Executive Career Brand

Best Kept Secret to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

Meg Guiseppi — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:33:28 +0000

Executive recruiters and hiring decision makers at your target companies search LinkedIn using relevant keywords to locate good-fit candidates.

Your LinkedIn profile offers several choice locations to insert the right keywords to help elevate your search rankings – or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – and the likelihood you’ll be found and considered by them.

The professional headline and summary section are two prime examples.

But there’s another powerful, and often overlooked, above-the-fold spot to add in a keyword phrase.

Your LinkedIn profile URL.

Take a look at your existing profile URL. To find it, go to “Edit Profile” under “Profile” in the drop-down menu across the top of your profile. Just below your name, headline and profile photo (if you’ve posted one), you’ll see your LinkedIn URL.

Is it a mishmash of letters and numbers like this?

www.linkedin.com/in/john-smith/5/224a/123/

If you have a common name, such as “John Smith”, that is the kind of default URL LinkedIn will assign to you, to distinguish you from all the other John Smiths.

With 200+ million users on LinkedIn, unless you have an UNcommon name, you’re NOT likely to capture the following URL:

www.linkedin.com/in/yourname

But see if such a URL is available.

If not, another option is changing your URL to include “yourname” with an appropriate short keyword phrase, such as the following:

www.linkedin.com/in/johnsmithbiotechexecutive

This not only distinguishes you from others with your name, but also helps boost your keyword recognition in LinkedIn searches – as well as on Google, Bing and other search engines.

Here’s how to personalize and optimize your LinkedIn URL:

Still in “Edit Profile” mode, click on the blue “Edit” link next to your existing LinkedIn URL.
Scroll down a bit and look for a graphic box in the right-hand sidebar that says “Your public profile URL”.
Under “Your current URL”, click on “Customize your public profile URL” to make the change. You’re allowed up to 30 characters for the URL.

Once you’ve changed the URL, don’t forget to go back and change it wherever you’ve used the old one, such as:

Your email signature
Your digital resume and/or other digital career documents
Your Google+ profile and other online profiles
Your social networking sites.
Your website and/or web pages.
Your LinkedIn badge, created for your website and/or web pages.

Disclaimer: At this writing, after searching LinkedIn’s Help Center, I found nothing to suggest LinkedIn won’t allow customizing your profile URL in this way. But there’s no guarantee this won’t change.

Related posts:

29 Biggest LinkedIn Mistakes

How To Write a LinkedIn Invitation to Connect

Best LinkedIn Tips: Find LinkedIn Groups to Join

photo by Steven Depolo

Martin Yate’s New Strategies for First-Time Job Seekers

Meg Guiseppi — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:02:29 +0000

The eighth in Martin Yate’s Knock Em Dead series, Secrets & Strategies For First-Time Job Seekers focuses on job seekers entering the market for the first time.

He begins the book with “some little known facts about the world you face”:

You are at the beginning of what will likely be a fifty-year career.
The statistics say you will probably change jobs (not always by choice) about every four years.
You will probably have three or more distince careers over the span of your professional life.

These realities of the new world of work may be news to seasoned professionals as well.

His new approach walks readers through their first job search, providing a unique blueprint for smart career management strategies that will help them live the life they want.

Once again, he’s tapped into his “Braintrust” panel of career professionals – those he believes to be “some of the smartest career management minds we have in the profession today”.

I’m thrilled to be included among such esteemed colleagues as:

Mark Babbitt, Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, Sultan Camp, Allison Cheston, Caroline Dowd-Higgins, Kate Duttro, Kevin Kermes, Sean Koppelman, Joyce Lain Kennedy, Roger Lear, Alexandra Levit, Kathryn Minshew, Hannah Morgan, Phyllis Mufson, Chris Perry, Amanda Pouchot, Lori Ruff, Josh Tolan, Tim Tyrell-Smith, Joshua Waldman, Denise Wilkerson, Leslie Zaikis

Two years ago I contributed to Martin’s “Knock ‘em Dead: Secrets & Strategies for Success in an Uncertain World“.

Related post:

Do New Grads Have a Personal Brand?

10 Blogs for Job Search, Personal Branding and Career Help

Meg Guiseppi — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:26:41 +0000

Prompted by the theme for this month’s Career Development Carnival, a showcase of the best blog posts from career experts, I’ve compiled a short list of excellent blogs and websites for job seekers and careerists.

By no means the only ones I read regularly – and not necessarily my top 10 favorites – the following sites are ones I come back to frequently and always find value in reading. I hope you do, too.

I often tweet these blogs, and they also inspire many of the blog posts I write.

There are actually 12 in my list. Two of my favorite writers run two sites.

Not only focused on job search, careers and personal branding, the sites I’ve chosen also speak to marketing, social media, leadership, technology and personal development.

