Check out the latest addition to Job-Hunt.org‘s list of 12 (and counting) free job search ebooks on topics ranging from personal branding, interviewing, and career reinvention, to salary negotiations, working with recruiters and more.

Tim Tyrell-Smith, creator of the Tim’s Strategy approach to job search and Job-Hunt’s Personal Marketing Expert, authored the newest ebook, “How To Create A Personal Marketing Plan: The 5 Powerful Steps To Bringing Your Brand To Life“.

What is “personal marketing”?  Tim explains:

“It is the work you do once you’ve created a personal brand. You know who you are and, importantly, know how you are different from others wanting to play the same role in the world.

You have to expose your brand and ideas to people in a way that gets them leaning in. Not turning away. So you have to be smart.”

He further notes two universal truths:

1. “Marketing is hard. To do it right, anyway.

2. Marketing takes time. Only in rare cases will your brand become viral overnight (or even over a few months). People who ‘rush in’ are making mistakes. And those mistakes can be costly. Giving you a reputation that’s hard to shake.”

Tim is a wonderfully engaging writer. The ebook is quick to read (only 12 pages) and will give you actionable advice and resources, along with the tools you need to make your promise of value known to the world.

Tim takes you through 5 steps to create and execute your personal marketing plan:

1. Build a Personal Marketing Hub
2. Learn to Engage with People
3. Start Building Social Credibility
4. Inspire Sharing of Your Ideas and Successes
5. Take a Few Calculated Risks

Download the free e-book now. Tim and Job-Hunt welcome you to share it freely with your friends or networks.

Related resources:

My ebook, 23 Ways You Sabotage Your Executive Job Search and How Your Brand Will Help You Land . . . A practical guide to executive branding, marketing your ROI value and navigating the new world of job search

My free Job-Hunt ebook, Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile: How to Transform Your Executive Brand, Resume, and Career Biography Into a Winning LinkedIn Profile

So you’re suddenly in an executive job search or planning one – by choice or by circumstance.

Things look different out there than they did the last time you were seeking a new opportunity, don’t they?

If you’re just starting out or, if your job search is lumbering on and you’re getting few or no interviews or action, you may not know how to job search well.

Or you may be lazy – thinking that if you put out a few feelers and get your updated resume onto plenty of job boards, you can sit back and wait for interviews to roll in. That makes you a passive or REACTIVE job seeker, instead of the PROACTIVE one you need to be.

Or you may be misinformed – putting most of your efforts into job search strategies that yield the lowest return on your time invested. You’re ready to put in the time and do whatever is necessary, but you don’t really know what you’re doing.

You’re a lazy, or misinformed, job seeker if you:

1. Skip over step one – identifying the kind of job you want, targeting the companies that will be a mutual good fit, and researching their current challenges to find out how you can help them solve their problems.

2. Run straight for your old resume (if you can find it) and update it – without first defining your executive brand, and creating content designed to market your ROI and resonate with your target employers.

3. Focus most of your time on job boards – the “monsters” and smaller niche boards. You think that job search in the digital age means hitting the job boards hard because that’s where all the job are. You don’t understand that most jobs are found by penetrating the “hidden” job market.

4. Fear having an online presence and putting yourself “out there” with social networking and social media. You don’t understand that executive recruiters and the hiring decision makers at your target companies are on LinkedIn and other social networks. If they’re hanging out there looking for candidates like you, you should be, too.

Get started with LinkedIn. If you do nothing else with social media, you need to be there, leveraging all that this social network has to offer, just to keep pace with your job-seeking competitors. See my LinkedIn Guide for Executive Branding and Job Search.

5. Neglected your network while you had a job because you didn’t think you needed them any more. Now that you’re looking again, you don’t have the time or inclination to re-connect. It’s too much work! You don’t understand that the way to get at those hidden jobs – where most opportunities lie – is through purposeful networking.

6. Haven’t researched what executive job search is all about today, so you can prepare and do all the back end work, before jumping in.

