Job Bait Questions

What kind of person are you, character-wise? Do you know? What kind of job do you want? What kind of job will you settle for? How well do your character traits line up with that job or that company's culture? Do you know who you are and who you are becoming well enough to foresee how good a fit you will be with the company? What are you going to do to get their initial 2 seconds of attention? What is the bait you plan to use to make them notice you in their stack of stuff? What magic words in the English language are you going to employ to make your character more appealing, to stand out as a face in the crowd? What particular action verbs and keywords are in your personal arsenal to slay the beast of blandness? How can you write a job description or experience history or workplace chronology that pretends to tell even half the real story, the one that you know is (or was) played out in the dynamics of character interactions, with other workers at many levels? If you learn that a company is seeking a "resourceful coordinator" how do you demonstrate that you possess and exhibit those traits naturally--even though you've never had a chance to demonstrate, prove or document them in one of your (good or lousy) jobs due to the nature of the managers or organizational structure? How do you lead a stranger to interpolate your present and past experience into an accurate picture of who you will be a year from now? How do you bait the hook to get them to consider investing in you and your/their mutual future?

PACKAGE YOURSELF

My final comment for 2007 is that bioblogs make sense simply for no other reason than good packaging, an art that has been lost in tradtional resumes. When I first got into the resume designing and writing and editing and printing business back in the 70s, it was still a form of "packaging," mostly for VIPs and certainly management-level types. The choice of the typewriter was important (there were all IBM Executive typewriters with proportional spacing), and the paper was as well (parchment being the "bond-like" favorite). Cover letters, hand-signed in blue ink, were the outer layer of the packaging, introducing the "product" (the resume); a proper strategy called for matching envelopes and letterhead. The point was to impress first of all the decision maker's secretary so she would take the package seriously enough to forward it to her boss (rather than the trash can where the sloppy stuff went), and then to be sufficiently packaged—sophisticated, convincing, attractive, important—that the boss would want to know more. To achieve this you had to spend, to package with proof of your sincerity, implying your willingness to invest in reaching out to them and that a mutual reaching back to you would be a sensible financial transaction. It was, is, and will always be about money; thus, packaging. Whether you are selling perfume or your potential, you want to upscale your brand to make it look and smell like money, the opposite end of the spectrum from the job-obits known as chronological and functional resumes.

Packaging, with graphics, is the way to set yourself above the generic brands.

WORDBOARDING

It was about one year ago that BIOBLOGS: RESUMES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY was published, introducing a new art form to the world of resume writing/reading. During these 12 months I have crawled and scrolled my way through thousands of websites and blogs relating to employment, recruiting, writing, creativity, business, human resources, careers, college graduates, graphics, communication arts and the business of blogging. Like a suspect run through a series of waterboarding, I feel like I have been wordboarded: O.k., I give up, I confess, I started the resume revolution! I splashed the first big wave in years by calling into question the very authority of "action verbs" and "keywords". And I admit that I intended from the git-go to bring the castles of the resume writers down, to shake the very foundations of those hallowed halls of the Professional Resume Writers' Association and all the certified professional experts on "personal branding" and even those women who claim to have the "courage to reduce a resume to 1-page." I confess! I did it! I doubted their power and value, and wondered more than once whether mere words and a semantic mix of job descriptions cum braggable achievements would really cut the mustard! Why? Because I dared to imagine that the "real story," the core of the whole shebang, lay in the missing parts, the ones that were mostly connected by the glue of the resume owner's character at work; this I thought important--the role of the person's character traits within the game played by the workplace dynamics and the tribal nature of the organization--not so much the job duties and tools provided, but the jobber's perceptions, actions, and resources.

But I must have been wrong. Despite having succeeded in sparking a kindling fire for the topic of "bioblogs" (which simply did not exist in 2006 before my book), and latching onto ownership of the term "bioblogs" (trademarked; mine), I overlooked something beyond the total dedication to the traditional status quo of those who are busy selling it: The lack of initiative in the American worker and his/her fear of wandering off the beaten path. Most are happy to fill out the form and be 1:70,000,000 resumes in Monster.com's database; that's how different they think they are; that's how confident they are about their creative character. Follow, follow, follow; don't dare stand out.

It looks like in the USA just about everyone active in the job market is happy to stay on the same track as everyone else, and that view is supported broadly by those who make a $ on it, charging excessive fees for standard crap that wasn't even exciting resume-wise 30 years ago when resumes still had an affect on people reading them. While the experts talk about "personal branding" from one side of their mouths, they babble about building keyword strength from the other, as if you can be short and tall at the same time, or a leader and a follower simultaneously. Unless you are a politician, don't buy it.

That the use of graphics in a resume is such a cold fish to these folks amuses me, and I believe it is mainly because they don't know how to do it so they don't like it. Personally, anyone who can't write their own word-driven resume today probably needs to go back to school because it aint that complicated to satisfy the scanners and the HR folks, especially if all you are aiming for is a narrative of your job obits.

But if you thought long and hard about your future (with work as a part but not all of it) and tried to capture your value in words, you would find they could use a little push and punch, and that's where graphics come in. Advertisers figured this out about a million years ago. Why is it taking everyone else so long? Stop listening to the clowns who want to sell you the same thing they sold the last 500 people and demand something different for yourself. You should deserve it, and if you don't think you do, go pay somebody big $$ to crank out a sheet to feed the machines. After all, it's important to get your life summed up in bits and bytes in the database, isn't it? Isn't that what it's all about?

