This all goes back to the age old question: Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?  To get to the other side (of course).

The answer should have footnote added: “it’s just that some chicken’s do it better than others”.

The same goes in a career search.  Think about your last job search, or maybe you are currently involved in a new search, or maybe you know someone who is actively looking, or re you seeking a career after college?  Whatever the case, how is the search progressing?  How are you differentiating themselves from the competition?

Are you looking hard but only searching on the job boards and are not seeing much of anything?  Have you posted your resume but are only receiving calls and emails from “work at home” or insurance or financial positions?

This kind of talk calls for an intervention!

How are you able to maximize your search time and value if you are doing the bare minimum?  This is the time to create a strategy which will allow you to better target and focus on key positions.  Some ideas to consider and build upon:

1. Take a break from the job boards. You need to get somewhere that more people know you and are willing to talk with you outside of the job application blackhole.  I don’t care how strong of a resume you have, going into a pool of candidates is not your best avenue.
2. Hit Google and Bing. Take a few days to conduct research on your targeted industry(industries) and targeted position(s) within that industry(industries).  This will allow you to focus more on what you want to do and less on let me just get anything.
3. Find the “trusted” contacts in your network. Take some time to examine your network to see who you know in that industry or in a similar position to what you are targeting.  Reach out to them, take them to lunch, tell your story and ask for their story.  Get the insight on how to position yourself for this type of career.
4. Get on social media. Share your story with others.  Get on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and whatever else will help you target positions.  Connect with others.  Gain their insight.  Share your insight.  Let them know you are looking but… DON’T BE PUSHY!
5. Make cold calls and introduction emails. You need to put yourself out there and that means connecting with others.  Use these calls not to focus on YOU but to learn from others.  Ask questions, almost interview them to understand their career path and see what helpful tips you may learn from others in positions you are targeting.

Remember, the goal isn’t to knock down doors but instead to open doors.  Being pushy or rude will get you absolutely nowhere.  When you are nothing but polite, nice and greatly appreciative… you will get much further along your path.

Whomever you connect with in these activities, please Please PLEASE remember to send a thank you note (email) for their time and insight.

Now get your plan into place and make it happen!

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As more and more employers search for you on Google and Facebook, it’s important to you use Facebook’s privacy settings correctly.  In our presentations and workshops, we’re constantly asked, “What should I show other people on Facebook and what should I keep private?”

Setting Your Facebook Privacy Settings:

Facebook Privacy Settings are straightforward. To access them:

1. Log into your Facebook account.
2. Hover over Settings in the top right
3. Click on Privacy Settings

There are two main areas of interest to you for controlling how employers can see you.  I would start off with the Profile portion.  Here you can choose specifically what people can and can’t see on your profile.  To make this process easier, create a list of friends, so you don’t have to individually set privacy settings for 10 different people.

To create a friend list:

1. Go to friends
2. Click create new list
3. Name the list
4. Type in friends’ names to add them to the list

In Facebook’s privacy settings area, you can click the drop down menu next to each item: profile, basic info, etc. and hit customize.  You can specifically lock off that section for specific users or a list of users, like your coworkers or your boss.

In figuring out what to block and what to leave open, I prefer the safe route: lock down your photos, status updates and your wall. These are where you are most likely to get yourself in trouble, especially if friends say something or tag you in an incriminating photo.

Be mindful of what people can see about you in general. Take some extra time to decide if everyone should be able to see something, or if you just want your friends or your local network to see it. Also remember that your Facebook profile is a great pace to flesh out your interests, activities and passions that back up your career goals.

The next important area of Facebook privacy settings is the search tab.  Search is important because it helps you become more visible online.  If your profile backs up your qualifications and you’ve locked down potentially dangerous areas like photos, I would suggest you allow your profile to be searchable by Everyone.  There are some risks associated with doing this, so consider what a hiring manager would think if they found your profile, and then decide.

Personally, I can be searched by everyone, and when I am searched a person can see my profile picture, add me as a friend,  send me a message and see my friend list.

