It’s easy to say that everyone should have an identifiable personal brand, but how can you communicate yours to a potential employer? It’s important to give hiring managers a solid idea of your brand the moment your name crosses their path and, in many cases, that first opportunity is when they are reviewing your resume.
The next time you edit your resume, ask yourself: does this accurately represent the personal brand I’ve built for myself and my career? If the answer is anything other than a very confident “yes,” it may be time to take a look at where your resume can improve.
Here are three tips to more accurately represent your personal brand on your resume:
- Include a summary statement (not an objective). Starting your resume off with a short summary statement is a great way to give the hiring manager a quick snapshot of who you are and what you do. Objective statements are becoming a thing of resume past, so utilize that space (and no more) to describe your brand. Your professional summary should just be a short line or two about you as a professional that highlights your skills and experience. For example, if you’re an executive assistant in financial services and pride yourself on your teamwork and leadership skills, you may write a professional summary like:
“A detail-oriented and highly motivated administrative professional with experience in the financial services sector. Able to take initiative, lead collaborative projects, and work seamlessly with colleagues.”
- Compare your resume to your online presence. This practice has a twofold purpose: making sure everything about your brand is accurately communicated on your resume, and also ensuring your resume doesn’t make any claims that your public brand can’t back up. For example, you may consider yourself to be a great writer, but an employer is going to want to see proof of that. If you don’t have any kind of writing samples online, whether they be blog posts, social media updates, or even a simple professional bio on your LinkedIn, an employer is likely going to wonder where these writing skills are being put to use.
- Show concrete examples and accomplishments. There may be times when your online presence simply doesn’t reflect what you want to say on your resume, and that’s not necessarily a deal breaker. If you have a skill that you think is vital to your brand but that’s difficult to show through social media or an online portfolio, you can show you possess that skill through listing any relevant projects and accomplishments you successfully worked on in the past.
Bonus: If you’re looking to change your brand or career path to something your work history doesn’t quite reflect, emphasize your transferable skills. This applies whether you’re looking to do the same kind of work in a different industry or if you want to overhaul your career altogether: every experience is a learning opportunity, and communicating what you’ve learned and how it can be applied to the position you’re targeting is a great strategy for circumventing an otherwise unrelated work history.