The importance of the personal story was perfectly illustrated to me last week when I was approached by a friend asking for help in getting back in the job market. She had a resume and a LinkedIn profile – fulfilling the absolute minimum requirements for any job seeker – but had no idea how to jump start her search.

Initially, she wanted my help pursuing a senior development position with a local non-profit and asked for some help modifying her resume to make her more attractive to the organization’s director. However, a quick perusal of her resume convinced me that no amount of creative writing could transform her background in the hauling industry and real estate management into anything remotely appropriate for the opening she wanted to pursue.

Not wanting to dash her hopes upon the jagged rocks of reality, I sat down with her to discuss her previous work experience and asked her to recount some of her most distinctive, enjoyable and memorable moments from her previous jobs. Initially, she started to recount the tasks she performed in each of her previous positions, but I told her to put the resume aside and just tell me stories that stood out in her mind.

She described the day she was hired at the hauling company, interviewed in a dank interior office, lit by a single bulb and crammed from floor to ceiling with paper. Unopened envelopes, bills, unsent invoices, even checks, piled on every surface and jutting out of every cabinet and every drawer. The office resembled a scene from Hoarders and presented a challenge to my friend. She offered to get the entire office and business organized and running efficiently and was hired on the spot.

She then spent weeks opening every envelope, sorting payables from receivables, meeting with bankers to discuss how the company would work with the bank from that day forward, met with the accountant to clarify how the books should be kept, contacted all the clients to resolve billing issues and personally handled all client service calls. She took over the business and made it run. And she loved doing it. She faced a herculean task that would have driven me into one of the cluttered corners, whimpering in the fetal position and dove into the project headlong.

I love her story. And she had others. How she expanded their client base from 65 clients to over 3000 by herself. And how she handled all client service calls and built enduring relationships because her clients never called their hauling company, they called Paula. She became the face and voice of the company and turbocharged its growth.

Once I heard those stories, I didn’t care what accounting program she used, or how they processed payroll. I simply trusted that she could face a task – no matter how complex – dive in and get it done. And I appreciate it more because she excels at the things that I avoid. And I know dozens of business executives like me who desperately need someone who can organize their business and keep it running smoothly day to day. Is there a title for that? I don’t know. But I know there’s a story to tell that will let Paula put whatever title she wants on her business card.

So, what are your stories? The ones that are so memorable you still remember the tiniest details? They don’t have to be your greatest successes, either. Frequently they result in failures that taught you permanent lessons. As long as they continue to inspire you, they’ll inspire your listener. So jot them down. They’ll separate you from every other job seeker who focuses on their tasks without sharing the technicolor details of their real accomplishments.

Alec’s approach was so simple and so direct, that it will undoubtedly be copied frequently by other job seekers. And why not? It was imaginative, it was unique and it worked. No reason others shouldn’t push the same envelopes in their job search endeavors as well and take full ownership of their personal brand and determine precisely how it’s presented.

For those imaginative small business owners, you can do the exact same thing when preparing to meet with a client who needs SEO or social media services. Buy the Google adwords for their company name a few days ahead of your meeting. Then, during your pitch, ask them to Google themselves and see your pitch for their precise needs at the top of the page. They’ll wonder how you got the top position, they’ll be impressed that you know how to manipulate the page rankings and you’ll have demonstrated your capacity to outimagine your competitors.

Bottom line, you and your firm can appear distinctive and memorable. And that’s always a good thing.

Now that Tim has laid the foundation for his job search, it’s time to raise his online profile by engaging and participating on the social media platforms so that others recognize his talent, intelligence and potential.

Most professionals start their social media participation on LinkedIn. It’s the social media platform most closely associated with professional pursuits and employment, so it makes sense for Tim to start there also. While Tim has completed the essential task of creating and populating his personal profile, even securing recommendations, the next step is just as important: join professional Groups to engage with others in your field.

Perform a quick search on your profession – sales, marketing, finance, healthcare – and review the list of Groups available. Narrow your search by inserting your city’s name in the search string. “Cleveland Networking” returns a much more precise list than the broader term “Networking.”

