As a top-level executive, now is the time to dive in and begin reviving your job search as the economy revives. With employers creating new positions, you want to take the steps necessary to make sure you stand out.
Clean Up Your Resume
One of the first steps to take when jumping into your executive job search is cleaning up your resume. Hopefully, you’ve made attempts to regularly make updates to it as your career has evolved, but this doesn’t mean that your resume isn’t still a work in progress. There are things you can do to continue to clean it up and make it stronger.
For instance, you could make sure that your job summaries quantify your best results (money made, workers managed, project time frames). In addition, if you’ve done anything in your interim period that could be listed on your resume (created a blog, added a new social networking profile, spoke at an event) these are things that you could mention that could give it more strength.
Strengthen Your Executive Brand
Now’s also the time to make sure that your executive brand is strong and visible. With many years of experience under your belt, you should have a great enough career focus to brand yourself specifically within your industry. Who are you? What are your specialties? What type of leader are you? How many people/businesses have you affected? Who is interested in hearing what you have to say?
All of these questions could be easily answered by getting out in front of people at speaking engagements, become a board member of one or more organizations, developing an online presence through social networking profiles (LinkedIn and Twitter) and blogging, as well as creating a website under your name. You could even try to get yourself interviewed with local newspapers or other publications, while giving yourself a title that will tell the world who you are.
Take Unconfident Language Out of Your Executive Bio / Cover Letter
One major mistake that some job seekers make - even at the executive level - is to showcasing low self-esteem in their paragraph-based documents like executive bios and cover letters. The intention is to not look unconfident, but it occurs anyway through the use of words and phrases like "Hopefully," "I’m just," "I’m only" and "I should." These words not only make you look unconfident, but make you look unprofitable. If you’re not sure of your capabilities, how could an employer feel good about them?
It’s a great time to get back in the swing of things as more employers look for competent and driven executives to lead their companies back to a profitable stage. So take advantage of this period of recovery by making the most of your executive job search.
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By Heather Eagar
