Time’s Work in Progress blog offered a peek today at a survey we recently commissioned on Internet job searches. Time staff writer Lisa Takeuchi Cullen reports:
[A] survey … from RiseSmart—a job search site that “caters to jobseekers earning $100K or more and that’s backed by former CareerBuilder and HotJobs execs”—finds one in three people already employed spends an hour a day looking for a new job.
Lisa then poses this question to her readers: “Are you one of them? Why?”
That’s a topic for another post (or several), but for those who saw Lisa’s post, we wanted to let you know that the full results of our survey will be released soon. Stay tuned.
With Americans fearful of a recession, the competition for $100K+ jobs has become more intense than it has been in years. In this environment, it’s more important than ever for jobseekers to be well-prepared for job interviews — particularly when they are seeking their first $100K+ job.
To help candidates break the $100K+ barrier, here are five tips to help you in the interview process:
1. Brand yourself. To be a $100k+ manager or executive, you must have a brand — a one-sentence or one-phrase way to powerfully describe yourself in your interview. Don’t just tell the person where you worked and what your responsibilities were. Instead, tell them you’re a ‘sales turnaround expert’ who’s ‘tough-minded’ and ‘thrives under pressure.’ That’s the kind of meaty characterization that recruiters use in pitching candidates to employers, and it’s how you need to present yourself in the big interview.
2. Know the employer. One of the biggest differences between the candidate who gets the $100k+ job and the one stuck forever in five figures is doing your homework before the interview. If you can reference and react intelligently to what journalists, investment analysts and others have said and written about your potential employer, you present yourself as a leader who thinks strategically — not a worker bee who waits around to be handed a new task.
3. Dress for the part. Dress for the side of the $100K salary line you want to be on. For example, high-powered male executives are far more likely to wear French cuffs than sub-$100K managers. So add a couple of new shirts and some nice cufflinks to your wardrobe – at least for your job interviews. Female executives, meanwhile, tend to dress more conservatively as they move up the corporate ladder – favoring high-end pantsuits over skirts, cardigans and other early-career options.
4. Don’t ramble — be concise. Answer questions thoroughly, but then stop. If you feel the need to continue talking simply because the interviewer hasn’t asked the next question, you’ll come off as weak and indecisive — not a leader. Some interviewers like to put you in awkward situations just to see how you’ll respond to them. Don’t take the bait; stay in control – especially of what comes out of your mouth.
5. Ask for the job. If you want to win your first $100K+ job, you need to show mental toughness in your interview – so bring your hard hat, not your pacifier. Bashful people don’t become $100K+ executives. Do you want the job? Then ask for it directly. Employers respect assertiveness, particularly for leadership positions.
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.
The sentence with the typo: “You’ve earned a better a job search.”
The blogger goes on to say:
The ad itself I really like, if only because it immediately calls out my major frustration of job sites like monster.com and even more targeted ones like talentzoo. I spend most of my time wading through crap before finding … a job I might be interested in..
Which to us goes to the real problem with the ad (and with TheLadders), compared to what RiseSmart offers jobseekers.
TheLadders takes half-measures to address the frustrations of looking for jobs online. Specifically, it restricts the number of openings it makes accessible to members – typically only 70,000 active job listings.
That solution reduces the number of jobs members must sort through, but it does so in an arbitrary, rather than personalized, manner. And TheLadders still requires its subscribers to search manually through job listings.
Watch this video for the first real solution to the $100K+ jobs dilemma:
Advertising Age reports that a new campaign for TheLadders.com “paints category leaders CareerBuilder and Monster as overrun with unattractive commoners.”
Ad Age goes on to say:
TheLadders’ tone is markedly different from that of CareerBuilder and Monster, which have tended to focus on job seekers’ unhappiness at their current workplaces…
The exclusive, country-club attitude befits TheLadders’ business model. Unlike the larger and better-known jobs sites, it costs $180 a year (or $30 a month) to use and restricts membership and listings to “$100k+ people looking for $100k+ jobs.”
While we’re not big fans of the elitist tone of the TheLadders’ ads, we do agree that $100K+ jobseekers are frustrated with most job sites and are looking for something better. Finding a the right six-figure job opportunity among the millions of listings online is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
TheLadders’ solution to this problem is to restrict the number of jobs it makes available to members. Its database typically consists of about 70,000 active job listings.
That solution reduces the number of jobs members must sort through, but it still forces them to search manually through job listings. And it greatly reduces the pool of possible jobs.
At RiseSmart, we think we’ve found a better solution for the $100K+ jobseeker:
We start with a database of more than a million active job listings — not 70,000.
Then, we take our members’ profile information and match it against this million-job database to produce a preliminary list of job results.
Finally, a RiseSmart Concierge — a real human being assigned to each member’s account — plucks only the most precise matches from this list.
That means our members gain the benefit of a more comprehensive search than TheLadders provides, but without having to search at all. You can leave that to your RiseSmart Concierge.
That’s why at RiseSmart we don’t just tell you you’re special — we show you you’re special by offering a level of service unavailable anywhere else.
LinkedIn, an Internet social network for professionals, will open up its service on Monday to outside software developers, starting with BusinessWeek magazine, to transform itself from an online contacts and referral database into an indispensable daily tool for business users…
The program will let outside developers create software for LinkedIn as well as embed features of LinkedIn, such as finding your business contacts, directly from partner Web sites.
This obviously presents exciting new opportunities for enterprising Web businesses that cater to business users, including jobseekers.
The new issue of Presstime, the publication of the Newspaper Association of America, has a great interview with Susan C. Lavington, the senior vice president of marketing for the nation’s largest newspaper, USA Today. Lavington talks about winning her dream job and offers some useful advice. An excerpt:
While sitting on the beach in Nags Head, N.C., in June 1999, Lavington told her husband, Michael Welther, that her dream job would be doing marketing for USA Today.
“My husband said, ‘Go and get that job,’ ” says Lavington, who at the time worked for US Airways Inc. When they returned home to Alexandria, Va., she saw that Gannett Co. was advertising for a director of marketing for USAToday.com, so she applied.
“Within a week, I had a job offer,” Lavington recalls.
Lavington’s story underscores the importance of pursuing your long-term career goals, even when you are fully engaged in your current job.
How many people are in the position Lavington was in at her previous job — unsatisfied and yearning for something else? And yet, when urged to “go and get that job,” too many people come back with excuses:
“I’m too busy with my current job to look for a new job.”
“I’m got too many family commitments to search online at night.”
“I don’t have time to network.”
“Online job searching is like searching for a needle in a haystack.”
I’ve been there, believe me. Our whole management team has. And that’s why we created RiseSmart — to take away those excuses. To inspire you to GO AND GET THAT JOB!
Oh, I almost forgot — when asked for the best career advice anyone had ever given her, Lavington offered the following: “Actions speak louder than words.”
In checking out the job search landscape on YouTube, we came across this amusing series of videos by jorgy81, a 26-year-old Kentuckian who is looking for work. He asks viewers for advice, such as whether he should button “one button, two buttons, or no buttons” on his suit jacket.
In this video, jorgy81 shares his thoughts driving home after his first job interview. Among his insights: “What can I say? Dressing nice works.”
Unfortunately for jorgy81, he’s no lonelygirl15; views of his adventure are few and far between. So maybe this will give him some needed exposure — and who knows, even help him find a job.
After all, that’s what we at RiseSmart are all about.
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.
Advertising Age reports that a
From 
