Ramping Up Your Resume with Transferable Skills

Understanding your transferable skills is essential to an effective job search strategy and absolutely vital if you are seeking a new direction in your career. All jobs incorporate the use of some transferable skills and the most successful career chameleons recognise this and adapt their resumes to suit.
So what are transferable skills? Essentially they are [...]

The Redundant Brand and How to Avoid It!

 

It’s the toughest question of all. The white elephant lurking in the interview room. Your silent stalker.
 
“So why are you looking for a new position?”
 
It’s the question most people affected by redundancy fear in an interview and also the most common stumbling block. With a look of resignation most people answer -
 
“I was made [...]

Avoiding becoming Resume Spam

Everyone hates spam but now for job seekers there is an even greater down side as candidates find their resumes ending up, not on the employer’s lap, but instead caught in the recruiter’s or employer’s spam box. 
In a 2008 survey done by Career Directors International regarding the percentage of résumés received that end up trapped in SPAM filters, 72 [...]

What does Your Personal Brand Wordle Look Like?

I just heard about this super cool application, Wordle, from an industry colleugue, and I immediately loved it. Basically it gives you a ‘visual wordmap’ or ‘word cloud’ of a document or text by analysing the most common words. Of course I immediately wanted to see what my personal brand would look like in this format, [...]

Six Figures – Job Board Innovations

In the past I have always been wary of job boards and job seekers reliance on them as a significant part of job search strategy.  All too often I’ve heard job seekers complain that they can’t get any decent information on the jobs they are interested in and more often than not they never hear back. Even more worrying, has been [...]

Personal Branding meets Resume Writing – The 6 Word Resume

What would you say to an employer if you only had six words. This is the question posed in G.L. Hoffman’s blog. As a resume expert and personal branding specialist I love this concept.
A few quick examples I came up with are -
* For the Project Manager – ‘Project Glue, binding teams, building unity.’
* My [...]

Who Do You Choose To Be?

I heard a wonderful quote recently from Sidney Poitier whilst being interviewed by Oprah. During his interview he shared that when he was young and new to America he faced his first real exposure to racial prejudice. During this time he was asked “Who are You?” and his response was

“I am who I choose to be!”

I loved [...]

Dare to Be You!

Dare To Be You. It’s not only my business mantra and blog title but my challenge to others. All too often the talented quiet achiever is overlooked not because they lack the skills but because they lack the personal marketing tools to get noticed and rewarded.
Life is too short to live in the shadows.
Capitalise on [...]

You don’t need to be the best to be the best known!

In marketing they talk about the legendary fallacy of the statement –
 

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

 
The reality is the world is filled with exceptional mouse traps but in marketing it’s well known that it’s not usually the best product that is [...]

Profiting from Small Talk – What’s Your Party Elevator Pitch?

So what do you do?

 We hear it all the time. Everytime you are left with someone you don’t know at a party, networking function    or get together this is the guaranteed small talk opener.     Yet how many of us give our occupation as our stock standard response and overlook the powerful personal branding opportunity this presents us?
Just [...]