Archive for Your Career
Boomer Job Interview: Making a Good Visual Impression
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Not the author!
As the saying goes, “You have only one chance to make a good impression.” Nowhere is this truer than in the interview. 80% of interviewers say that within the first few seconds after a candidate walks into a room, they’ve made up their minds. Obviously, the visual component in making a good impression is huge. If a candidate’s clothing and grooming are at variance with interviewers’ expectations, it creates visual dissonance and discontinuity that makes interviewers uncomfortable. When interviewers are made uneasy, the ”offending” interviewee is more likely to be rejected. Fair or not, it’s the way things are.
This fact underscores the importance of a candidate’s attire and overall appearance. Given the highly competitive nature of today’s job market, why is it that many boomer job candidates wear clothes and hair styles that brand them as outmoded? In part, it’s because a large number of age 50+ job seekers have not had to look for employment in a long time and settled somewhat comfortably into a state of complacency about how they appear to others. Time to confront reality.
Take pleated pants AKA ”the Dockers look.” This is an equal opportunity fashion faux pas making both men and women look 15 lbs. heavier than they are. Wearing flat-front pants addresses this problem.
Hair care is another area where many boomer candidates fall down. Wearing a hairstyle that is compatible with your shape of your face is essential. Click here for a good resource to help you analyze your face and select the right cut for you. After you’ve done your analysis, share it with your current hairstylist. If your hair care professional is unresponsive or dismissive, it may be time for a change in your stylist.
LinkedIn Profile vs. Resume
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High Profile
The LinkedIn profile has emerged as at least the equal of the time honored resume or CV. Some even contend that it has surpassed the resume at the tool for job seekers (both passive and active) wanting to project their qualifications. The profile is unparalleled as a candidate screening tool used by recruiters and employers.
Back in the day, the resume was the principal means of communicating and assessing qualifications in terms of experience and accomplishements to prospective employers. Boomers will remember getting their resumes type set on high rag-content paper in order to enhance their personal brands and gain a competitive edge. But doing resumes that way made revisions difficult and expensive. Enter the word processor and the next evolutionary step, the electronic resume, packed with keywords for use on job boards. Then the biggest transformative change of all, the LinkedIn profile.
The LinkedIn profile has been called “resume of the 21st Century.” According to Wikipedia, there are over 65 million registered LinkedIn users which, of course, explains its ascendency with job seekers and employers alike.
Will it totally eclipse the resume? Yes and no. LinkedIn with its profile and other tools will grow and evolve, offering enhanced features and functionality that complement the resume and CV. The resume will remain the core source document used as a basis for creating the LinkedIn profile and key component in a dynamic career portfolio that should include SlideShare presentations, blog posts and other evidence of professional competency.
Your eReputation Development Project
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Grow Your Professional Brand
Enhancing your eReputation is critical to establishing your credibility as a serious professional. Here’s a project plan for building your professional brand. Whether you’re currently employed or actively pursuing a job search, establishing and maintaining an effective eReputation is critical to your success.
In my last post, Your eReputation: Take the Test, I provided you with a quick way to determine the strength of your eReputation and based on critical elements related to building your online brand. If you haven’t taken the test, please do so now and save your results. The following recommendations use these test results as the foundation for developing a strategy and tactics for moving forward.
If you scored between 0 and 3, you have a low or almost non-existent ranking in Google and an invisible presence in social networks. Note: you also earn a low score if your visible but your presence is full of digital dirt. You need to embark on an energetic program to establish a positive online presence.
If you scored between 4 and 6, you have detectable presence, but it is undeveloped with incomplete profiles on social networking sites or, perhaps, you’ve neglected to exploit search engine optimization options.
If you scored between 7 and 8, you’ve been doing a great job. Congratulations! But don’t rest on your laurels. Keep at it and refresh your content on a regular basis so that you stay on top.
Building your eReputation is best approached as a project where you break down major project elements into manageable milestones and tasks. Keep in mind the fact that you can’t build a positive eReputation overnight. It takes time and effort but the results are more that worth it! Here’s an eReputation project plan outline that should help you plan and implement your own eReputation development project over six months:
Months 1 – 3:
- Search for an clean-up digital dirt
- Secure your personal domain name
- Get a personal web site
- Get a LinkedIn and Twitter account
- Claim your vanity name in social networking accounts
- Start a blog
Months 3-6
- Build out your profiles in social networks
- Automate content publishing
- Tweak SEO (search engine optimization) for visibility in Google, etc.
- Monitor your progress in Google, set up Google Alerts
Getting Started Quick Tip: Claim your personal domain name today!
Go to GoDaddy or another Internet domain registrar and get your personal domain name for less than $10 per year. For example, my personal domain name is kitjeffrey.com and the form is firstname, lastname, .com. If yours is unavailable, find a variant such as firstname, middlename, last name.