Are you a lazy or misinformed job seeker?

To get all the inside skinny on landing an executive job in today’s job market, see my post Today’s Executive Job Search Toolkit.

Related posts:

Bullet-Proof Your Executive Career in the New World of Work

5 Key Elements of a Strong Online Personal Brand

Social Media ROI: Is It Worth the Time?

photo by suvodeb

Do you want to increase your chances to be found by executive recruiters and your target employers?

What job seeker doesn’t?

Most recruiters and hiring authorities source talent by searching relevant keywords on LinkedIn, Google, and other search engines, and then assessing the people those searches reveal by what they find about them online.

If you’re in a job search and have no “online footprint” – that is, a good number of positive, solid search results when your name is Googled – you may be invisible to the very people you need to be positioned in front of.

The better your online reputation, the better you position yourself online, and the stronger your presence online, the more appealing you’ll be to these people.

Take a look at your own online footprint right now. Type your name into a Google search, and see what you find.

• Do you “own” the first several search results?
• Or does it take several pages of results before you get to anything related to you?
• What information will people find about you when they click on those search results?
• Is it what you need them to know about you and your potential value to the companies or organizations you want to work for?

[Note: If you are logged into your Gmail, Google, or Google+ account, Google usually "personalizes" your search results specifically for you, so log out first to see what the rest of the world sees.]

Here are the 5 components necessary to build a strong online brand for your job search:

1. Relevance

You should know, before starting your job search, which companies or which kind of companies you’re targeting, and what information about you is relevant to them and will resonate with them.

Without a clear target, how can you possibly differentiate your personal brand, ROI value and best-fit qualities, and create career marketing communications (online and offline) that will hit home, attract them and clearly distinguish you as a good hiring choice?

Keep your brand messaging relevant to your target, detailing how you can help them solve their current problems, and position yourself on sites that are relevant to and frequented by them.

2. Quality

Be careful what you post on social networks, or anywhere online. Continuously monitor your online presence. Get used to self-Googling regularly (about once a week) to see what exists on the first several pages of search results.

If someone has posted something nasty about you, see about getting it taken down. Adjust what people will find, whenever possible.

Are you finding any “digital dirt” that may disqualify you? Do you have the same name as others who have an online footprint? If so, you may easily be confused with them. That’s bad news for you, if any of them have a sordid reputation. You’ll have to work on building more positive search results to outdistance those of the bad guys.

3. Diversity

You need a good mix of static profiles/web pages and vibrant real-time content. A few online profiles that all contain the same content won’t cut it – change up the information in each one.

• Express your opinions, showcase your expertise and add value by blogging on your own site, commenting on other sites and/or guest blogging on other sites.
• Get busy on social networks like Twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc.
• Contribute to online forums that are open to the public, LinkedIn Group discussions, LinkedIn Answers.
• Publish white papers on relevant sites.
• Put up a profile and post book reviews on Amazon and other online booksellers.

4. Volume

Keep working on building more and more search results for your name and increase your number of diverse and accurate results on the first few pages.

To build up your volume of search results, focus on sites with strong “Google juice” (meaning, sites that Google and other search engines deem authorities because they’re content-rich, have been existence for a long time, and have a strong following, among other things), such as – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Google itself (Google Profile).

Any activity on strong sites will likely result in those web pages (with your name on them) landing towards the top of your list of search results.

5. Consistency

You should already have done the back-end work of defining your personal brand, built around what will resonate with your target companies. (See my 10-Step Personal Branding Worksheet).

Express that same personal brand message, across all communications channels and social media you decide to use. I don’t mean that you should use the same information over and over. As I mentioned above, mix it up.

Put yourself in the place of people assessing you through your online identity and deciding whether to hire you or do business with you. If your brand message and focus varies from one real-life setting to the next or from one social network to the next or from one website to the next, your target audience won’t clearly see your promise of value to them. You’ll confuse them.

Use the same name or handle across all channels online, so that you’re easy to find and distinguish from others.

