Main Feature: 15 Quick Tips for Career Branding Success
Special Feature: Your Personal Brand: Evolution or Revolution?
Bonus Feature: Your Career Brand: Who Are You? Employers Want to Know
Extra Feature: 15 Quick Tips for Working with Recruiters
Quintessential Site: Featured Career Website of this Issue
Q TIPS: Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search and Work Life
Editor's Note: About this Issue...
We're ending this year with three fresh articles on an important topic -- personal/career branding.
Publisher Dr. Randall Hansen provides top branding tips in his
article. Tim Tyrell-Smith explains the difference between evolutionary
and revolutionary branding. Wendy Terwelp tells how to use your brand to
distinguish yourself.
Finally, we conclude our 15th-anniversary series of career and job-search tips with my
article offering 15 tips for working with recruiters.
We wish our readers a wonderful season of the holidays that surround the winter solstice, and
a fabulous 2012. See you there.
--Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., Master Resume Writer, Credentialed Career Master,
Certified Electronic Career Coach, and editor at
kathy(at)quintcareers.com
Feature Article: Career Branding Success
15 Quick Tips for Career Branding Success
by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.
As part of the celebration of Quintessential Careers's 15th anniversary, we're presenting lists of 15 tips on
some of the most essential topics in college, job search, and career.
As a job-seeker, are you a Coke, Pepsi, or generic cola? In other words, have you been
proactive in establishing and promoting your personal career brand -- or are you still using
outdated job-hunting and career-management methods that keep you from standing out from
other job-seekers? Personal career branding is about defining who you are, what you offer to
prospective employers; it's a combination of reputation, image, promise, and value-added.
Whether you're new to career branding or a pro at it, we've included our best tips for creating,
enhancing, and broadcasting your career brand. Once you've developed your career brand, you
can use it in a plethora of ways to obtain a new job, help get a promotion with your current employer,
and even establish yourself as a consultant.
Have Your Resume Ready in Case of Job Loss in the Current Economic Climate.
QUINTESSENTIAL RESUMES AND COVER LETTERS, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service, provides solutions
with unmatched quality in the areas of professional resume writing. In fact, in 2009, during one of
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Check out Joan's experience: "I cannot believe what a difference this made. I have had 3 calls for interviews and just accepted
a job that pays me 15% more than I made before!"
Our personal brands are most often quiet and dormant. Hibernating. Until we need them.
Why?
Well, for most of us, a brand is something we manage only when necessary. We're
out of work, chasing a promotion or working to establish a business of our own. It is a smart
and necessary activity to build a personal brand.
If you've been in a regular job and under the safety of a company's warm blanket, your
personal brand is probably tucked away in a file on your home computer. Or it has never
been created.
Then something happens. You are laid off. And it is time to unwrap your branding tools,
re-learn your story, and decide if and how to change the way you communicate your value.
If a job search is prompting you to review your brand for the first time in a while, you have an
important question to ask yourself:
To best communicate my value in this economy, does my brand need an evolution or a revolution?
Find Your Career Future. Learn More About Yourself
Career Maze is designed to help every job seeker, at every level, make smarter
career choices. Individualized to reflect your unique personality and written in
"plain English," it is thorough and easy to complete.
Once completing the assessmemt, your 2-part report includes:
A specific, career-relevant discussion of your workplace personality
A list of job types compatible with your personality
Career Maze encourages you to think about tapping your full potential to find your future.
When all things are nearly equal (like years of experience, education, job duties), it's your personal brand, who you
are, that sets you apart, and those are the reasons an employer will hire you. As one staffing-industry CEO
told me, "Companies want to know what kind of contribution you can make to their success -- not how many years
you've been working." Not only do your achievements with quantifiable results set you apart, soft skills do too.
One labor-relations director told me she hires for attitude over skill every time. "You can always teach a skill, but
never an attitude," she said. And she is not alone.
As part of the celebration of Quintessential Careers's 15th anniversary, we're presenting lists of 15 tips on
some of the most essential topics in college, job search, and career.
If you're engaged in a full-blown job search, you may wonder if you should work with a
recruiter. Or perhaps you find that recruiters are seeking you out, whether you are job-hunting
or not. To leave no stone unturned in your search, definitely consider recruiters. Our
tips are intended to guide you.
Ad: Increase Your Marketability with More Education
Increase Your Marketability by Obtaining Additional
Education, Training, Certifications
The number people enrolling in online education programs to advance their knowledge and their career
is increasing enormously.
Should you be one of them?
Programs range from business to management to computer
information systems and students can choose from accelerated
courses and full or part-time programs.
Find programs from all the best schools in the country
-- to best fit your personal, educational, and career needs.
Our colleague Meg Guiseppi says her Executive Career Brand blogsite is "designed
to be a hub of constantly updated [no-cost] information and resources for the c-level and senior-level
executive job-seeker." And indeed it is.
