The Dallas Business Journal has a nice profile of us in the edition that came out today. Check it out!

We’d like to thank Alison Doyle at About.com for taking the time to review RiseSmart’s services. As she writes in her review, “By using the time-saving RiseSmart web site, people who are looking for that perfect high-level job can do so without having to do all the work themselves.” She encourages her readers to try the three-day trial.

So what are you waiting for? Try it out now.

If you haven’t seen BW Chicago, you should check it out. It’s a brand-new local Business Week publication for the Second City. Who knows, maybe Business Week will spring up in your fair city next?

Oh — and you should especially check it out because RiseSmart is mentioned in the publication’s News & Views section in an item on our executive education sweepstakes with the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There’s still time to enter, by the way: Do it now!

The buzz is building around RiseSmart, and we appreciate all of you who have helped spread the word — including bloggers in Germany and The Netherlands! Some recent blog posts that mention our company:

• Job sites for high earners (Seeds of Growth)
• RiseSmart looks to take on TheLadders (Recruiting Fly)
• RiseSmart goes YouTube (Magic Pot of Jobs)
• Two new job finder services sites (Job Search Guy Blog)
• Class instead of mass (Startuptrends.de)
• Job sites for “high earners” (ARA weblog)

Thanks to everyone who has taken an interest in us.

That’s how Adrants characterizes CareerBuilder’s new ad campaign, which debuted on Super Bowl Sunday. They like the campaign better than Monster’s.

The folks at Bootstrapper called our attention to an excellent post providing links to tools, advice and resources for individuals who are looking to change careers. There are more than 50 links (52, to be exact), so check it out.

Bootstrapper, by the way, debuts at No. 8 on the Career 100. If you haven’t added your blog yet to our ranking of more than 150 (166, to be exact) career-related blogs, please join the fun.

I thought I’d share with you the news release we put out today. We’re very excited to begin taking our story to the public. Here it is:

RiseSmart Enables High-End Jobseekers to Search in Style, Transforming the Way Busy Professionals Find Jobs Online

Dallas-Based Startup Assigns Each Member a Personal “Job Concierge” Who Plucks the Most Precise Matches from Company’s Million-Job Database

DALLAS – February 6, 2008 – In most aspects of their lives, $100K+ earners have come to expect a higher standard of service. But when it comes to finding high-paying jobs online, senior-level professionals have had little choice but to scour the Web’s millions of job listings like everyone else. That is, until now.

Bridging the gap between traditional job boards and the personal attention of a career coach, RiseSmart – a new subscription-based site for $100K+ professionals – assigns each member an expert “Job Concierge” who is responsible for matching member profiles with the most relevant job openings. It’s the first high-end job site truly worthy of the high-end jobseeker.

The High-End Job Site That $100K+ Earners Deserve

“Finding the right six-figure job opportunity among the millions of listings online is like searching for a needle in a haystack,” says Sanjay Sathe, RiseSmart founder and CEO. “Most $100K+ earners are too busy to spend countless hours visiting different job boards and poring through the many often-irrelevant positions returned in a typical automated search.”

Other $100K+ job sites, Sathe adds, offer only half-measures to address this problem.

“Other sites claim to have ‘’exclusive’ databases that make searching for $100K+ jobs easier. While this may sound impressive, the reality is that these databases exclude many high-paying jobs their members would want to know about,” Sathe says. “And they still require subscribers to sort manually through automated search results.”

The RiseSmart Process: Taking the Search Out of the Job Search

By contrast, RiseSmart’s process literally “takes the search out of the job search” for senior-level professionals. Here’s how it works:

• Each new member takes five minutes to create an online profile and upload a resume.
• RiseSmart runs an automated search of its million-job database to identify openings that could represent quality matches based on the member’s profile information.
• A RiseSmart Concierge™ – a real human being – carefully compares the member’s search results against the profile and resume, eliminating poor matches and presenting the member with only the most relevant job openings.
• The member simply clicks a link to apply for a job.
• RiseSmart identifies new opportunities weekly for each member. Members can provide feedback to improve future search results.

The RiseSmart Concierge: Your Personal Job-Search Assistant

The RiseSmart Concierge is the centerpiece of RiseSmart’s strategy of building deeper customer relationships than other job sites. Each RiseSmart Concierge is assigned specific member accounts, and is responsible for reviewing members’ resumes and learning their job preferences.

Concierges can also modify future searches based on member feedback – for example, screening out jobs from undesirable companies.

“This is the first site that actually treats executives like executives,” explains Dan Davenport, RiseSmart co-founder and chief financial officer.
“In their work lives, senior-level professionals often have a team of people who report to them, doing the tactical work necessary to achieve the objectives they set. Yet when it comes to searching for jobs online, these professionals are forced to sort through hundreds of irrelevant job listings, just to find the handful they might actually be interested in.

“Finally, these $100K+ earners have a ‘direct report’ to handle this task for them: a RiseSmart Concierge.”

An Idea Whose Time Has Come – as Members Can Attest

Since RiseSmart.com quietly went live in late November, the site has signed up more than 1,800 registered users. Of those who have requested RiseSmart’s free three-day trial, more than 80 percent have gone on to become paying members of the site.

“We’re getting positive – often ecstatic — feedback from our members. There’s been a latent need in the market for an online job site that doesn’t put the jobseeker through so many hoops,” Davenport says. “Our customers are telling us that this is a breath of fresh air for them.”