In no particular order, other than starting with the blogs/sites of a few colleagues of mine, here’s my list:

1. Susan P. Joyce’s Job-Hunt.org and Work Coach Cafe

2. Hannah Morgan’s Career Sherpa

3. Jason Alba’s I’m On LinkedIn – Now What??? and JibberJobber Blog

4. Drew McLellan’s Drew’s Marketing Minute

5. Forbes Work in Progress – Career talk for women

6. Wall Street Journal’s At Work Blog

7. Harvard Business Review Blog

8. Marketing Profs Daily Fix

9. Social Media Today

10. LinkedIn Blog

To find out which blogs other career professionals suggest you read, check out this month’s Career Development Carnival on Lynn Dessert’s blogsite, Elephants At Work, the week of May 13th.

Personal Branding and Executive Job Search Book — Second Edition

55 Top Job Search Experts To Follow On Twitter

graphic by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Who is an Executive?

Meg Guiseppi — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:26:11 +0000

This may seem like an odd question for me to pose, and to write a blog post about.

But apparently there’s confusion on the part of some executive job seekers as to whether they’re actually “executives”.

Here’s something that happens to me all the time.

Job seekers at the Director, Executive Vice President or even General Manager level (clearly executives by most any definition) will reach out to me to see if I’d consider working with them, even though they’re “not yet at the executive level”.

I’m baffled every time.

Unless the definition of executive has shifted over the years, for all my 20 or so years as a job search professional, I’ve considered someone to be an executive when they manage others and have decision-making authority.

This doesn’t necessarily mean being “a suit”. Even some CEOs (unquestionably executives) don’t wear suits.

Dictionary.com lists its first definition of the noun “executive” as:

“A person or group of persons having administrative or supervisory authority in an organization.”

The late Peter F. Drucker’s seminal book on management, The Effective Executive (1967), was quoted in Fast Company’s article last year, Who Is an Executive?

“I have called “executives” those knowledge works, managers, or individual professionals who are expected by virtue of their position or their knowledge to make decisions in the normal course of their work that have impact on the performance and results of the whole.

What few yet realize, however is how many people there are even in the most humdrum organization of today, whether business or government agency, research lab or hospital, who have to make decisions. For the authority of knowledge is surely as legitimate as the authority of position. These decisions, moreover, are of the same kind as the decision of top management.

The most subordinate, we now know, may do the same kind of work as the president of the company or the administrator of the government agency, that is, plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure. His compass may be quite limited, but within his sphere, he is an executive.”

What do you think?

When does someone who has been contributing for several years and adding value to a company or organization get to call herself an “executive”?

21 Ways Your Executive Brand Drives Your Career

Today’s Executive Job Search Toolkit

Executive Job Search: Research Your Target Employers

photo by Horia Varlan

What a Personally Branded Executive Resume Does For You

Meg Guiseppi — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:24:37 +0000

The main purpose of an executive resume is to land interviews.

But it can do so much more for you, as you navigate an executive job search.

When you add personal branding to the mix, a resume becomes an even more powerful positioning and job search tool.

The information-mining process, before you write your resume – researching your target employers, defining your personal brand and developing content for your resume (and LinkedIn and Google+ profiles) – helps you understand what makes you and your target employers a mutual good fit.

You learn how the value you offer is the answer to their current challenges.
You learn which qualities and areas of expertise you possess that they need.
You learn how to translate your top career accomplishments into an indication of what you will do for your next employer.
You’re equipped to create resume (and online profile) content that will resonate with your target employers.
Your confidence in your value is boosted, so you network better. You know who to seek out and how to present yourself better.
Which results in you gaining interviews with the companies you want to work for, and excelling in those interviews.

But well beyond landing interviews, your resume keeps on giving.

It becomes an integral reference point for you and those assessing you while you’re interviewing, and once you land your next gig:

It prompts the interviewer to dive into topics you both want to discuss.
By reinforcing your brand promise, it helps hiring decision makers deliver on their promise – to hire the top pick to support the company’s brand, enhance the corporate culture, best care for their customers, and grow the company.
With metrics that enumerate the savings, improvements and growth you will bring to that company, it supports your salary requirements, helping you get paid what you’re worth.
Once you land the job, it sets you up to keep your network alive, anticipating your next career move in this new world of work, where no job is permanent.

I’m a CMO But I Need Help Writing My Executive Resume

How C-A-R Storytelling Gives Executive Resume Branding Zing

10 Brand-Diluting Phrases That Weaken Your LinkedIn Profile (and Resume)

photo by Nguyen Vu Hung

Personal Branding and Executive Job Search Book — Second Edition

Meg Guiseppi — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:30:11 +0000

I’ve just completed the second edition of my ebook,

23 Ways You Sabotage Your Executive Job Search and How Your Brand Will Help You Land . . . A practical guide to executive branding, marketing your ROI value and navigating the new world of job search.

Updates to the content reflect the ever-changing nature of social media and job search in the digital age.