The most important aspect of search is the Public Search Listing.  This is where Google and other search engines can find you.  If you don’t check this box then you will not be visible when someone searches you in Google.  Once again this needs to be a personal decision, but if your profile backs up your personal brand in a way that won’t damage your career, I would suggest that you allow search engines to find you.

Facebook Privacy Settings are easy once you get used to them.  They are a great way to help you safely build your personal brand.  As always, be cautious when posting detailed information about yourself on the web, especially your home address.

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The hallmark of a credible personal brand online is the ability to create content that backs up your qualifications. How credible are you?

To answer this, we developed a Hireability Dashboard that breaks down the components of your personal brand online and grades the strength of each. Last week, I talked about our tool that grades the visibility of your personal brand. Today, we’ll talk about credibility: are your actions online backing up your qualifications?

The credibility portion of the Hireability Dashboard is broken up into tabs: your blog, other blogs mentioning you, social bookmarks mentioning you, and news mentioning you.

The first tab, Your Blog, analyzes the strength of your blog based on who’s linking to it, and your blog’s Technorati authority. The more authoritative your blog, the more your credibility score rises.

The next tab, Blog Mentioning You, tracks blog posts mentioning you. The more other bloggers talk about you, the more your credibility rises.

The next tab, Bookmarks Mentioning You, keeps track of any content you’ve created that other people Digg, Stumble, Reddit, Delicious, etc. As other people like, favorite or thumbs-up your content, your credibility score rises.

The last tab, News, keeps track of news articles that mention you. The more you show up in the news, the more your credibility score rises.

The Next Step

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of some of our tools, it’s time to find out: How credible is your personal brand online? Create a free Brand-Yourself.com account now and start managing your online reputation with our Hireability Dashboard. See you there!

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Building your personal brand is one thing but if no one can find it your efforts have been fruitless.  While many people go about the right steps to build a personal brand they overlook what they need to do so that search engines can easily find and crawl their content.

Let’s start off with what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is: the process of taking content that you produce and make it search engine friendly so that search engines like Google and Yahoo can crawl and index.

So what makes search engine friendly content?  The answer is: content that you yourself would like to read or content that will benefit other people.  Search engines are not interested in indexing content that is written to fit their needs because they too are businesses.  They want to give their customers (web users) the best content that they can find.

Here are some basic tips that you can employ as you are producing content, whether it is on your blog, in an article that you are writing, or on your personal websites.

1. Use Google’s Keyword Tool. Google has a great tool to help you figure out what keywords other people are competing for.  You should tailor your content to be for a specific keyword.  To help you figure out what keywords are obtainable use the keyword tool where you can track competition.
2. Have good title.  Search engines put a lot of weight on the title of your article because they assume that your title is a good representation of your content.  Witty titles are not as effective online as they can mislead users and search engines.
3. Use the keyword phrase as you see it. If you are competing for the keyword phrase “How to write a bio” you need to make sure that you use that phrase exactly as you see it.
4. Keep new content coming. Search engines like to see sites that are regularly publishing new content because it shows that the site owners are invested and are putting more time into the site.  This will take some time on your part but will yield more readers in the long run.
5. Track your progress. Use a tool such as Google Analytics (FREE!) that will help you track the number of hits that you get to your site on a daily basis.  If you don’t track it then you will not be able to determine how your efforts are going.

Always keep in mind that SEO is not an overnight process.  As you build your personal brand it will take time.  Many experts say that you should not expect to see any of your efforts have an effect for 3-6 months.  After that you will start to see it pick up.

Keep at it and don’t give up.  Building a personal brand through search engine optimization is important and is a big step in increasing the visibility of your brand.

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As you continually work to improve your personal brand, you are going to consider many social media tools to utilize.  Along this journey, I am sure that Twitter will be one of them.  The reason that Twitter is such a good outlet for you is that Twitter is a means to express both your professional and personal sides.  The professional and personal mixture, of course, being your own unique personal brand.