Bottom line:

Building your brand online takes planning and effort. It will take time for your hard work to gain traction and give you the kind of online presence that will appeal to your target companies. Get started now, and work on outdistancing your competition!

Cross-posted at Job-Hunt.org.

Related posts:

Does Your Online Presence Scream “DON’T Hire Me”?

Get Personal With Your Executive Brand Statement

How Twitter Helped Me Build My Personal Brand

photo by Vince Alongi

If you’re like many people, January is the time to make – and stick to – resolutions that will improve your life in some way.

While you’re working on those resolutions, why not also take stock of your personal brand and brand messaging, to be sure they’re aligned with your career plans for this year.

Times being what they are, you never know when a new job opportunity, a possible career change, or even a layoff may come your way.

Maybe it’s time to re-brand. Ponder these questions:

• What’s my brand reputation about these days?
• Have I become the “go to” person for a new area of expertise?
• What is my promise of value in the marketplace?
• What ROI do I offer potential new employers?

Step one with any career branding work is identifying which employers (or which kind of employers) you will target.

If you’re happy in the kind of work you’re doing now, and would want to continue in the same vein, then you probably know quite a bit about your target audience.

If you’re ready for a change, it’s time to do some research and plan a new career path.

An essential piece in both the re-branding process and job search strategy is looking at your recent career accomplishments and contributions.

What did you do for your employer(s) last year that most benefitted them?

Think about the things you did that positively impacted your company or organization – saving money, increasing profits and market share, improving processes and/or productivity, expanding service offerings, improving communications, turning around failing processes/operations, etc.

How will those contributions impact your promise of value to your target employers?

If you weren’t keeping track over the past year, get to work cataloging them now, while you can still recall them.

Here are some things that could be important:

• Joining new professional associations and/or contributing to existing ones
• Publishing articles, white papers, blog posts
• Getting a promotion
• Overcoming challenges you and the company faced. What were the results that benefitted the company?
• Suggesting initiatives to make the company “greener”
• Negotiating a lucrative new contract
• Sourcing a cost-saving new vendor
• Introducing new best practices
• Being part of the recruiting and hiring process
• Being a mentor and helping others progress in their careers
• Earning certifications or awards
• Reaching a career milestone
• Connecting with new people who brought in business for your employer
• Completing special training or gaining any relevant new skills
• Taking advantage of professional development – seminars, webinars, attending conferences
• Volunteering in your community

What should you do with all this new information?

• Update your resume and career biography, so they’re at-the-ready if you’re suddenly laid off and find yourself job hunting.
• Consider adding new career marketing documents to your career portfolio, such as an Achievement Summary, Performance Milestones, Leadership Initiatives Brief, Case Studies Profile. Name the document to fit the content.
• Update your LinkedIn and other online profiles.
• Revamp your brand statement to keep it relevant and make it resonate with your new target employers.

I know this is a lot of work to do. You’ll be thankful you’ve done it, if you find yourself suddenly in a job search.

Another major benefit to you. Reminding yourself of your valuable contributions and personal achievements is a HUGE ego boost. Something we all need from time to time.

Related posts:

Bullet-Proof Your Executive Career in the New World of Work

Get Personal With Your Executive Brand Statement

10 Things to Love About Your Executive Brand

(An edited version of this article was originally posted on Quintessential Careers as part of the fourth annual Job Action Day initiative, celebrated this year on November 7.)

Finding a job and staying employed today – two separate challenges – require more effort and strategic planning than ever before.

Maybe you think that finding a job in the digital age means posting your resume to as many job boards as possible, then sitting back and waiting for the interview offers to come flooding in.

If that’s how you spend most of your job search time, you’re setting yourself up for failure, and building a false sense that you’re working hard on finding a job.

The fact is, most jobs are not posted on job boards. The majority of jobs that are filled are not advertised anywhere and not posted on a job board. Yet, most job seekers only pay attention to that small percentage of jobs that are advertised and visible.