Meg regularly provides insightful articles on a range of branding-related topics, including
blogging, executive career management, executive job search, executive networking,
executive personal and career branding, executive resumes, career biographies,
green careers, cover letters, executive interviewing, Linkedin, online identity and
online reputation management, social media and social networking, Twitter, and
work-life balance.
She also provides sample resumes and bios and a no-cost ebook.
Find a Job, Post Your Resume -- on our Job Portal!
Even in a bad economy, there are still job postings and career opportunities!!
Go now to search for jobs, post your resume, build an online portfolio, receive career consultation,
and learn about continuing education opportunities.
Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search and Work Life
SlideShare, the YouTube of slide shows, offers new ways for job-seekers to present themselves and initiate a creative
job search to get on the radar of recruiters and hiring managers.
In a blog post, the site tells
job-seekers how they can research potential new employers, stay current on hiring trends and strengthen their personal
brand through presentations.
A slideshow on the site,
tells job-sekers and careerists how to manage their online presence.
And for more information about how job search and career management is changing, you can
browse the Career category on SlideShare.net.
Our colleague, Rita Ashley, has a terrific offer going for the holidays.
Purchase her Networking Debugged or Job Search Debugged, job-search books,
and get the other one free. Once you purchase a book, contact her with your email address
and it will be her pleasure to send you the other book.
We’ve read these terrific, downloadable ebooks, and trust us, they are well worth your investment.
Here’s an excerpt from our review of Job Search Debugged:
Among the strengths of the rich, comprehensive Job Search Debugged is the fact that author
Rita Ashley was a recruiter for many years, so she thoroughly understands the hiring process
from the employer’s side of the desk. The other distinctive feature is that the book is filled with
stories of clients and other job-seekers. Nothing beats real-life examples and anecdotes to get
points across. Ashley is opinionated, and sometimes her positions clash -- refreshingly -- with conventional
career-expert wisdom. She disdains, for example, the typical advice to be coy and guarded about one’s
salary request when negotiating salary.
Your online presence and reputation are important aspects of your personal/career
brand. Heather Huhman recently compared Web-based tools that measure one's online
reputation, including Klout, Identified, PeerIndex, MyWebCareer, and one that hasn't launched yet,
PeerREACH. Huhman concludes that Identified and MyWebCareer are better suited to job-sekers,
while the others focus on online popularity and Impact (PeerREACH is an unknown at this point).
If your school, organization, business or other
entity has a Website, we welcome you to link to Quintessential Careers.
If you already have a link from your site, we want you to know we
appreciate it. If you don't have a link to us, please
send a request to your site's Webmaster to establish a
link to Quintessential Careers. Thanks so much!
For more details (including sample HTML copy), see our
Link to Us page.
Quintessential Careers Career Masterminds
We are honoring our 15 favorite career gurus with the title of Quintessential Careers Career Mastermind.
In turn, they are honoring our readers in a number of ways throughout the rest of the year ... with articles,
tips, and a special feature in our 15th anniversary issue of QuintZine in November.
Quintessential Careers Press Announces Our Latest Book: The Quintessential Guide to
Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media.
The
Quintessential Guide to Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media,
by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., and Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D., provides six chapters to guide you
through the next revolution in online job search. Since job boards, vestiges of the first
revolution in online job search, should still be part of the job-seeker's toolkit, this
book helps you navigate those while also considering the future of job boards. The book
looks at building your personal brand, teaches you to make the most of social-media venues
in the job search, guides you in creating a digital presence, suggests you consider blogging,
and discusses ways to integrate multimedia elements into your job search.
Ad: Does Your Organization Have Positions to Fill?
Find Qualified Candidates Today!
The Quintessential Careers Job-Hunting Portal is a great place for organizations that have job
openings to post those openings and review job-seeker resumes.
Our national resume database contains more than 500,000 active resumes of candidates seeking employment.
Numerous job-posting packages are available.
If your organization is looking to hire, use the power behind our
portal! Learn more today!
Follow QuintCareers; Read the Latest Advice
Follow QuintCareers Latest Job Tips and Career News on Twitter
Also follow @KatCareerGal for regular career-related tweets.
QuintCareers Network of Empowering Blogs
What are QuintCareers empowering blogs?
The Career Doctor Blog:
Especially for those who miss our former regular feature, Ask the Career Doctor, this blog each day features a question and answer from The
Career Doctor, Randall S. Hansen, PhD.
Need a career expert for a story or article you're working on? Searching for college,
career, and job news? Interested in learning more about Quintessential Careers?
Our Press Room
is your one-stop location for getting the information and resources you need.
SlideShare, the YouTube of slide shows, offers new ways for job-seekers to present themselves and initiate a creative
job search to get on the radar of recruiters and hiring managers.
