Resume Fundamentals For Senior Executives

iStock | tadamichi

Executives require a bit of a different approach to building an effective resume than other job seekers. It’s lonely at the top because, in comparison to other jobs, there are far fewer C-suite job opportunities in what could be accurately described as a hyper-competitive environment for those positions.

Like every other job, however, when a company, or board of directors, launches a search for a CEO or some other top executive the first thing they ask for is a resume. Even if you plan to hire a professional to write your resume, an understanding of the essential elements will help you communicate your expectations and enable you to properly evaluate the final draft.

Bear in mind – other candidates for the jobs you’re seeking are often just as impressive as you, also career senior executives with laundry lists of achievements. How you communicate your achievements may be the difference in your job search, so the first thing to understand is an effective executive’s resume tells a story about who you are and what you can contribute to a company.

• What is your superpower? There are many types of executives with many types of specialties, but they all set a vision for an organization and move it toward that vision. Are you an expert in launching new companies? Increasing the value of an existing firm? Can you turn around troubled companies around? Or in guiding stable ones into new areas. It’s important to know what kind of executive are you, and where in the lifecycle of a company you deliver the biggest bang for the buck – this is your through line and should run from the header on down.

• Where do you come from? There are many types of organizations. Privately held. Publicly traded. Venture capital. Private equity. Government. Education. Research. Non-profit. Each is a distinctly different environment with its own relevant ownership structure, investor relations, and compliance requirements, and being able to thrive in one setting doesn’t necessarily mean you will be talented at the other. Setting a strategic vision for a tech start-up is different than taking your successful family business public. Who you are is intertwined with the world where you learned your chops.

• What is the essence of your leadership style? There are many types of leaders. Servant-leaders. Thought leaders. Strategic. Transactional. Transformational. Solution-based. Autocratic. Are you giving TED talks or quietly working behind the scenes? According to Robert Smith, your leadership style is, “your approach to leading and interacting with others,” and “is composed of four key elements: theory, attitude, guiding principles, and behavior.” Just like your identity, your leadership style should be embedded in your work history.

• Can you sell and deliver against your vision? Regardless of your specialty, your type of organization, or your leadership style, when you’re in the C-suite you should be engaged in high-level long-term strategic thinking. That’s what a vision is - but anybody can have a vision. The ability to turn a vision into reality is what separates a manager from a senior executive. For example, let’s say you were hired to be the CEO of a small regional business that wants to move into new markets. Your vision is to create a national footprint through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Your resume should focus on how you set this vision, and then worked through your organization to guide it from concept to reality. Details matter, of course, but an effective C-level leader motivates his crew to achieve, without getting too stuck in the weeds.

• Do you have other credentials that can put you over the top? Just like any other resume, you will list your school(s) and related degrees. In addition, include any type of executive or leadership training, certifications, and relevant professional organizations. Yes, leaning on prestigious school names and program rankings helps.

• Be mindful of your tone. It’s the management team YOU put into place and countless employees that YOU are responsible for guiding to a successful outcome. There is a fine line between what you did and what you were able to get your company to do. Take credit for what you were able to get your company to do, but absolutely share that credit as appropriate. 

•  Use power language and metrics. Active verbs (i.e., orchestrate, direct, vision, pioneer, innovate, etc…) in your resume illustrate the difference between a photo of a bivouacked army and one charging into battle. Use language to affirm your level and experience and back it up with hard numbers of top-line and bottom-line business results you were able to deliver, in addition to the culture and “softer” initiatives you’ve effected.

---

Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

I Got the Job – Now What? Make a Splash In The First Year Of Your New Job

iStock | amriphoto

You got the job, which means you are on the cusp of a new, and hopefully, long-term relationship. Education, experience, intelligence, and hard work got you through the door, but now it’s a brand-new game with uncharted pathways to success.

To thrive, you must navigate and master your new employer’s corporate culture, office politics, cross-functional organization dynamics, talent management, and the ability to influence people. An acclimation period is to be expected, so prior planning reduces the length and uncertainty of the learning curve.

To help you ease into your new job, break down your orientation into three areas:

1.     Get to Know Your Employer

2.     Talent Management

3.     Learn to Influence

Get to Know Your New Employer

Organizations are more complex than ever. Org charts and subsequent workflows, responsibilities, and key performance indicators have changed over the past 40 years.

There are diverse internal and external stakeholders, constantly evolving reporting structures, traditional work hierarchies working in collaboration with specialized outside consultants, and project-based workgroups – just to name a few possible features of your new job.

Throw in work-from-home or hybrid work models, virtual meetings with participants scattered around the world, and the novel pressures of corporate responsibility (think Disney in Florida), and it is easy to visualize a new job as a labyrinth that is equal parts opportunity and dead ends.

During your interview process, you never saw past the entrance to the maze. Here is a checklist that can be the ball of string that helps you move through the labyrinth.

·      Learn the organization. On day one request an org chart. If there isn’t one available, make your own.

·      Introduce yourself to your manager(s). Yes, you may have met your manager, or managers, during the interview process. However, they are busy and they barely know you. Take the first step.

·      Introduce yourself to clients/customers. Once again, take the initiative. Be your friendliest and most helpful self and get them on Team You.

