BRAND YOU
It’s that time of year when people will often reflect on the previous year(s) and consider whether it is time to consider the next career opportunity. Naturally, there are many talented people also considering their next move at this time, so how do you ensure you are creating the best possible impression?
Given there are multiple channels to create an impression, it is important to take a thoughtful approach in how you present yourself and ensure consistency in terms of written and verbal communications. It is a useful investment in your time – after all, this is where you will spend 40+ hours of your life each week.
It can be helpful to approach the exercise by putting yourself in the shoes of the person who you may be trying to make that impact on and try to concisely answer as many obvious questions that they may have. Make it as easy as possible for the hiring manager / recruiter to understand why you are a super candidate. This ultimately helps to ensure you have the best possible candidate experience – and hopefully stand out as the best option for them!
Increasingly, internal and external recruiters and hiring managers will just look to your LinkedIn profile before they even read your CV, so this is your first opportunity to stand out by providing a clear and concise summary of your professional history, ensure you have filled in as many elements of your profile as possible and have a great professional photo. What will they learn about you in a 3 second scroll of your LI profile? Do they have enough information to make a decision and also understand how you think and what you could deliver? And make sure you keep it up to date!
The typical next step if they wish to progress is looking at the online application you submit. Ensure you include a cover letter articulating why you are excited by this opportunity and where you could add value. Keep it to no more than one page with a few paragraphs. Consider it your elevator pitch. Do I need to mention that you should ensure you address it to the correct person – and not the people associated with your last job application?!!
If you aren’t a local applicant, ensure you mention visa status and that you will physically relocate yourself to wherever the job is – and ideally the date that you will arrive and be available for interviews. Don’t leave these questions in the hiring manager’s mind as they will have many other applicants to consider that are locally based.
In terms of your CV, keep it simple with lots of white space, ideally using size 10 or 11 Arial font which is easy to read in a Word document rather than PDF. Keep it to 4 pages max (some sectors and Board roles should be a 1 pager only).
Unless you are applying to a creative agency, resist the urge to try to stand out as creative and clever by using complex and over-engineered formatting. It is difficult to know where to look on a page when your CV is broken into 8 different sections squeezing in too many adjectives in tiny font – it feels confusing, disjointed and hard to know what the key points are. Keep it simple. Make it easier for the hiring manager to read and understand your message.
What is the most important information that the reader requires to know you will be relevant for their role / organisation and be aware of the order (given they may only look at it for <5 seconds)?
What they do need to know: a 1-2 sentence summary introducing yourself – your background and objectives, your key achievements in each role and on the last (4th) page, include other relevant information such as education (highest qualification first), interests and any relevant visa and language information. It is helpful to tailor your CV slightly each time to ensure you hit the key points that the role requires.
When outlining your roles, ensure you provide the month and year you were there, then company and role title and ensure it is clear what is the company name and what is your role title. Please provide a 1-2 sentence description of what the company you worked for does and the context of operation (size, geographical reach, revenue etc.), along with a 1-2 sentence description of the context for your role (size of your team, who your clients were, who you reported to, role purpose). Try to keep each role to half a page max. If it was a contract role, make sure you mention this. If there is a sizeable gap, include what you were doing eg. Travelling, caring for family member etc. If you are at the mid or late-career level, you can just include a couple of sentences describing each role after 10 years from now – better to keep to <4 pages, and they can ask if they want to know more.
What they don’t need to know: ie. please don’t include the following information: date of birth, a photo, that you will ‘make references available upon request’ (of course you will!), the actual referees’ details (you want to control when they are contacted), your high school results and where you worked when you were in high school (unless you are a graduate / first few years of your career), company specific acronyms – they wont translate to someone who doesn’t know that company’s language and will confuse the reader, every single detail of what you did in each role – this isn’t supposed to be your position description, equally, please don’t list every single internal training course you have been on in your job or that you have intermediate level proficiency in MS Word.
If you have sufficiently whetted their appetite, the next step is a phone conversation. Ensure you are always able to provide a <5 min summary of your background and what you are looking for in your next opportunity, reiterate why you are jazzed about this role, be able to explain why you wish to leave your current role and make yourself as available as possible to meet the relevant people.
Next: the first (of possibly many) meetings with the company – each interview will be different, ranging from an informal unstructured meeting which is mostly about chemistry / cultural fit (especially at the senior end of your career or with a non-big corporate style organisation) to a very structured interview with a consistent set of questions focused on your understanding of the organisation, what you have done previously and your motivation for this role. Most likely it will be a mix of both. Ensure that you bring several well prepared questions to ask too – it is a two way process, but the balance of questions should be from the interviewer.
And of course, whilst it is difficult when you are nervous, be yourself as you would be at work so they can understand how they will work with you but recognising that you don’t leave the rest of your life behind – talk about your family, sports, travel, tell a joke or something in the first minute or two which will help you relax into the interview (you can’t get that answer wrong!) and helps bring you to life and build rapport with the interviewers.
In terms of the bulk of the interview, ideally you will have prepared 6-10 examples of relevant work based on what you have gleaned so far from your research and prep and ensure you can spend 5-7 mins explaining each example using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action and Results). This will ensure that you have outlined the context, what you (and your team) did, your thinking behind the actions you took and what the outcome was and any lessons learned. Avoid spending 10 mins outlining all the nuances and politics of the organisation. The most important information is what your logic and actions were and the results they yielded. And make sure the interviewers clearly understand what you personally actually did to deliver the results. For example, saying you ‘coached leaders’ doesn’t really tell the interviewer anything – how did you know they weren’t performing and what was the impact, what were the specific things you discussed and undertook to influence the leader’s behaviour and how do you know they were performing more effectively as result of your intervention?
Finally, ensure you cover any key questions you had, you understand the next steps in the process and of course thank them and reiterate your motivation for the role.
Assuming you have got through several rounds of meetings / interviews, there will usually be a request for reference checks. Ideally, you will have several referees they could use (and their latest phone number and email address) and if you are at the senior end, ideally a 360 review could be conducted if need be ie. 1-2 recent managers, a client, a team member and a peer. Make sure you have let the referees know in advance and they have some awareness of the role and anything they should highlight to help you be successful.
It pays to invest the time to thoughtfully consider the impression you create. The market is too competitive to simply send off a 10 page CV and expect to get an interview, much less the role. Taking the time to help your target organisation understand how Brand You can help Brand Them be successful together should help enable you (and them) take your next best step!