Then simply join some Groups. Visit their pages to see what types of conversations they’re leading. Find one that’s interesting to you and join the conversation. Provide your opinion, your insight and your expertise to the topic of the day. Become visible.

Do the same on Facebook. Search for professional groups that interest you, become a Fan and follow their posts, adding your own comments regularly.

If you’re new to Twitter, visit twellow.com where Twitter users are indexed by their professions and specialties. With a click you can follow the thought leaders in any field and start receiving their tweets in your twitter stream. Click over to their Twitter profile to see who they follow and who’s following them, then follow the same people and start engaging with these professionals.

It won’t take long for your name to be recognized and for you to develop relationships with successful, networked professional in your industry who have the capacity to inform you of job openings and introduce you to others who can help you in your job search.

It’s understandable why most job seekers think that their resume is their most important written job search tool. After all, they’ve heard throughout their professional lives that the resume is universally demanded by virtually every company  engaged in the hiring process. So it’s natural that most people associate resumes with landing their next job.

Although it’s true that your resume will likely play an important role in your job search it’s best used only when you’re applying for a specific position. After all, that’s the purpose of a resume – to articulate your background, skills, abilities and credentials – with the hopes of obtaining an interview.

Sending out resumes blindly in the hopes of attracting attention will likely result only in high postage expenses, not any job offers. Studies repeatedly confirm that over 80% of jobs – especially skilled jobs – aren’t filled from responses to online or newspaper ads, but from personal networking with friends, family and current or former employees at the hiring company. It’s these contacts that get you in the door and face to face with the hiring manager.

Not all of these contacts are interested enough to read your whole resume, but they do want an understanding of your professional capabilities and background. The best way to provide them with this information: your bio.

Brief Biography

Your online bio can provide you with substantial leverage during your networking activities. If written effectively, it will convey  your background in a crisp narrative format before, during or after your networking meetings, providing just enough detail to garner interest and generate further inquiries.

Benefits

Your bio should provide a readable and concise description of your professional background to anyone who want to check you out online. It’s much more conversational than a resume and doesn’t require a significant level of effort to read and absorb. Written in the third person and without the rigid structure of a resume, you bio is much more readable and conversational than a resume.

The bio is also useful for those job seekers who don’t with to announce their intentions to pursue new job opportunities. While posting a resume online announces your intentions, your online bio is simply a convenient resource that informs any interested person of your professional capabilities and experience.

How to write your bio

Most people have difficulty writing about themselves and have trouble even getting started. A quick way to jumpstart your own bio is to visit LinkedIn profiles or blogs of people you admire. Read their personal profiles until you find one that you think can serve as a model for your own. I’m not suggesting that you simply cut and paste their profile to your own, but you can use their profile as a template for your bio, substituting your own professional details and personal skills.

At a minimum, your online bio should include a brief paragraph summarizing your profession and overall expertise. You’ll also want to add specific career highlights and significant accomplishments in your field. Ideally, you’ll also include some details concerning your professional philosophy and approach to your business. Details that illuminate how you differ in your professional capacity from everyone else in your industry. Include your education credentials and any type of professional associations that you belong to that can embellish your professional prestige. Finally, humanize yourself with a brief comment on your personal hobbies and pursuits – as long as they don’t have the potential to alienate any prospective employers.

Once your bio is complete, you need to paste in into every social media platform where you participate, on your blog’s About page and on your Google profile (don’t have a Google profile yet? Get one now at Google Profile)

Though readers may view this ongoing series tracking the job search of Cleveland sales executive Tim Krenn as an interesting case study, for Tim this is real life. The guidance we provide needs to produce real results in the form of a job offer out there in the real world.

That’s why this morning’s call from Tim was great news and an affirmation that we’re guiding him on the right path.

Tim had an interview this morning with a large technology company needing to break into a new market. Their sales director met with Tim and told him that they were interviewing a lot of candidates so he needed to know why he should consider Tim for the position.