·      Understand your job scope. Ask as many questions as you need to get a thorough understanding of what is expected of you. Understand the administrative processes involved to successfully do your job. At the same time, know where your responsibilities end and others begin. Don’t be blindly aggressive or you may start a turf war you will lose.

Talent Management

The good news is that YOU are the talent! The bad news is that you’re being watched and evaluated. The other good news is you can influence the process to your advantage. The bad news is that it is a lot of work that you, and you alone, must do.

So, what is talent management? It’s ongoing reviews and performance appraisals. Every business has its way of evaluating its employees. Speak to your immediate supervisor about the process and be proactive:

·      Align performance expectations and document them.

·      Keep your manager informed.

·      Demonstrate independence in action and thought.

·      Identify and adopt modeled behaviors.

·      Track your wins, challenges, and metrics.

·      Want additional challenges? Ask for more.

·      Put in place an individual development plan.

·      Know that you’re not just being evaluated by your manager.

Learn to Influence

What is influence? The Merriam-Webster definition is “(n): 1. the power or capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways. 2. The act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command.”

The knee-jerk corporate definition is getting what you want. The more enlightened definition is to work both inside and outside organizational structures to get the job done. Influencing is not individual behavior. It’s a toolbox and mindset, and career progress and success are increasingly reliant upon it.

Do not confuse influence with:

·      Bossing (command & control)

·      Requesting

·      Asking

·      Begging

·      Cajoling

We’ve all been there – people with less experience, who do less, somehow advance, but workhorses who make everything happen are passed over. That’s because you’re not the only one in the labyrinth. There are trails of string everywhere and together they make a web of relationships with a common goal – to find the exit and fly toward the sun (don’t get too close!). Consider the following when you think about the elements required to achieve your professional goals:

·      Emotional intelligence/people agility gets rewarded.

·      Technical expertise alone is not always the ticket to advancement

·      Learn to project manage. Bonus tip: project management is a combination of intelligence and three-dimensional thinking. Project Management does not necessarily require training (but it doesn’t hurt) or fancy software (but it doesn’t hurt). The Great Pyramids, which have lasted 5000 years, were not designed or built by anyone with PMI certification or using MS Project.

·      Be an active contributor

·      Build effective partnerships.

·      Offer alternative solutions.

·      Don’t miss the opportunity to “own” pieces of the business.

·      Know when to lead and when to follow. When to give. When to take. You got to know when to hold ‘em. Know when to fold ‘em. Know when to walk away. And know when to run.

---

Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

We're All Replaceable – Are You Ready?

iStockphoto.com | nytumbleweeds

I once read an opinion piece in the New York Times by Dan Lyons, who worked at a software company where involuntary turnover (i.e., getting fired or laid off) was the norm. The fact that you could be fired on any day, for any reason, was routine.

Rough and tumble corporate cultures are nothing new. And while not every company is a meat grinder, the truth is that deliberately tough work environments do exist, and employers aren't necessarily selling themselves as best-in-class places to work. They demand results. The social contract is simple enough: We give you a paycheck, and you work in the environment we choose to foster.

Websites like Glassdoor will show you reviews of companies' work environments by former and current employees. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that this increased level of transparency has led some companies to embrace the fact that working there isn't going to be a Shangri-La. It's kind of freeing for executive leadership, in a way - if people know you're not too worried about employee engagement, you can focus that energy on simply producing results.

Going back to the opinion piece mentioned at the beginning of this post, the detail that really caught my attention was that Lyons' employer evaluated employees in their appraisals with a metric called VORP - Value Over a Replacement Player. This is a baseball statistic that general managers use to decide when to trade or cut players. In other words, if there's a second baseman on the market who can do the same job for less, or deliver better stats at the same rate of pay, the GM has data that can support making a personnel change at moment’s notice.

This, according to the article, is transparent to employees, they can tell immediately how much the organization values them. What's scary about this is that Major League Baseball is a truly elite work environment - at any given time, there's only 750 positions available at the highest level. And these players are paid elite money to deal with this uncertainty - and to reward them for the level of performance they are expected to deliver.

The average MLB player knows the odds - there are hundreds of thousands of people competing for his job. And his career averages 5.6 years in length. Longevity isn't necessarily part of the equation.

But the fact that this practice has entered the mainstream should serve as a wake-up call to employees. We are all replaceable. There is always somebody ready to come along and do our job.

How can you prepare?

• Be self-aware. Are your skills up to date? How about your soft skills, do you get along well with others? Your employer and coworkers are very aware of your strengths and weaknesses, and you should be, too. If you realize you're lacking in a certain area, work on developing your skill set. It's worth it.
  

• Know where you stand. Have regular touch-bases with your manager. Engage in open dialogue about your performance and expectations. Make sure you're both aligned, and you know what is believed to be a personal strength or development area.
  

• Keep your resume and your LinkedIn profile current. Change may come faster than you anticipate, and not necessarily on your terms. You need to be ready in case opportunity knocks.
  

• Always be networking. The worst time to start building up your connections is when you need a job. Have your network in place and give it some TLC. Pay it forward - help people in your network when you're in a position to do so, so that others have a reason to give you a solid. Be nice to people – it pays dividends.

---

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, and career coaching services, including a free resume review. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercareerstrategies.com.