Launching a targeted personal marketing campaign, with purposeful networking to uncover the goldmine of “hidden jobs”, and strategically positioning yourself, leads you into the huge pool of unadvertised jobs.

What is the hidden job market?

• Positions created to accommodate specific candidates, once they connected with and spoke with companies’ hiring decision makers.
• Existing positions that open up when an incumbent is replaced with someone better.
• An open position that isn’t advertised outside the company. Only insiders know about it.
• Jobs that, for whatever reason, are not advertised or visible, and can only be uncovered and accessed through networking.

But understanding where to find jobs won’t bullet-proof your career. Understanding how to stay employed will.

Gone are the days, for the most part, when you could expect long term employment (5-7 years or more) with the same company. Employer loyalty rarely exists these days. No job is permanent and everyone should expect to be in perpetual passive job search.

Savvy careerists continuously market themselves, always anticipating job transition. Career situations can change at any time, and everyone must be prepared.

Flexibility is key. Some viable strategies include temp to perm and portfolio careers (multiple part-time jobs or consecutive short term consulting positions, including temporary jobs, freelancing, and self-employment). Creating income security, instead of job security, is the new wave.

As Quintessential Careers’ Randall S. Hansen said:

“Portfolio careers are usually built around a collection of skills and interests, though the only consistent theme is one of career self-management. With a portfolio career you no longer have one job, one employer, but multiple jobs and employers within one or more professions.”

What many job seekers today don’t understand is that staying employed is very much like running a business. You need to think of yourself as the CEO of your own start-up company – BRAND YOU – and continuously market, network and strategically position yourself, just as a business does.

To insure you’re ready for the many inevitable shifts and moves your career is likely to make over your work life, you need to change your approach, whether or not you’re currently facing a job search.

Dive in right now, with this checklist:

1. Define your personal (or career) brand.

Personal branding is a method to uncover and differentiate the personal attributes and hard strengths you possess that outdistance your competition for good-fit jobs with your target industry and employers. Branding is no longer optional. Employers want to see hard skills linked to your softer ones – indicating who you are, what you’re like to work with and how your strengths and expertise will translate to $$$ for them.

I’ve written a 10-step personal branding worksheet that will help you.

2. Get your resume, biography and other career documents together as the foundation for all your personal marketing (or Brand You) communications.

Gone are the days when all you needed to land a job was a one-size-fits-all resume outlining your comprehensive skill sets and qualifications. These days, you need to first have a clear career target so that you can build your career marketing documents around content and messaging that showcase your ROI (Return on Investment) and resonate with a specific audience.

3. Move your Brand You communications online with LinkedIn and other social media.

Being on LinkedIn and having a strong online presence are also not optional. You may not feel comfortable putting yourself out there, but without an online identity, you may be completely invisible to recruiters and hiring decision makers who source and assess candidates through LinkedIn and other search engines. Transform your portfolio of career documents into a LinkedIn profile that’s a magnet for these people.

Beyond LinkedIn, build a diverse online footprint across multiple channels, monitor it regularly for “digital dirt” or incorrect information, and make adjustments when possible. Show that you’re social media savvy by networking through LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others.

4. Keep your network alive . . . always!

A vibrant, far-reaching network is career insurance. Your real-life and social networks need to be ever-primed for you to tap into for new opportunities, introductions and hot leads, and help you penetrate the hidden job market. You need to practice “give to get” networking, being there for your network, so that they’ll be willing to reciprocate.

Put your online and offline brand communications to work in all your networking efforts.

5. Improve or add relevant skills and stay educated.

Job seekers with up-to-date skills are much more attractive than those who haven’t kept up. This means learning industry-relevant skills as well as the new social media skills.

6. Work on developing a back-up or side career.

Think additional income stream to supplement your “real” job and possibly pump up to full-time, if you lose your real job.