With all the work that Tim had devoted recently to preparing his personal brand statement and constructing the stories that demonstrated his three key competencies, he was prepared to hit the question out of the park.

Tim immediately related his personal branding statement:

I’m the guy who can build the relationsips with the people you want to do business with.

And then recounted the stories from his professional experiences that demonstrated his ability to penetrate new markets, develop strong personal relationships and gain enduring market share.

The sales director told Tim that he was the only candidate who had a concise and direct answer to the question: why should I hire you? And it was the single element that vaulted Tim into leading consideration for the position.

Your personal brand is powerful and effective when thoughtfully constructed and deployed. Build yours today.

When we last left Tim Krenn, our Cleveland-based sales executive, we instructed him to create his personal branding statement – the single sentence that defined the value that he brings to an organization.

Tim examined his professional strengths and crafted the statement:

I’m the guy who can build the relationships with the people you most want to do business with.

It’s an intriguing statement meant to arouse interest and curiosity from the potential employers that he meets, but he needs to be ready to expand on that statement with concrete examples that demonstrate his talents. What’s Tim’s next step: he needs good stories.

Stories That Resonate
The most recognized and popular brands in the world don’t just tell you about their products, they tell stories that involve their products. Facts are forgettable while stories are memorable. I have no idea how many laptops Apple sold last year but I know the story of their early days in Steve Jobs’ garage. I have no idea how many passengers Southwest Airlines flies each year, but I know the story of Herb Kelleher drawing a triangle connecting the dots between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio on the back of a napkin and creating the idea for their new airline.

Stories connect emotionally and enable the listener to easily absorb the information you want to convey. Authentic stories, when told well, are powerful and memorable and are an essential component of a thoughtful and thorough job search.

Stories Set You Apart
As a job seeker, you need to be ready to answer questions that reveal insight about your background, passions and skills. Reciting your degrees and your sales numbers doesn’t convey anything about you other than the end result of your efforts. However, recounting a story detailing how college was so important to you that you worked two jobs every semester to earn enough to pay tuition and how you always made sure that one of the jobs was in a restaurant so you would be able to get at least one good meal a day tells so much more about you than your degree and your GPA.

Ultimately, the employer isn’t hiring a degree, they’re hiring a person. And if you’re the person they remember as committed, hard-working, creative and industrious, then you’ve got the advantage. Your story gives you that edge.

Just make sure that every story has a distinct purpose and communicates one of your three marketing messages. For Tim, his stories will focus on his ability to build lasting relationships, his strategic business development skills and his consistent record of achievement.

Ready for Anything
Every job seeker should know the three strengths they want to communicate and have at least a couple of stories ready that demonstrate these skills in action. If you prepare these stories now, you’ll never be caught off guard or stumble to answer the tough interview questions and your stories will  separate you from every other candidate pursuing the same job.

Day 4 of our real-life, real-time job search with Cleveland sales executive Tim Krenn.

For those of you just tuning in, we’re documenting the real-life job strategies and efforts of a Cleveland-based sales executive whose looking for a new job.

So far, we’ve had Tim create his social media identities on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, we had him take a headshot that could be used as his visual identity across all his platforms, we created a professional blog bullgoosesales.com focusing on power sales and networking and we’re in the process of creating Tim’s personal brand.

Creating a distinctive and memorable personal brand may be the most important component of your entire job search. Every job seeker is armed with the same tools: a resume, cover letters and a lot of hope.

But, not matter how well written your résumé is or how thoughtful your cover letter is written, you still haven’t done enough to separate yourself from the rest of the people seeking the same job. You’ve got to stand apart. You’ve got to be distinctive. You’ve got to be memorable. Bottom line: you need to build your personal brand.

Your Unique Selling Proposition
At the core of your personal brand is your personal branding statement. What is it that separates you in your professional field? What makes you unique and desirable?

In sales, this would be called your Unique Selling Proposition. What is the one thing that will make a hiring manager tell himself that he’s got to meet you?

