If you're an executive, your résumé can be a marketing vehicle of immense consequence, but only if it's managed effectively. That means it must convey your career story accurately and compellingly, and must be delivered into the right headhunter's hands at the right time.
But don't be alarmed if it's been a while since you last updated your résumé. Whether you've already taken a headhunter's call or are hoping to be referred to one, what matters is that you have an accurate record of your employment history and professional accomplishments from which to create your new résumé. (Of course, that requires that you to do some record-keeping along the way so you can put together a résumé fairly easily and quickly when called upon to do so.)
Before you start writing (if you're lucky, an enterprising headhunter has offered to write it for you and merely wants you to answer his questions), think about what you're trying to achieve. Where exactly do you want to go next? What kind of senior-management position will most effectively leverage your education, experience, skills, and leadership abilities? And what do you believe you're really capable of doing?
Be Straightforward and Honest
Once you've answered these and other end-game questions to your own satisfaction, you can begin to craft a compelling résumé that communicates your experience and smarts in a way that may appeal to the executive headhunter.
Having a good grasp of the general direction you'd like to see your career move in is essential, not only to help identify the recruiter(s) who might plug you into the best opportunities but also to differentiate yours from the dozens of résumé your target headhunter(s) already has on hand. The best way to identify those targets is to ask trusted friends, colleagues, and other confidants who may have already built relationships with key headhunters or who may know the most influential among them.
Despite your considerable accomplishments and the insertion of some catchy action words to highlight results that you've helped deliver, your new résumé may strike you as being rather homogenous. Don't worry if that's the case. Even the most polished, professional résumé can't convey the full fabric and substance of your leadership experience. What it can and should do is package your unique story in a way that is easy to read, appealing in tone, and truly reflects what you've already done. At this stage of your interaction with a headhunter it's most important to prepare a straightforward, honest, and chronological retelling of where you've been, what you've done, and how you see your new career objective.
You want to make it easy for the reader to single out your most critical experiences and responsibilities in a way that mirrors and reinforces the two or three key elevator speech messages that you—or someone you know—used to get the headhunter's attention. Here are some tips to make your résumé and cover letter as appealing as possible:
COVER LETTER: This is the audition that will determine whether the headhunter adds your name either to a short-list of leading candidates for a current or future search or decides not to take the relationship further. Points awarded for clarity and brevity. It should never exceed one page. Be sure to accommodate ample white space as opposed to cramming too much text into your cover letter.
RÈSUMÈ: Put your experience first, in reverse chronological order so the headhunter can easily reconstruct your most recent career moves and understand the choices that guided your ascent into senior management.
•Focus on the results you've delivered. But don't stretch or oversell. Keep it accurate and honest, or pay the consequences at a later date.
•Keep it to two pages in Microsoft (MSFT) Word or Adobe Acrobat PDF format.
•Avoid the temptation to distribute your new executive résumé to a broader audience than the headhunter who is now courting you as a candidate. Don't post your executive résumé on a public Web site or database. Once it's out there, you lose control over it. Even though many of the sites and databases have safeguards against your current employer seeing your résumé, information spreads fast in today's networked world.
•Do not send it unsolicited to other headhunters. If you're lucky, anyone you send it to unsolicited won't even read it. But if they do, you've risked exposing yourself as an active job seeker, one who will be assumed, perhaps unfairly, to be in some kind of career peril.
Your résumé is your calling card, your first impression. Take care that it makes a positive first impression thanks to attention to detail, an honest and straightforward accounting of your experience, careful handling, and a measure of discretion with regard to message, style, and audience.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
Think again the next time before you your post personal data online
Perspective
Imagine a day when a contentious topic of a Supreme Court nominee hearing is the content of the candidate's resurrected MySpace page, Flickr account and your blog from your college days? Or the log of phone calls and Web searches you made in the previous year? Or a posted list of purchases made for a christmas party?
These aren't futuristic imaginative thinking. They are timely, important questions that relate to your very personal corner on the Internet. Or, as Sun Microsystems put it, the "network of you".
Many as forsaken or pure innocent ignorance from thinking about how to best safeguard and respect the many million networks of you that interconnect with millions others users like you.
We gain significantly more economic and social benefits from increased participation on the network than digital isolationism.
In order to enjoy the benefits of participation and avoid isolation on the network, we need a renewed effort by industry, policymakers and individual users to prevent an unprecedented breach of data privacy that would shake consumer confidence and create crisis.
With more than a billion users on the Internet now, and with another 500 million users expected to come online by 2010, individuals are creating a massive boom in data.
Do the math. Think about how much e-mail, photos, videos, music, and personal thoughts you stored online 10 years ago. Now think about how much you put online now and will, a decade from now. It's a whole lot and a whole lot more.
On average, one person generates 850 megabytes of data a year. And, by 2010, individuals will create about probably 70 percent of the world's digital data,
Yet, while consumers are creating massive amounts of data, by 2010, businesses, governments and other organizations will be responsible for the security and privacy of 85 percent of this information.
That information represents not only power for those entities, but also a new currency. The big public and private players in IT, search, retail, healthcare, insurance and content sharing are running the equivalent of an information World Bank.
Unfortunately, despite the tremendous personal and financial value of the information in huge databases, we're still operating in an environment where a $40 savings account is more institutionally protected against misuse, fraud and theft than $40 billion worth of digital records.
