Are you one of those who applied for a job with thousand others and have a resume that looks very similar to all of them? If so, then don’t be surprised if you have not heard from your prospective employer. Most resumes look very similar and tend to highlight day-to-day activities, responsibilities. While these are important to be highlighted, it does little to help the recruiter understand how good of a fit you are for the company.

Every employer is looking to hire a “Super Star“. So, they are looking for great stories. Stories that they can relate to with the current situation in the company, the problem they are trying to solve and how you could be the person to solve those problems.

So, why wait? Go ahead and get your story together that talks about these things

• Leadership: Companies are always looking to hire people who can lead i.e. people who actually complain less and takes initiatives without asking for, resolve conflict situations and make it a win-win situation for everyone

• Innovation: Something that companies are always thriving for.  Highlight stuff that shows  you are out-of-box thinker and how you innovated either to improve workplace productivity or how you identified new business problems and came up with ideas to solve these problems.

• Growth:  Companies want their employees to grow, so they could add more value to the company and in-turn drive more profits. Showcase examples where you grabbed opportunities that helped with your career progression, how you are eager to try new things and willing to take risks.

While you are busy working on your story, I will try to find out more on why people stick with resumes that don’t help.

Those of you who are top of your game are already well aware of your brand.   You manage it closely and you tune it to meet your professional needs.

One thing you might want to add to your thinking is your email style.

If you haven’t heard that email is killing everyone, you are probably not paying attention.  We have too much and taming the inbox is a huge professional pain point.

God bless TEDChris for taking this issue on and building a charter to help us all get better in this area.

One thing I think I would want to add as a guiding principle is to generally get over yourself.  You send email for the recipient not for yourself.  Take the effort to understand your recipient and their needs.   This is important when you want something from the recipient (especially as it relates to career opportunities).

Get your point across quickly and in their language and you will go a long way to improving your brand and being seen as someone who “gets it”.

Like me, you have probably read dozens of articles that speak on how LinkedIn is primarily for professional networking and Facebook for personal sharing and pictures. Not any more, the line is blurred. Today, Monster announced Professional Networking Application on Facebook Platform. Monster is not the first mover, BranchOut came out with professional networking app few months ago and is going strong with 800,000+ users.

LinkedIn with it’s stellar growth in the past few years and recent IPO has changed the dynamics of passive recruiting and has been the major source of Talent acquisition in the recruiting market. LinkedIn with it’s 100 million users, is already tapping into the valuable data it has and will have the first mover advantage to build any kind of analytics platform. If you have missed the story, you can see Reid Hoffman talk about data Data Wrangler of The Modern Age .

Facebook, on the other hand has provided a platform and user base for applications like BranchOut and Monsters to leverage. With it’s 700+ million users and about 47% of users filling out their work experience (Source: Hodes Group from a survey of 5000 users) is quite compelling. Monster already has an advantage over BranchOut with it’s 35 million user base who could potentially use the “BeKnown” application. Both Monster and BranchOut are in very strong position to tap this huge potential. Over the coming weeks, it would be interesting to see what kind of explosion Monster will have vs. compared to BranchOut.

What do you think? Are you ready to extend your professional networking on Facebook. If you are looking for a job right now or in the next few months, would it change your preference of using one or the other platform. Would it be cool if there was a way to synchronize connections from 1 platform to the other and solve the end-user pain?

I recently had a chance to attend Recruiting Innovation Summit held at LinkedIn Headquarters in May’2011. The session “Behind The Wall with Social Recruiting” by Susan Strayer, David Kippen started off with an interesting  question “Recruiting isn’t social until you take it offline“.  The audience were asked to wear a tag to indicate if they agree or disagree. The question is bit tricky and opinions vary depending on whom you ask.

The big professional / social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare have provided recruiters with unlimited access to millions of potential hires, provided ways for recruiters to observe, engage and communicate with their target hires. Social networks have really made it easy to reach out to potential hires.

Given I’m on LinkedIn, I get a lot of emails from recruiters asking if I would be interested to take up a new job. Of all these emails, certainly 2 emails stood out and totally 180 degrees apart in their approach.

Here is the first email (only posted part of the text that is relevant)

Subject: Not your typical recruiter…here is why

I differentiate myself from other recruiters by approaching our relationship with honesty, transparency, and integrity. My goal is to build long-term, lasting relationships and helping to find the best possible jobs for each individual

I have my fingers on the pulse of the job market, and am glad to share my knowledge and make introductions. Let me know when would be a good time for me to call and introduce myself to you over the phone.

Here is how the second email goes

Subject: Senior Java Developer

My client is looking for a senior java developer. Is this something you are interested in? If so, can you forward your resume.

For various reasons, the first email was intriguing.

It gave me an opportunity to know the recruiter, help the recruiter understand what my interests and needs are and when I might be looking for a job.

Obviously, the audience had varying few points. If you are doing mass hiring, it’s not feasible to reach out to every individual potential and talk to them. But if you are actively sourcing passive candidates in fewer #’s,  take it offline to know each other better.

Reaching out to the potential hire via the social network is “not the end of it”. In fact, it is just the beginning of a relationship.

What are your thoughts on this? What worked and didn’t work for you. Please share your comments below.

HR Examiner published their latest edition of Top 25 Online Influencers in the recruiting industry. As John Sumser rightly pointed out in the article “The HRExaminer is helping us understand who we need to talk to and who makes things tick in HR.”

While John and his team are working hard to put up this list, rest assured having the list of influencers will go a long way for anyone who is researching the market space, new product launches that need feedback from influencers or even learning from these thought leaders. If you are not already following these influencers, I wouldn’t wait anymore.

If you want to hear and learn from what these influencers have to say, you can find them actively participating and helping the community in the following weekly chats on Twitter

#JobHuntChat on Monday’s 7:00 PM PST moderated by Rich DeMatteo (@CornOnTheJob).

#HFChat on Friday’s 9:00 AM PST moderated by HR Margo (@hrmargo)

#TChat on Tuesday from 8-9 p.m. ET & 7-8 p.m. CT & 6-7 p.m MT & 5-6 p.m. PT moderated by Meghan M. Biro (@MeghanMBiro) , Kevin Grossman (@KevinWGrossman)

You can use tools like http://tweetchat.com/ to follow the chat stream.

Enjoy!

This inspiring blog post Distinguishing Goals and Resolutions from Sharlyn Lauby at HRBartender.com and Want to be a Better Leader? Schedule Some Time For Yourself to Think from Patty Azzarello set a great tone why leaders, management and individuals should set goals for their teams and for themselves.

As a leader, you need to be ahead of the game, understand the overall company and team objectives and align each individual goals to have a better outcome. The job as leaders is to encourage the individuals to write down goals, monitor their progress and keep revising on regular basis. I still remember I would drag once in a while to share weekly goals with the team, I saw it more as an administrative task and lesser priority compared to other day to day tasks. As Patty pointed, you need to schedule some time to think about yourself and not get distracted with low level tasks. The big thing really is to see setting goals as an investment. We as individuals are poor investors in self-growth. Of course, I was lucky enough to have a boss Meg Bear who would look after my back, keep me excited and would push me harder on things I need to work on.

While I’m gone past working for a company as I’m now fully focused on growing Tahlent, the thing that really motivates me now is a sense of accomplishment.There is no management team to keep you motivated. Having set of goals, be able to check them off and seeing progress is what really motivates me and my team.. As Sharlyn rightly pointed out – “Set goals that are important to you“.

Do yourself a favor today, write down your goals for the coming days. Best!