The problem most job seekers make when they define themselves is their definition is simple a restatement of their professional responsibilities. “I’m a recruiter .” Or “I’m a tax accountant.” But that’s not nearly enough. Your branding statement has to be much deeper than that. It must really reflect your core strengths and attributes that an employer will desperately want to have.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, when working with Tim, his first attempt at defining who he was resulted in the generic statement “I’m a sales executive.” Having known Tim for nearly 20 years and having worked with him professionally, I knew there was much more to him than that.

360 Degree Evaluation
I gave Tim an assignment to talk with his former managers, peers and clients and ask them how they would describe him. This process of getting feedback from people above, below and at your peer level is often referred to as a 360 degree evaluation and can be enlightening and revealing.

The feedback Tim received was pretty consistent and included descriptions like: genuine, passionate, empathetic, great listener, adjusts to anyone, understanding, personable, sincere, caring, achieving, personable and visionary.

The dominant theme revolved around Tim’s ability to connect with his clients and peers and build lasting relationships. And in sales, those relationships are crucial because people do business with people they like. Tim builds lasting friendships with everyone from the machine operator to the CEO and is able to convert these relationships into sales.

The Branding Statement
This recognition resulted in Tim creating his own personal branding statement:
I’m the guy who can build the relationships with the people you most want to do business with.

It’s simple, it’s focused and it’s intriguing. It’s the type of statement that invites the next question from a hiring manager: Tell me more.

Note what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a laundry list of everything that Tim can do. It didn’t include his record of achievement, though that record is impressive. It didn’t focus on his strategic sales and business development experience, though his skills there are also strong. But Tim focused on one thing. A single differentiator that leads to curiosity, interest and a face to face meeting where Tim can tell his whole story.

And that’s where we’re headed next. Telling the stories that illustrate who you are and why they need you. Stay with us as our real-life, real-time job search continues here on the Job Shopper.

Day 3 of our real-life, real-time job search with Cleveland sales executive Tim Krenn continues with a focus on how to create and market your personal brand. Over the course of our first couple of days, we instructed Tim how to create his social media identities, how to create a blog focusing on his sales experience and had him actually post his first entries on his blog.

Now, we’re going to focus on exactly how Tim is going to define and present himself to prospective employers. How is he going to stand out from the crowd to gain attention and, ultimately, job offers?

Your job search is marketing. You’re the product, and the employer is the consumer. You need a clear and compelling personal brand enables you to stand out from the pack and helps employers perceive the benefits of your product, giving you an advantage in the job market.

The first rule in developing your personal brand is that it must be founded in authenticity. It should be about who you are, what your work-life purpose is, and what you are committed to causing. As a starting point in developing your brand, brainstorm a list of all the things you’re good at.  Write down the stories of your professional successes. Your favorite memories of work. What really inspires your passions and gets you excited about going to work?

Then examine these stories to see what common elements and themes run through them. It’s not enough to be a great accountant or a terrific programmer, you have to really divine what makes you great at what you do, so you can translate that into a personal branding statement that appeals to employers.

Once you’ve identified your unique area of expertise you need to determine the advantages of that professional skill. For instance, if you are great at relationship building, the advantages to prospective employers might be greater loyalty from clients, more referrals and a more stable revenue base.

If you’re still lost among the crowd, make your brand more specific by fine tuning. With Tim, his positioning as a sales executive, while true, just isn’t powerful or memorable enough, so he’s going through this exact exercise to determine how he’ll position himself with prospective employers.

I’ve told him to focus on developing a Three-Point Marketing Message that conveys his unique strengths. Three things that define who he is, why he’s successful and most importantly, will appeal to prospective employers.

Tim selected:

• Strategic sales and business development
• Relationship development
• Consistent performance and achievement

Once you know what strengths you’re going to focus on, the next step is creating a powerful branding statement that defines who you are, why you’re valuable and why they need to meet you. And that’s what we’ll cover next as our real-life, real-time job search continues on the Job Shopper.

