Great LinkedIn profiles and resumes have a lot in common, including highly targeted, keyword-rich and concise content, accomplishment-oriented bullets and a powerful summary section. Because of these similarities, copying your resume content right into your LinkedIn profile is often a good idea. Yet in some situations you’ll want to take a different approach to your profile.
If you’re concerned about how a resume gap will be perceived by employers, here’s some good news: you can usually reduce or eliminate the harm it can cause your job search. Plus, in many cases, the gap will not be viewed as a big deal to begin with. How much of a problem the gap poses depends on:
If you’re a candidate for C-suite, Partner, or Board roles, you’ll be asked for a bio as part of the process. For some roles reporting to the C-suite, you may need a bio as well. Employers evaluating your candidacy want to see how your career story will look to prospective investors, clients, and employees when shared publicly. For more junior roles, a bio is usually not worth prioritizing, except when your story is especially unusual or compelling.
To create a resonant bio,
Informational meetings with network contacts can either be time wasters or unlock doors to great job opportunities; it all depends on your approach. First, be sure to meet with the right people: those who can refer you, hire you, or provide valuable advice. Then, carefully manage and script the meetings to serve your goal, which is to get another career-advancing meeting or interview. Use the steps below to tightly manage your meeting agenda.
For those over 50 and gainfully employed, this study says you have a 56% chance that you’ll be let go before you’re ready to retire, risking substantial income loss. The study supports my own observations via client work that there is no real job security, only “career security.” In a sense employees are really all consultants.
But not to worry! Here’s a list of things you can do to both minimize the risk of an unwanted departure and set yourself up for a quick, positive transition if necessary.
Many jobseekers are too quick to write-off opportunities if they experience radio silence after an interview. A typical example: “My last interview was three weeks ago and I haven’t heard anything, I guess they’re not interested” (this jobseeker actually ended up receiving an offer). You can both avoid having to guess their intentions and improve your odds of landing an offer by taking the following steps.
Once you receive a job offer, all the negotiating leverage switches from the employer to you. They are no longer thinking about hiring anyone else, they’re now focused on getting you in the role. The result: items that weren’t negotiable before the offer are now suddenly negotiable. Use this new leverage and the following guidelines to make thousands in minutes.
LinkedIn’s “Advanced People Search” feature is a fantastic tool for finding people in your extended network or shared groups who can help you to reach your career goals. Including boolean logic in your search terms such as AND, OR, NOT, parenthesis and quotes around phrases can greatly expand its power. To demonstrate, here’s an example of a client who was interested in obtaining a VP of Marketing position at Pfizer.
If you’re struggling with a big career decision, your underlying challenge likely involves either: a) properly evaluating the risk associated with a specific action, b) identifying and narrowing down a long list of options, or c) choosing between two or three good options.
While each of these challenges requires a different approach to get to the best decision, they all share the same first step: offloading the decision-making criteria in your brain onto a spreadsheet or sheet of paper, to ensure you’ve captured and accurately weighed them all.
The following techniques will help you to choose the best option when facing any of the scenarios described above.
How to Use Seasonal Slowdowns to Advance Your Career
by Robert Hellmann • Career Change, Getting Interviews, Job-Search Strategy, On-the-job Success