The problem begins when your personal brand sways more heavily one way over the other.  This is most concerning when the personal emphasis is the heavier of the two.

As Mack Collier tweeted, “Getting on Twitter is NOT a strategy, Twitter is a tactic to execute a social media strategy”.  Such a wise statement.

Twitter is a tool for you to continually work to create and expand upon your personal brand.  Any social networking tool is not a strategy, but instead is a tool (and this cannot be forgotten).  Twitter is searchable by Bing and now by Google which further exposes you and your personal branding message.

Let’s take an example for a moment.  Pretend Katy is an SEO “expert” and she is working to position her personal brand firmly in the SEO field.  Katy wants to be more easily found so she signs up for Twitter.  Katy starts to tweet so that she may spread insight and connect with others on SEO tactics and strategy.  However, over time, she lets her personality enter more and more.  Katy begins to tweet on non-SEO topics and engage in conversations outside of her personal brand and on non-business related subjects.  Katy continues to tweet but the focus is now closer to a 50/50 split on SEO related material versus non-business subjects.

There are two opposing tactics at play in this example.

1. Katy’s personality is coming through, which is not necessarily a bad thing to happen.  This allows her followers to better know her and be able to engage with her on a variety of topics.  However, by taking her message further away from the SEO space, Katy’s personal brand begins to falter in terms of having a consistent message.
2. Because Katy’s tweets are not as consistent as when she started, then the results that appear in a Bing or Google search will not necessarily produce the SEO-based results that she desires.  By keeping SEO as the major theme and sprinkling other topics in on an as needed basis, Katy will continue to increase her personal brand in the SEO space and potentially position her as a leader in the field.As with any personal brand message and social media strategy, you must have a clear picture as to what you would like to convey as your personal brand as well as the selected tools to help create your brand.  This means working to communicate a clear and consistent message of you.

So, to answer the question: “is Twitter a good tool for your personal brand?”  Yes it is a valuable tool.  However, it is only a good tool if you use it in a manner that supports your personal brand and does not dilute the message you are working to communicate.

Make a Twitter plan and execute the strategy.  Your personal brand relies on it!

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You’ve written your resume, and sent it out to what seems like hundreds of companies without any success.  Perhaps it’s time to look at one of the most important, and yet often neglected, parts of the resume – your career objective.  If done correctly, this will show potential employers at a glance that you are serious about the job in question and know what you want to do.  A poorly executed objective, however, may disqualify you from the position altogether.

Follow these simple steps to write a winning career objective every time.

• Be pithy. Generally, an objective should be limited to a sentence or two.  It’s all about saying as much as needed in as small a space as possible.  Remember, this is only the first thing that a potential employer sees, and the goal is to write so that he or she wants to continue reading the rest of your resume.
• Begin with ‘To’ not ‘I.’ The career objective on your resume should tell what you can do for the company, and not what you expect to get from the company.  When you’re competing with hundreds of other applicants, the employer’s focus is on which one of you can benefit them the most.  Here is an example of a quality resume objective: “To work for a small graphics company using my graphic design, layout, and drafting skills.” This shows what you can do for them instead of saying, “I want to work for a small graphics company to improve my graphic design and layout skills.”
• Convey facts. Words such as challenging, useful, educational, helpful, etc. mean different things to each person, and therefore do not convey specific messages to a possible employer.  Instead, explain how you want to use your English degree and editing skills to work for a book publisher.
• Use action verbs. It is tempting to try to stand out with your objective by starting it with something other than ‘to’ such as: my goal is, I hope to, my plan is, etc.  Not only does this show employers that you are more concerned with helping yourself than with helping his or her company, but the passive voice makes the sentence wordy and weak.  Phrases such as to work, to promote, and to advance show that you know what your career goal is and how you can help your prospective employer.
• Decide how specific you need to be. This is by far the trickiest part of writing a career objective for your resume.  If you know exactly what job you want within a company and understand what type of skills that job requires, then your objective can be written like this, “To work as an office production assistant with a small film company specializing in television using my clerical skills and Communications degree.” Unless you understand what the job requires and have specific skills, however, you will probably want to write something a bit broader such as “To work in an advertising agency using my experience in graphic design, layout, and copywriting.” This does not mention what position you seek, but includes a varied list of qualifications that would make you an attractive candidate to work in graphics or ad copy.
• Use what experience you have. If you’re a recent college graduate, you may not have many practical, real world skills that you can list in your objective.  Don’t worry.  Consider what you were good at in college (editing, researching, memorizing facts) and re-word it for a corporate environment.  If you were good at gathering data for essays then you have skills as a researcher.  Similarly, if you have a photographic memory then that can be a marketable quality.

