In an increasingly challenging job market, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Whether you’re navigating your current role (from the C-suite on down) or pursuing your next opportunity, self-marketing in your career is no longer optional—it’s essential.
Here are three high-impact ways to do it.
When helping clients optimize their resumes or LinkedIn profiles, I often use AI prompts to refine the content. Here are seven prompts to create stand-out content so you get more interviews, plus one that you shouldn’t use. Note: some of the prompts are long, as you get better results with specificity. Also, my go-to AI chatbot is usually ChatGPT (free unless you use it excessively), but feel free to experiment with others.
The Thanksgiving-to-New Year period is a great time to set yourself up for a quick job search in the new year. Yes, hiring slows down at many organizations, and many executives take time off, so you’ll see fewer interviews and job offers. BUT those in the office have more time to read your email and speak with you. So, if you’re thinking of making a career move internally or externally, take the opportunity now to get on the radar of leaders who will be making hiring decisions in early 2026.
If you’re getting interviews, open to board roles, or building relationships for your business, you’ll want a resonant, keyword-rich presence on LinkedIn.
And yet, too many professionals—from the C-suite on down—leave their profiles mostly blank or filled with generic summaries that don’t resonate.
Why? Because everyone else’s profile looks that way too.
But here’s the problem: You’re invisible to those who could be offering you opportunities. Recruiters, search firms, and many hiring leaders use LinkedIn as their first stop in finding talent. Many prospects, business partners, and investors search their LinkedIn networks as well.
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,
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.
Perhaps you’ve experienced the disappointment of carefully crafting an email or cover letter asking for a meeting only to get no response or turned down. In fact, all too often these messages are not even read, because the email subject line or the content doesn’t resonate or the message is too densely worded. Clients who have applied the following nine rules, however, have seen big improvements in their email response rates.
How to Get More Interviews with Fewer Meetings
by Robert Hellmann • Resume, LinkedIn, self-promo
You’re putting in the hours – Zooms, Coffees, Handshakes – and yet your calendar is full of meetings that have gone nowhere. Weeks pass with no interviews and a growing sense that your effort isn’t getting results.
The issue isn’t that you’re not networking enough; it’s that your strategy needs adjusting. These three fixes will ensure you land more interviews while optimizing valuable job search time.