To solve this problem, we need to develop transparent, open controls that are appropriate to specific types of information and that create respect between organizations and individuals.
Here are the first steps:
• Harmonize regulations.
Many of these current and proposed rules are in conflict with each other, as lawmakers try to balance mandated retention of data with a desire to protect consumer privacy.
We need to work toward synching local rules with international standards, and we need to nurture other economies that are struggling to set up their own legislative privacy schema. A mishmash of rules creates complexities and unpredictability that open opportunities for criminals.
• Build privacy into products and services and gain competitive advantage.
There is a fundamental need for privacy to be built into systems to protect personal data. Where we must retrofit existing technology architectures and individual systems, we must--but this approach comes with its own set of risks.
Indeed, as it is now becoming the norm to consider energy efficiencies when creating products, so should it be to consider privacy from the start of the development process and throughout a product lifecycle.
Businesses that integrate strong, transparent privacy controls into their systems will gain competitive advantage over those that don't.
• Consider privacy part of good corporate governance.
Technologies that help protect confidentiality, control access to data, and enforce enterprise data management policies are enablers for privacy, but they don't address the decision making around how personal information will be used by the organization.
Organizations must carefully consider what data to keep, who can access it and how third-parties can audit the effectiveness of their data management efforts. With a transparent privacy policy in place, a company incurs much less risk and is more attractive to investors and customers.
Companies that manage significant amounts of data tied to individuals should appoint a chief privacy officer with senior-level power, access and accountability.
Yet, despite all the things that policymakers and corporations can do to make the Web a more secure place for your private information, everyone with a network of you has to take personal ownership of his or her small, but growing, space on the Internet.
Before you post that hilarious vacation picture for everyone to see, think about whether it could come back to haunt you years later when you are trying to ascend to the highest court in the land.
Imagine a day when a contentious topic of a Supreme Court nominee hearing is the content of the candidate's resurrected MySpace page, Flickr account and your blog from your college days? Or the log of phone calls and Web searches you made in the previous year? Or a posted list of purchases made for a christmas party?
These aren't futuristic imaginative thinking. They are timely, important questions that relate to your very personal corner on the Internet. Or, as Sun Microsystems put it, the "network of you".
Many as forsaken or pure innocent ignorance from thinking about how to best safeguard and respect the many million networks of you that interconnect with millions others users like you.
We gain significantly more economic and social benefits from increased participation on the network than digital isolationism.
In order to enjoy the benefits of participation and avoid isolation on the network, we need a renewed effort by industry, policymakers and individual users to prevent an unprecedented breach of data privacy that would shake consumer confidence and create crisis.
With more than a billion users on the Internet now, and with another 500 million users expected to come online by 2010, individuals are creating a massive boom in data.
Do the math. Think about how much e-mail, photos, videos, music, and personal thoughts you stored online 10 years ago. Now think about how much you put online now and will, a decade from now. It's a whole lot and a whole lot more.
On average, one person generates 850 megabytes of data a year. And, by 2010, individuals will create about probably 70 percent of the world's digital data,
Yet, while consumers are creating massive amounts of data, by 2010, businesses, governments and other organizations will be responsible for the security and privacy of 85 percent of this information.
That information represents not only power for those entities, but also a new currency. The big public and private players in IT, search, retail, healthcare, insurance and content sharing are running the equivalent of an information World Bank.
Unfortunately, despite the tremendous personal and financial value of the information in huge databases, we're still operating in an environment where a $40 savings account is more institutionally protected against misuse, fraud and theft than $40 billion worth of digital records.
To solve this problem, we need to develop transparent, open controls that are appropriate to specific types of information and that create respect between organizations and individuals.
Here are the first steps:
• Harmonize regulations.
Many of these current and proposed rules are in conflict with each other, as lawmakers try to balance mandated retention of data with a desire to protect consumer privacy.
We need to work toward synching local rules with international standards, and we need to nurture other economies that are struggling to set up their own legislative privacy schema. A mishmash of rules creates complexities and unpredictability that open opportunities for criminals.
• Build privacy into products and services and gain competitive advantage.
There is a fundamental need for privacy to be built into systems to protect personal data. Where we must retrofit existing technology architectures and individual systems, we must--but this approach comes with its own set of risks.
Indeed, as it is now becoming the norm to consider energy efficiencies when creating products, so should it be to consider privacy from the start of the development process and throughout a product lifecycle.
Businesses that integrate strong, transparent privacy controls into their systems will gain competitive advantage over those that don't.
• Consider privacy part of good corporate governance.
Technologies that help protect confidentiality, control access to data, and enforce enterprise data management policies are enablers for privacy, but they don't address the decision making around how personal information will be used by the organization.
Organizations must carefully consider what data to keep, who can access it and how third-parties can audit the effectiveness of their data management efforts. With a transparent privacy policy in place, a company incurs much less risk and is more attractive to investors and customers.
Companies that manage significant amounts of data tied to individuals should appoint a chief privacy officer with senior-level power, access and accountability.
Yet, despite all the things that policymakers and corporations can do to make the Web a more secure place for your private information, everyone with a network of you has to take personal ownership of his or her small, but growing, space on the Internet.
Before you post that hilarious vacation picture for everyone to see, think about whether it could come back to haunt you years later when you are trying to ascend to the highest court in the land.
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