Since you have such a short space to make a good impression, be careful in selecting the skills to list.  Choose ones that will be the most advantageous to each individual company.  You may have to re-write your objective several times for different jobs, but a well-written objective will help put you ahead of your competition.

–

Bethany Stringer is a graduate of Texas A&M University (class of ‘08) and has her B.A. in English Literature with minors in History and Psychology.  Writing her first story at the age of 5 (with help from Mom), Bethany still enjoys writing and researching about everything from business and history to travel and fiction.  Enamored with languages, she plans to teach English in Russia in 2010 as a CELTA certified teacher.  She owned her own business working horses when she was 17, and still loves riding her horse Romeo.  Always appreciating a challenge, she loves sea kayaking and prefers Rachmaninov to Bach.

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The hallmark of a visible personal brand online is the ability to be found through search engines and social/professional networks. How visible are you?

To answer this, we developed a Hireability Dashboard that breaks down the components of your personal brand online and grades the strength of each. The first section we’ll talk about today is visibility. Can you be found?

The visibility portion of the Hireability Dashboard is broken up into tabs: your Google search results, professional profiles, social networks, directories, web 2.0 services you want to protect your username on, and media related to your name.

The first tab, your Google Search Results, makes it easy to understand what someone else will see when they Google your name up to 65 Google results.

Now instead of having to Google yourself to see what’s changed within the first ten results, you can log into your Dashboard and see what’s changed up to 65 reulsts.

You can also confirm items as about you, moving them into a separate column of confirmed items.  This makes it easy to understand which Google results are actually about you. We also display the Google result rank so you know if it shows up as the first, second, fifteenth, or thirtieth result.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Professional Profiles. Here, we track the professional profiles you’ve created, and suggest others you should join of to make it easier to find you online.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Social Networks. Here, we track the social networking profiles you’ve created, and suggest others you should join of to make it easier to find you online.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Directories. Directories are like online Yellow Pages for people. Here, we track the directory profiles you’ve created, and suggest others you should join of to make it easier to find you online.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Protect These. Here, we track the web 2.0 services you’re on, and suggest others you should join of to protect your username and prevent cases of mistaken identity.

The Next Step

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of some of our tools, it’s time to discover: How visible is your personal brand online? To find out, create a free Brand-Yourself.com account now and start managing your online reputation with our Hireability Dashboard. See you there! Get started now.

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Interviewing is something that is going to take practice and preparation no matter how experienced you are in the job search process.  When you are in the interview you never know what type of interview it will be or what off the wall questions a potential employer might ask you.

It is important to realize the position of the person across the table from you when you are in an interview.  The potential employer is looking to find insight into how you act on your feet, how well you can think through problems and all in all how well you would work within the company.

After that initial realization of everyone’s expectations here are 5 tips to help you figure out how to interview well.

How to interview well

1. Don’t launch into your answers. Take a few moments to collect your thoughts then give a good answer rather than a fast answer.
2. Practice practice practice. I cannot emphasize how important it is to get comfortable being asked questions and having to respond.  You do not want the interview to be the place you are being asked your first questions on the spot.
3. Know your strengths. It is important to show off in the interview what you are good at.  This helps you control the conversation a bit more and makes sure that you cover the important topics.
4. Stay calm. No matter what happens it is important that you stay calm.  You are in a tough position, you want to stay relaxed and roll with the punches.
5. Know your employer. This is probably one of the most important aspects of how to interview well.  You need to know something about your employer.  If you can’t do the research up front they will think you don’t care.  It should only take 15 minutes on the web to discover some important news.

