Think Like a Brand: A New Age Approach to Build Your Career
If you had a chance to drop by Career Launch (CCD’s redesigned Resume Critique Night) in early September, you may have noticed the buzz at our Creative Career Branding Table as you waited in line for your resume or LinkedIn Profile to be reviewed by an employer. While tra
ditional resumes and LinkedIn profiles are still the standard, a creative on-line presence is increasingly becoming a differentiator. Our Creative Career Branding table featured real examples from recent alums and current students, including Damanick Dantes‘ economic blog, Rohit Mundra‘s Infographic Resume, as well as Ryan Narod’s, Arjun Bhatnagar’s, and Alexis Ierardi’s personal web-sites. The reaction from many of you: Why haven’t I thought of this before? This makes total sense! This type of branding comes so naturally for our age group — it’s who we are. If we grabbed your attention, check out CCD’s new On-Line Branding content in Career Beam (accessed directly through your student portal) to learn more about social media, video resumes, infographic resumes, web-sites, blogs and more.
Rohit Mundra ’14, Director of Product, Engagement & Marketing at TruWorth Wellness, India’s top on-line wellness company, spends lots of time recruiting designers, marketers, product engineers, and content writers. Time and again, those candidates who can “show not tell” their experiences are the ones who grab his attention. I asked Rohit to share his thoughts with us. And in true form, not only did he write us a guest blog, but he made it come to life through his own infographic! Please enjoy his guest blog and infographic below. Thank you Rohit!
Guest Blog by Rohit Mundra ’14
Did you know that our attention span is now even shorter than that of a goldfish? This means that if we are concentrating on a certain task, we will have a wave of distraction every 8 seconds. Of course, you can choose not to get distracted by it – but in every 8 seconds we will have a chance to get distracted by something around us. Thanks to our big screen smartphones and easily accessible internet, we have wide variety of content available to us right on our finger tips. We’re not even consciously aware of this but we now make decisions within 3 to 5 seconds based on first impressions.
Now imagine the average attention span of a recruiter who gets flooded with hundreds of resumes and cover letters everyday. Having a standard one-page resume is great – if you can summarize all your achievements and career aspirations in just one page. However, think about how all your peers and competitors have the exact same resume too. The content of your resume might be 10x better than any other resume but it will certainly get lost in the pile of other similar looking resumes – simply because it couldn’t hold the attention span of the recruiter for more than 3 seconds.
I spent a lot of time in the last year interviewing designers, marketers, product engineers, and content writers. I always paid attention to just one thing – how serious they are about their personal development. Most of the candidates simply came in with a portfolio of previous works that just described what all they achieved in their professional life. They all were great candidates but the ones who made an impression on me were completely different. They were free thinkers, who had their own personal website, blog, online portfolio, active social media profiles, and a single coherent message that tied everything together. These are all assets that help in developing a strong web presence, which is really important in today’s world where we spend most of our time online. In the digital world, we need to think of ourselves as brands instead of people.
My advice to all the future job seekers would be that even before you start searching for jobs you need to figure out what skill are you good at? And most importantly, does performing that skill on a daily basis make you happy? Once you’ve find the answer to these two pointers then you will have a single coherent message and skill on which you can then build your personal brand. I’ve always loved presenting with the help of visuals so here’s one that I specially made to help you brand yourself.
For any questions or comments, email me on rmundra1@babson.edu. I’ll be happy to help you out.