This week starts a new real-life real-time experiment detailing the job search efforts of Tim Krenn, a Cleveland sales executive who like millions of Americans recently found himself out of work and in need of a new job.

Tim approached me a couple of weeks ago asking for advice on how to refine his resume and get the word out to prospective employers who might be interested in meeting him. The more we spoke, the more apparent it became that Tim didn’t just need a better looking or more adroitly phrased resume, he needed a job search strategy that encompassed personal branding, networking and effective use of social media.

I’ve known Tim for nearly 20 years, and I’ve worked with him professionally, so I know how talented he is, I could see the enormous amount of see the untapped potential that could be released with the right strategy and disciplined and consistent tactical execution.

We’re going to be documenting the advice that we provide to Tim, discussing why we’ve selected the strategies, platforms and tactics that we pursue, and track the results of our efforts until Tim lands a new job. It could be six weeks or six months, but we’ll be there to document the highs, the lows, the technical challenges, the mistakes and hopefully the ultimate success.

And as a starting point, I’ll share with you exactly how I started with Tim. Laying the social media foundation that will enable you to create and distinguish your personal brand, build your personal network and start engaging online with professionals who have the capacity to recommend or even hire you.

So, let’s start at the beginning and start building your social media persona.

First steps: create identities for yourself on the three big social media platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Don’t feel overwhelmed by the fact you don’t know how to use these platforms yet, you don’t know how to build a network and you think that Facebook is for teenagers and Twitter is time wasting text messaging. They’re all simply tools that you need in your job search toolbox right now. We’ll learn how to use them effectively later.

Second, find a terrific professional headshot that you can use on all your social media platforms. I want to make sure you heard that: pick one headshot to use across all the platforms. The same picture. This is all related to personal branding and your creation of a brand image that is unmistakably you.  And there’s a reason that I qualify the shot as a headshot, not a full body shot or a full torso. The photos on social media sites are often displayed at 40×40 pixels. That’s tiny, and if you use a large shot, you’ll be unidentifiable.

It’s also crucial that you select a photo that conveys the appropriate professional image. This means that your shot should capture you dressed as you would for work, not at a party or a wedding, not with your spouse or kids and not a grainy shot you grabbed from your laptop’s webcam. Your photo may be the single most important visual element in your entire personal branding effort, so take the time to get it right.

Third, and finally for now, think what topic you can write about and contribute professionally on your own blog. What’s your area of expertise? Where have you had your greatest successes? What aspects of your profession get you excited? Write down some ideas, because your professional blog will serve as the focal point of your job search, will provide the content you need to display your expertise, generate conversations, feed your social media channels and position you as a leader in your field.

So, get busy, start thinking, because tomorrow’s topic is going to be all about the blog as the central element in your job search.

For those of you still skeptical about the value of a thoughtfully written thank you note to those you interview with, I present the story of an anonymous Cleveland executive (let’s call her Jane Doe) who was told yesterday that she received a six-figure job over her competitors because she was the only candidate who followed up her interviews with individually tailored thank you notes to each person she met with.

In a job search that took nearly a year (not that unusual for someone seeking a six-figure income), and required dozens of interviews, the thing that stood out, that separated Jane Doe from the rest of the executive candidates wasn’t her degree (everyone has those), her experience (everyone has that, too), or her network (though her network helped her tremendously). What separated Jane Doe from all the other educated, talented and networked candidates was her ability to connect with each interviewer.

Her thank you notes were printed, not emailed, and were each tailored to include observations and concerns expressed by each individual interviewer. She didn’t send the same note to everyone. They checked with each other to make sure. And her ability to demonstrate her capacity to connect with each of them, to understand their priorities and concerns and to express how she would work with them to reach their personal and departmental goals made her unique. Made her stand out. Made her memorable. And made her necessary.

Assuming that her new position lasts for at least 8-10 years means that the value of her thank you notes will exceed $1 million. Not bad for a few hours work.

Are you doing the same in your job search?