Interviewing well is not something that is going to come easy.  It is important that you figure out how to interview well early on so that you do not miss job opportunities.

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Every day, an increasing number of job applicants get hired through social media rather than the traditional apply-blind-with-a-resume route. Over 83% of employers go online to get more information about potential applicants, so it’s essential to have a strong web presence and social networking skills. It was no surprise when I found out that Doug Haslam in my Personal Branding Group on BrazeenCareerist was hired via twitter.  I took the opportunity to interview him to give you the inside scoop on how he used Twitter to get a job.

1. How did you get started with social media?

Back in 2003/4 I was starting to see the rise of blogs, and contemplating from the outside how they might affect my work (as a marketing manager at a small research company at the time).  I ended up leaving and getting back into PR agency life before I could act on it, other than a tentative start at my own blog in early 2005.

2. What were your first impressions of Twitter, and why did you start to use it?

Very first impressions? I don’t need to know what my friends are doing at every given moment– this was October 2006. In Late February 2007, I started to see some of these friends get some real utility out of twitter (see this post for a very brief description)

I  finally gave in on on March 1, and still was skeptical of the noise, and wrote this post but followed only a week later with this one.

3. How did you create a job opportunity through Twitter?

What I did to create opportunity was to network with other PR people. One of those was SHIFT Communications principal Todd Defren. We were actually direct-messaging back and forth about some industry questions we had for each other (I would often come and comment on his blog, even though we were technically competitors), and at one point he flat out asked me if I would consider putting myself up for a position that was opening.

4. What is your current job, and do you use Twitter for it?

I am an Account Director at SHIFT Communications, overseeing an account team and working with clients at the program strategy level. I do use twitter– I’ll promote news for clients and the agency on my own account (with disclosure), but more importantly advise clients on their own use of twitter (among other tools).

5. Now that you’re a Twitter success story, what would you recommend our readers do to follow in your footsteps?

Find people to network with – people who are in your industry as well as people in your clients’ industries. The conversations you start and take part in will enhance your standing as an engaged careerist, and a plugged in worker.

Conclusion

Doug notes, “If people you need or want to reach on Twitter aren’t on Twitter, go where they are – that’s most important.” That could be LinkedIn, blogs, Facebook, or anywhere else they’re active online.

Doug’s story is an inspiration to job seekers everywhere, demonstrating that you can get a job through social media if you use it properly. There is a lot of clutter and noise on the web, so make sure you connect with the right people and turn that connection into something real.

If you know anyone else who has had success via social media to get a job, let us know so that we can feature them!

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For those who don’t know, we are speaking at the CEO National Conference in Chicago this weekend. We could not be more excited. The last six months have been surreal for brand-yourself and, quite frankly, ground breaking. We launched our services, expanded our community,  developed a working product, and were named one of the top 5 Entrepreneurs of the year.  Many things have changed, but our mission has remained steady. We want to help young proffesionals manage and create credible online presences that help advance their career. We can not think of a better way to celebrate than share our success, our story and our advice with the brightest, career minded college students in the country.

If you will be at the conference, some things you want to check out:

• Our presentation Leveraging social media for career advancement Saturday, 11:30-101-106 South building
• Our friends at UNDER30CEO are giving a few presentations. These guys know their stuff, you do NOT want to miss them
• Our friend Bradley Will is giving a presentation you’ll want to catch.

CEO After Party

We are also happy to announce we will be throwing a CEO after party with Under30CEO at Mcfadden’s Chicago. Everyone (of age) is welcome to attend, network, and most importantly, unwind. If you are not attending the conference, we are more than happy to have you anyways. $20 dollar open bar from 8-10, cash bar after that.

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