Ready To Tell Your Executive Career Brand Story?

Capturing the attention of people assessing you through your resume, LinkedIn profile, biography, and other personal marketing materials for job search can be a challenge.

Sure, you need to include all the right keywords representing your skill sets and areas of expertise . . . but that’s just to keep pace with your competitors.

How will you catapult your value and good-fit qualities above the crowd, in these often anemic personal marketing materials?

Use the Time-Honored Tradition of Storytelling. Tell Your Career Brand Story.

If you’ve ever listened to a great storyteller, you know how connected it made you feel to the person and what they said.

In job search, storytelling works similarly. Building stories around your skill sets, accomplishments, and good-fit qualities helps attract people to you and differentiates the unique value you offer.

Storytelling helps you make an emotional connection with employers and generate chemistry for yourself as a candidate, compelling hiring decision makers to want to learn more about you by asking for an interview.

Storytelling helps employers get a feel for the kind of person you are and how you make things happen, and envision you contributing on the job.

Start with Targeting and Personal Branding

First, before you can write your resume, LinkedIn profile, biography, and other job search collaterals, you need to know who will be reading these things, so your content will speak directly to that target audience.

Narrow your job search by targeting specific employers, researching their current challenges, and identifying how you can help them right now.

Then define your brand and promise of value to them so your content will resonate with the values, vision, attributes, passions, and driving strengths they’re looking for.

Then Use the C-A-Rs (Challenge – Actions – Results) Strategy

This method of job search storytelling is a good way to start. You’ll showcase a few significant contributions you’ve made to past employers by describing in depth:

The Challenge(s) you faced
What Actions you took
What Results came from your efforts, that benefitted the company

You can take storytelling a few steps further, beyond the metrics-driven accomplishments the C-A-Rs method is designed to elicit.

Move Beyond C-A-Rs to Tell Your Career Brand Story

Here are some questions to prompt career brand stories around your personality and attributes. Use abbreviated versions in your resume, LinkedIn profile, and especially your biography – a vehicle tailor-made for storytelling – and rely on them as you network and interview:

1. What things are you most passionate about doing – in your personal life and work life?

2. What differentiates you from others who do the same work – your competition in the job market? What combination of skills and personal attributes do you have to offer that no one else does?

3. What drove or inspired you to become involved in your field?

4. What 1 or 2 things are you most proud of accomplishing in your career?

5. To what do you attribute your success as a manager or leader (if applicable)?

The above questions focus on just part of the digging-deep work you’ll need to do, to fully tell your career brand story.

My set of 4 proprietary worksheets will take you all the way there.

Get My 4 Proprietary Job Search Worksheets

The worksheets package includes:

Job Search Targeting & Research Worksheet
Personal Branding Worksheet
Career History Worksheet
Biography Worksheet
Numerous resources and DIY tips and strategies to help you land the job you want.