I paid particular attention to the two chapters on LinkedIn. (The colloquial chapter titles in the book are things clients have actually said to me or asked me.):

“I set up a LinkedIn profile a while ago, but I never finished it or did anything with LinkedIn.”
“How will recruiters and employers find me on LinkedIn?”

If you can find time to use only one social network, it has to be LinkedIn.

LinkedIn and most other social networks have gone through major changes since I wrote the first edition of the book in 2011. To improve the user experience, they periodically tweak existing features and functionality, and roll out new features, while eliminating others.

Want to get a handle on social networking and how to land a job in the new world of executive job search?

Click here to read about, purchase and immediately download 23 Ways You Sabotage Your Executive Job Search and How Your Brand Will Help You Land.

Your Email Signature: Another Personal Branding Tool

Meg Guiseppi — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:20:33 +0000

I estimate that more than half of the emails I receive from executive job seekers have only one line in their email signatures . . . their name.

Sometimes their signature is the default they use in doing business through their employers, which may not be appropriate to use in their job search.

When communicating with potential employers via email, your email cover letters need to include a potent, branded email signature.

When creating your email signature, assume that the email recipient will know nothing about you, but will want to know about you and be directed to more information about your brand story.

Once you’ve started a series of email communications with someone, back and forth, don’t bog down the flow by including your email signature in each response, beyond the first one.

Your email signature is another opportunity to position yourself as a good-fit candidate. It should include a brief description of what you do and who you do it for (that is, your target employers).

Below your name, include your professional title (and/or areas of expertise relevant to your target), such as

COO – Global Business Operations Leader – Biotechnology
or
CIO – Turnaround Management Executive – Healthcare

You can also include a tagline to succinctly differentiate your ROI value and generate chemistry.

An easy solution for the professional title is to use the branded professional headline from your LinkedIn profile, if you’ve already created one.

If you’re not on LinkedIn (you really should be!) or haven’t created a keyword-rich headline, check out my post, How to Make Your LinkedIn Profile Professional Headline SEO-Friendly.

To give you an idea, here’s what appears directly below my name in my email signature:

C-level Executive Personal Branding & Job Search Strategist — Executive Resume, Biography, LinkedIn Profile, Google+ Profile, Online Presence, Career Brand Communications

Your unique ROI value proposition … differentiated, strategically positioned, helping you Land Your Next Great Gig™.

Below that I note a few credentials, then list my social media links — blogsite, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter — and close with my contact info.

Configure your email account with an automatic signature for outgoing messages, using the suggestions below. You can always delete the signature before sending an email, if need be.

Here are some tips on optimizing your email signature:

Use your full name, not a nickname. Even if you know the recipient well, as part of the hiring process, your email may be forwarded to someone else who will have no idea who “Bobby” is.

Give them the best phone number to reach you anytime. Don’t confuse them with several numbers. Your cell phone is probably best, to avoid having someone at work, or someone you’d rather not, intercept the call.

Use your personal email address, not your work email. For that matter, don’t use your work computer either, for job search or any personal business. If you’re doing job search research or emailing using the company network – even if you use your personal Gmail account – your employer can track your activity.

Include a link to your personal blog or website “About” page, if you have one, leading your email recipient to your whole brand picture.

Include a link to your LinkedIn profile and Google+ Profile. Either of these can stand in as your executive brand hub, if you don’t have a website.

Include links to your Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, if you’re active there.

Consider including the following, especially if you don’t have some of the above essentials:

Relevant certifications and credentials
A recent noteworthy publication of yours (book, e-book, white paper, etc.) with the URL
A link to a professional video of you.

Further tips:

You can cut down on the number of lines in your signature, and include just one URL for all your social networks and social media, by creating an About.me profile, or similar one-stop hub.

Platforms like WiseStamp allow you to include various apps in your signature, for social media activity, and images or graphics, for better visual appeal. But using them could compromise the appearance and functionality of your signature because they may not support all email services and web browsers. Images may be unviewable or pixelated.

It may be best to stick with plain text without special characters, to be sure everything will appear at the receiving end, just as you sent it. Only use characters that are on your keyboard, such as pipes ( | ) or colons ( :: ), to separate the text, and tildes ( ~ ), hyphens ( – ), or asterisks ( * ) for bullets.

Write out URLs instead of using hyperlinks, which may not show up in your recipients’ email message.

Skip your home snail mail address. You don’t want security-sensitive information floating around out there.

Avoid including a legal disclaimer notice, unless you’re required to for some reason.

An expanded, branded email signature will mark you as up-to-date and savvy to the new world of work. It will help decision makers vetting candidates like you learn what differentiates the value you offer over others.

Design your signature to resonate with your target audience, and entice them to want to open any attached career documents and consider you.

Related posts:

When Job Search Email Goes Missing

Cover Letter Debate: Are They Necessary in Executive Job Search?

3 Social Media Ways to Build Your Executive Job Search Network

photo by Horia Varlan