How to Use Powerful Personal Branding for a Perfect Resume

You have just graduated or left your old job. So what next? Obviously creating or updating your resume from scratch comes as the foremost step. But it’s not as easy as it sounds.

You may be employed at your favorite company for years and have not thrown a look at your resume since getting appointed, but it doesn’t mean the structure and presentation of resume hasn’t changed in the market at all.

Before starting to update your resume, you should consider it as a weapon of personal branding that would effectively land top jobs you have always wanted. The point is to use the tips below and build the perfect resume branding that would serve as a nice fit for your intended employers and place you apart from the rest in the job hunting competition.

In this blog post, we are going to discuss how you can use personal branding and build the best resume to sell yourself in the most tempting and appealing manner.

1. Targeting

Before you begin branding yourself and include the content in your resume, you need to clearly identify your target employers—professionals who will be interested in reading your resume. You’ll decide what kind of jobs you are interested in, compile the list of employers you are seeking, acquire insights regarding their existing challenges and needs, and evaluate how your employment can help them achieve their goals.

The point is to align the content in your resume with all the aspects your employers will be wanting from you. A thorough industry research and the details contained in the selected job descriptions will help you catch the right keywords to include in your resume. Go for the most reliable sources, for instance, different companies’ websites and Google search.

2. Personal branding and value addition

Personal branding is no longer a mighty option, rather has become an absolute necessity. Keep in mind, your rival job seekers might be currently using it to differentiate themselves from you in the field. In order to stay abreast of your competitors, you have to do the same thing, only better. Creating and marketing yourself is all about including your skills, strengths, passion, attributes, and qualifications in a manner that tempts your intended employer the most among other resumes at the table.

As you progress in your personal branding, you are creating a powerful brand positioning in the minds of your chosen companies.

3. Explain your career success instances

Rather than using the common phrases and keywords depicting your past achievements, back them with strong examples of how exactly you helped your past employers in cost-saving, crafting new revenue generating operational procedures, enhancing efficiency, etc. Talk with numbers and display what impact your presence had on their overall organizational culture and performance figures.

4. Leave out the objective sentence

Using traditional statements such as, "I’ll prove to be a valuable resource", "seeking challenging opportunities to enhance my career is this field", etc. are a thing of the past. Employers are no more interested in boasting sentences, but rather want to know what you can do for them to register a better team and department performance and why should they consider hiring you.

In short, it’s a misconception that objective statements at top of the resume are ought to throw an impression, in truth it’s a waste of valuable information you could have used for something more explanatory and appealing to the reader.

5. Strategic positioning

What candidates need to understand is that HR personnel are busy people that only permits about 10 to 15 seconds on average to skim through your CV and decide if you can be a good fit for their organization.

The HR professional will go through the resume not farther than the first page. And this is the area where you need to show your best self to impress the professional enough for reading further, or even considering you for the interview without a second thought.

Some potential suggestions for adding a catchy content in the most prominent area of the resume are:

• Start with a strong branding statement that contains your most relevant keywords as well as the best benefits, preferably ROI, you are capable of providing to the selected company.
• Include a potent quote or recommendation provided to you from any past employer.
• Add 2 to 3 short value-centric statements with numbers.

6. Formatting, length, and overall legibility

Bind the fact with your life: any hard and densely populated document is a big no-no from any employer. The digital world has provided us a plethora of options to view documents online, not necessarily your resume will be viewed on the large screen of the office system, but the HR professional might also opt to read some resumes through his/her smartphone.

The point is, add small or bite-sized chunks in your CV that would make it easier for any reader to view and read it cleanly without stressing over to reduce the font size.

The formatting of the content should be clean, appealing, and consistent. Avoid using fancy, unprofessional fonts and more than two different font sizes (one for the content, one for headings). Further avoid underlining text and irrelevant use of graphic lines.

When it comes to length its simple, recent graduates or newcomers in the industry should not exceed their resume over a page, while more experienced professionals having variety of fellowships and memberships in different organizations along with vast qualifications can extend their CV for up to two pages.

Remember, you are not throwing your resume to explain your career history, rather it should be used as a powerful personal branding or marketing tool. The document should present enough information in an aesthetically pleasing manner that will do well to get you an interview call.

7. Grammar and typo errors

The fact does not require further emphasis but it’s better to state as a refresher, bad grammar and typos are one of the biggest blunders a candidate can make. To make the matters worse, improper grammar and other content errors can also convey misinformation to the reader. Never rely too much on Alt+F7, rather proofread and edit your resume as thoroughly and patiently as possible before applying for a job.

8. Avoid overused terms

The purpose of personal branding is to showcase yourself differently from others in the market striving to capture the same position as yours. As for differentiating yourself in the resume, words are all you have at your disposal. Try to keep the content as attractive and engaging as possible and avoid using old-school phrases that can be seen on every other resume, for example, visionary leader, exceptional performer, proven record of success, result-focused professional, etc.

9. Passive verbs

Its time you stop using the same dull and tedious phrases, i.e., "responsible for", and go for creative terms that explain your character and professional attributes in a robust and compelling manner. Try using terms like driven, potent, propel, optimized, streamlined, etc.

10. Recurrent job descriptions

• Professional Experience’ is a very valuable section in a resume, and it is our job to use it wisely. Avoid stuffing the obvious job responsibilities in the section, and use the space to add examples of how and what value you provided to your past workplace, and how that would help in your opted job descriptions.

Final thoughts

The above pointers may seem somewhat too much, especially to inexperienced professionals, but the effort is worth it when it comes to personal branding. Let’s review the purpose of personal branding of building a killer review to land your dream job. Personal branding will help you in displaying yourself as a value proposition to your employers, open up new career opportunities for you, build your self-confidence and self-worth, and elevates your recognition in the industry as well.

Author bio

Irene Prater, a professional blogger who acquires a vast experience in digital marketing and technology industry is well-known to write top articles for students as well as for professionals. Irene is also an avid assignment writing help provider with the aim to provide unparalleled knowledge in a plethora of disciplines.