THE COMPLETE BIOBLOG STORY, VOL. 1

It's now complete, the web site you've all been waiting for, the COMPLETE BIOBLOG STORY VOLUME 1. Just go to bioblogging.com and you will find out everything to know about bioblogs, the resumes for the 21st century . . . and for those who wish to stand a head above the crowd.

DEB DIB'S FIT

The so-called "trend watcher of branded resumes" Deb Dib says there is a "lot of movement" towards 1-page resumes. This is but half the story because what she doesn't know is that we've already been there and 1-pagers need a lot more now than then to make an impact. She suggests leading off with a "brand statement" that portrays your "personal chemistry" and "how you would fit", or in other words, who you are.

As I said in 1975 in The Resume Writer's Handbook and its various editions, and in Bioblogs: Resumes for the 21st Century (2006): employers hire character, not skills. Thank you Deb for making a good argument for using a bioblog to paint a picture of your personal chemistry, how you would fit, and the kind of creative character at work you are promoting.

If anything implies a brand and makes a statement in the world of resumes (chronological job obits, functional job descriptive lists, combo mumbo), it's the powerful, graphic-driven, street-savvy bioblog, the one in a million document that transcends the limits of data dumped under dates.

Fit: how you work, how you relate, how you emote, how you think, how you create, how you will be in the future.

THE BIO IN A BIOBLOG

Bernadette Martin's synopsis of a good bio is that it "sets the stage." Hold that thought. She also summarizes the essence of a bio with "It's your story." [She should trademark that.] Beyond the "straight bio," which is the sort of thing you skim over on BoD reports and such things, there is the "narrative bio," wherein lies all the good and tasty bits and bytes of a person's vision, purpose and passion—those "personal touchpoints that resonate" [her words] and which (I presume) are the components that "inject personal branding" into the paragraphs (the necessary zeitgeist). It is the story of your vision, the telling of your purpose, the rendering visible of your passions that makes the whole shebang believable . . . and desirable to another, whether looking for a blind date or blindly looking for a better job. The fact of the matter of bios is that they are not just about the past and present you that may or may not be profiled in LinkedIn or Facebook or a hundred other public purviews, but the present-becoming-the-future You that brings all this baggage to the station, ticket in hand, ready to take on new challenges and to grow. It's this becoming-You that will make the vision, purpose and passion come alive. And that stage? It's the workplace where your creative character at work is the public persona that you yourself direct from backstage, behind the curtains, a socially acceptable workplace avatar (a titled Doppelganger) who has successfully separate him- or her-self from his or her chronological chains to the job obituary of traditional resumes.

All the good stuff of a bio fall naturally into the first part of a bioblog, with the graphic component carrying the load in a vacuum of competitive words. Whether you are heading upstage or downstage, your bio should be established in your own character's mind first; then dress it up in your costume of choice.

It's not just your story, of old: It's your story, of becoming. (Remember, that's what the other guy pays for, and that's why you want to create as much curiosity in your story as he/she has in his/her own story.)

Nice synopsis, Bernadette.

RESUMES ARE SO OLD HAT

Thursday's "Brand You World" teleconference was interestig to tune into, which I did for the "Resume Branding" segment with Deb Dib, Bernadette Martin and Megan Fitzgerald providing their insights and experience in the (now shadowy) field of personal branding, which can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I suppose we could all agree, however, on the basic premise that we are talking about 'personal' as equivalent to individually differentiated from the crowd (of competitors) and 'branded' as essentially our creative character at work--as what else could it be if titles, responsibilities, achievements and status are basically undistinguishable?

The terms value and impact and infused with passion and what you can do and who you are were bandied about in the circling around a descriptive essence of "personal branding," especially by Dib, who warns against common resume mistakes of becoming a generic document, nothing more than a jobs list [resume as job obituary] or merely another bland and faceless sales piece. Another word I found awkwardly tossed into the mix was "courage," especially when it was defined in terms of "having the courage to trim your resume to one page." Please forgive me, but since in 1975! I was the one in New York City who started selling high-priced, Fifth Avenue-style 1-page resumes rather than 3+ page "executive resumes" I might consider this "courage" bit a dollar short and a day late. It was radical, yes, 32 years ago.

I'll tell you what I think courage would look like in today's job market/job strategy: using a powerful bioblog to show your passion, your potential, your value, your impact. Here's a chance to do a performance breakout on a mini-scale, and to set yourself apart from the crowd: what you can do. This will show not only your creative character at work, but will voice your "brand statement" loudly, clearly and with a sense of curiosity.

One word the panel failed (not accidentally) to mention was bait, that unsophisticated kernel of truth about all resumes no matter how fancy or unfrilled. Those certified-this and certified-that folks who sell their consulting services don't want to admit to it, but that's what they are selling: bait . . . good, better, or best . . . it's still the wiggle of the worm that gets the attention of the fish.

Ms. Martin rubbed up against it with her comment that the components of a good bio are "used to set the stage" (which I construe as meaning a stage upon which your creative character can speak your part and make your case); and Ms. Fitzgerald laid it out right on the table: all you are doing is trying to prequalify for an interview (with a fish, I'd add).

All in all, these personal branding experts (Certified Personal Branding specialists, no less) were pretty vague about what the core of branding is, other than "passion" and "impact" and "value."

I wish they would have mentioned bioblogs, which are all about your potential and future value, or in other words, the personal brand of your creative character at work: the sum of all your personal parts plus work and experience and education, all aimed forward into the slippery workstreams of worklife.

And by the way, Ms. Dib, going to 1-page resumes is not the biggest thing happening in resumes today. Bioblogging is, but I don't expect you to endorse them because you are not certified to create them.