A beloved hobby or favorite past time could become a money-maker. Maybe you’re handy around the house and can hire yourself out to help people with their “honey-do” lists, or odd jobs. Maybe you’d go for a part-time job in retail, healthcare, restaurant or business services.

Other options could include teaching or substitute teaching, consulting or contract assignments, and home-based work or telecommuting work that could include technology, sales, office support, bookkeeping, personal services, etc.

Now you’ve done the backend work and you’re ready for the inevitable. When you’re laid off, forced into another job search or choose to transition:

7. Get clear on what kind of job you want, who your good-fit target employers are, what their needs are right now, how you can help them and who their key hiring decision makers are.

8. Work on circumventing the gatekeepers at your target companies and connecting directly with the key hiring decision makers, where they hang out online and offline.

9. Cultivate relationships with several executive recruiters who specialize in your niche.

10. Prepare to brand and “own” your job interviews.

Related posts:

Today’s Executive Job Search Toolkit

How to Build a Powerful Executive Network

LinkedIn Guide for Executive Branding and Job Search

If you think that HAVING a photo on your LinkedIn profile (and elsewhere online) may red-flag you for discrimination – age, weight, ethnic background, etc. – think about this.

NOT having a photo can be a red flag, too.

Discussions persist over whether including your photo can cause people to discriminate against you. My c-level executive clients – typically over 50 years of age – are understandably worried that they’ll suffer from age discrimination. You can minimize the age issue by not including earlier career history in the “Experience” section, but a photo could well show age.

Your reasoning for not including a photo may be that you hesitate “putting yourself out there” so visibly. Although you know that for executive job search and networking, you have to be on LinkedIn, you resisted putting up a profile in the first place.

You didn’t really want to have an online presence at all, but you slapped up a LinkedIn profile because you felt you had no choice. But you feel that adding a photo will make you way too visible online.

You may have good reason not to include a photo, but I encourage you to include one. The benefits far outweigh the pitfalls.

Think about the recruiters and hiring decision makers at your target companies who click through to your LinkedIn profile. The first thing they’ll notice is your photo . . . or lack of one. If you have no photo, their initial thought will likely be “What is this person trying to hide?”

One of the strategies you should be using with your LinkedIn profile is branding yourself to differentiate the qualifications and qualities you possess from your competitors. Branding is also about creating emotional connections.

People connect easier and believe content more when it’s accompanied by the author’s photo. They’re more likely to reach out to someone when they can “see” the person. Your photo helps to personalize and humanize your brand-driven content.

Why NOT having a LinkedIn photo is NOT a good idea:

• You can be perceived as not understanding how to use LinkedIn. It can make you seem out-of-touch with current technology and trends. You can appear to be technically incapable of loading on a photo.
• “Fake” LinkedIn profiles do exist. Those without photos may be perceived as not belonging to real people.
• Lack of a photo keeps your profile from being 100% complete, according to LinkedIn’s criteria. Profiles that ARE 100% complete are more likely to show up higher in search results, giving them an advantage over “incomplete” profiles.
• LinkedIn research indicates that profiles with pictures are seven times as likely to be viewed as those without.

Choose your LinkedIn photo wisely. This is the first thing people are likely to see when they open your LinkedIn profile. Select an appealing photo that strikes the right image and professional tone for your industry and niche.

Remember that your LinkedIn photo isn’t only visible when people click through to your profile. It also shows up with all of your status updates, group discussion comments, contributions to LinkedIn Answers — any of your activity on the site — so make it be a positive reflection of you.

Related posts:

LinkedIn Guide for Executive Branding and Job Search

My free e-book: Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile: How to Transform Your Executive Brand, Resume, and Career Biography Into a Winning LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn: Best Tactic for Undercover Executive Job Search

29 Biggest LinkedIn Mistakes

photo by nan palmero

So many of my c-level executive clients and potential clients are surprised that Twitter is such an integral part of my personal branding and social media marketing efforts, even though it’s wildly popular and stories about its value for business-building and job search abound.