Early RiseSmart members offer enthusiastic testimonials:

Gary Iyer, a Houston-based CIO consultant for Intellysys, says –

Before RiseSmart, I had been visiting five or six different job boards every week, in addition to corporate sites for several companies I’d had my eye on for C-Level consulting in the U.S. RiseSmart aggregates jobs from all of these sources — then separates the wheat from the chaff so I don’t have to wade through hundreds of automated search results. I’ve been extremely pleased with the service.

Martin White, a senior marketing executive based in Dallas, says –

When I started my job search, I realized there was a huge gap between the numerous open senior marketing positions available across the U.S. and my ability to get to them. RiseSmart bridged this gap by proactively bringing the right jobs to me. I was previously a member of TheLadders, and even though they did have some senior positions on their site, I still had to do all the work to go across a multitude of pages to find the relevant positions. At RiseSmart, I get the relevant opportunities served up to me, based on my preferences.

Joselyn Conti, a marketing director in New Jersey, says –

I used subscription-based job sites before, but I never felt comfortable with them because I kept coming across $100K+ jobs on other job boards. Why didn’t my subscription site have these jobs? After I joined RiseSmart, I didn’t have this problem. I felt confident that if the job I wanted was posted online somewhere, RiseSmart would find it for me. Another thing I liked is that RiseSmart had a salary calculator next to each job result presented, which helped me compare salary ranges for various positions that I was exploring.

Alan Jernigan, a Texas-based sales executive, says –

I like RiseSmart’s approach to customer service. The team shows a real effort to help – which sets the company and its service apart.

Industry Veterans Praise, Participate in Venture

Citing RiseSmart’s potential to transform the way senior professionals search for jobs online, several leading authorities in the job-search and recruitment businesses have joined the company as advisors.

“Given the range of Web sites posting jobs, and the time it takes to aggregate all of these jobs, RiseSmart offers a great way to get access to jobs that are real and targeted.” says Dean Harris, former senior vice president of marketing for HotJobs and now a member of RiseSmart’s advisory board.

Fellow advisory board member Craig Stamm, the former chief financial officer for CareerBuilder.com and Headhunter.net, says: “This new business model is able to save senior professionals time and drive relevance in their search. Instead of looking for jobs across a multitude of Web sites, RiseSmart brings all the relevant jobs to the customer.”

“I’m pleased to be part of a venture that has a chance to change the online job search process in a fundamental way,” adds Bill Rowe II, vice chairman and managing partner of Pearson Partners International, who is also on RiseSmart’s advisory board. “The RiseSmart management team is made up of veteran corporate executives who know firsthand the difficulties with traditional job sites — and have developed an ingenious alternative.”

Service Pricing and Special Discounts

Through a special introductory discount, members can subscribe to RiseSmart Concierge service for $43.95 per month, or $109.95 for a three-month plan. The normal monthly rate is $54.95.

About RiseSmart

Based in Dallas, RiseSmart is a human-powered job search service that prescreens online search results for time-starved managers and executives. The RiseSmart team matches opportunities with jobseekers based on each member’s unique profile, freeing senior-level professionals to focus on networking or the demands of their current jobs. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.RiseSmart.com or its blog at www.risesmart.com/risesmart/blog. To view a demo, visit www.RiseSmart.com/demo.

When people are assembling their resumes, they tend to get obsessed with finding the right format, the right fonts, and the right “power words.” But the biggest key to writing a successful resume is knowing your personal brand before you ever set fingers to keyboard.

Even though, for most people, the best resume format is a reverse-chronological listing of your past positions and responsibilities, this doesn’t mean your resume should read like a list. On the contrary, it means that you need to communicate your brand message so clearly that it connects with the reader, no matter the format.

It’s Not About Power Words

You can’t communicate a distinctive brand message by littering it indiscriminately with so-called “power words.” While certainly your description of past accomplishments should be driven by action verbs, too many people go too far with words like “optimized,” “enhanced,” “revitalized” and “solidified.” You’ll only succeed in making the hiring manager’s eyes glaze over.

How about coming up with words that really describe you? If you’re a sales executive, maybe you’re a “sales turnaround expert” who’s “tough-minded” and “thrives under pressure” but is still “popular for having an even hand.” If I’m a company struggling to get my sales organization off the ground, would I rather know these things about you – or that you have X years of experience “solidifying, optimizing and revitalizing”?

You can think of these words as your personal brand characteristics — and they should be reflected in all your communications to prospective employers.

Three Steps to Success

Here are three steps I recommend when you are ready to prepare your resume:

• Come up with three to five personal brand characteristics that make you stand out from the competition.
• Make sure these brand characteristics come through in your overview paragraph (every resume should have one), as well as in the accomplishments you list for each job you’ve held.
• Connect these brand characteristics to the specific job you’re applying for with a well thought-out cover letter.

Hiring managers are busy people. They’re not trying to understand your “brand”; they’re mainly looking to find people whose experiences meet their checklist of requirements. But by taking a personal-branding approach to preparing your resume, you’ll give that hiring manager a strong sense of who you are — and what you bring to the table — even before that first telephone interview.

The powerful narrative you are communicating about yourself will click in, and you will quickly separate yourself from the job applicants focused on formats and power words. What’s more, as you get closer to landing your desired job, your positioning will be reinforced each time your resume is read and re-read.

So don’t settle for a resume that reads like a list. Create a resume that reads like you.

[This article also appears in Personal Branding Magazine.]