They still think Twitter is a time-drain for people who have nothing better to do than tweet about what they had for lunch, or other trivial matters.

My Twitter ROI was dismal at first when I started tweeting seriously late in 2008, and I thought I was wasting my time. It took about 6 months of tweeting several times every day (except weekends) before I could see that my time spent was gaining traction, and I was beginning to make a mark.

I certainly haven’t been as heavy-duty a tweeter as many others, but I’d say my Twitter schedule is realistic for someone who is actively job seeking. Some say it’s better not to tweet too much anyway, and risk overwhelming your followers.

Because tweeting is micro-blogging, Twitter is a natural complement to my blogging efforts. It fits in perfectly with the kind of marketing that works best for me – spreading my own content across various social media channels, showcasing my writing skill and its value to c-suite job seekers.

It’s all about getting my brand and promise of value noticed by potential clients and those who can lead me to more clients, and getting recognized as an industry thought leader and expert.

The idea is to get on their radar and stay top of mind with them so that, when they have a need for my services or know someone who may, they’ll reach out to me.

Sounds just like job search networking, doesn’t it?

Good networking on Twitter, just as in real-life or through any social media channel, works when you think “give to get” – promote and help others, and they’ll likely reciprocate. I’ve built professional friendships with all kinds of people (other career professionals, executive job seekers, social media experts, entrepreneurs, etc.) with whom I’ve formed alliances.

We’ve become brand evangelists for each other. I support them by retweeting them, tweeting their blog posts, spreading the word about them and referring them to good-fit clients. They’ve reciprocated by referring potential clients to me and sometimes their contacts in the media who are looking for career experts to interview and/or to contribute to their publications.

One of my Twitter strategies is using relevant keyword phrases often, in my retweets and original tweets, and/or adding hashtagged (#) keyword phrases at the end of tweets, if it will still leave room for others to retweet them.

Savvy Twitter users search these phrases for information, products, services, and to find people to follow. Here are some of my recurring keywords:

#C-suite
#PersonalBranding
#JobSearch
#Executive
#SocialMedia
#LinkedIn
#Blogging

Other strategies I use to attract potential clients, colleagues and thought leaders within my niche:

• Using hashtags on my relevant keyword phrases strategically, tweeting with and without them.
• Retweeting people I want to notice me, if they’ve tweeted something relevant and worthy.

And my efforts have paid off:

When I published my executive branding and job search ebook, I knew I could rely on my Twitter network to help promote it.

Many of my blog posts have gone viral, broadcasting my name and business on many other sites. People have referred to and linked to my blog posts on their blogs, helping to build SEO on my sites and bring more visitors … all potential clients or people who can refer potential clients.

About 15-20% of visitors to my blogsite come from Twitter. If I’ve tweeted an especially popular blog post of mine, that number can jump to more than 50%. Those visitors are people who probably otherwise wouldn’t visit my site. Every visitor is a potential client or may know someone who is.

Some clients who found me by Googling relevant keyword phrases, landing them on my blogsites, said they wanted to work with me because of my Twitter and other social media involvement, indicating my expertise in online identity and online reputation management. They watched my ongoing activity in the Twitter stream on my blogsites.

Leading job search experts who found me on Twitter have included me in their lists of approved career services providers.

Your takeaway:

As an executive job seeker, if you build a realistic strategic plan to incorporate Twitter into your search campaign – even as little as 10-15 minutes a day – you’ll get the word out about your unique promise of value to the companies you’re targeting.

Many of them are on Twitter, tweeting opportunities and updates on their products and services, which could alert you to needs of theirs that you can fulfill. Job search experts are on Twitter, tweeting valuable (and free!) information that can help you. They’re all active on Twitter. You should be, too.

Related posts:

Twitter Turbocharges Executive Job Search and Personal Brand Visibility

Twitter Executive Branding Strategy: The Beauty of a Retweet

14 Reasons I Won’t Follow You On Twitter

Twin Twitter Executive Job Search Tips

photo by josh semans