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, 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.

Because the rhythm and rhetoric of effective email exchange is a critical success factor in business performance, mismanagement of email may in fact be a symptom of other weaknesses in your organization.

But no executive has the time (or obsessive-compulsive disorder) to review and edit their people’s correspondence — it’s not possible and it wouldn’t be healthy. So how can managers quickly and cheaply create the shock of self-consciousness to push their people to take the style and substance of their correspondence more seriously? And how can you find out the interoffice spam actually reflects a deeper issue of employee performance?

I’ve found that the most powerful approach is also the simplest: make email an intrinsic part of performance reviews. Insist that colleagues and subordinates better evaluate their email so that you may better evaluate their performance. There are few better proxies for assessing how well individuals are communicating, on task and on target, than the digital missives they send in order to get their work done.

Email can be a frustrating train of cc’s that mean nothing to most of the people being cc’d.  The important stuff gets lost and the unimportant stuff just wastes time.  This proposal is a good one, but only if a manager is not part of the problem.  Often managers demand to be ‘in the loop’ so much that they cultivate a CYA culture.  In other words, if I hit cc to everyone in the office including my boss or bosses, I can’t be blamed for something going wrong.

In addition, managers often blast out emails to a vague group of people or cc people on a ‘team’ with no real thought to who really needs to read the message.  So how do you really get to the heart of an email inefficiency problem.  Job reviews might be a way for individuals to change, but that won’t quickly change the culture of your organization.

So here’s a tip direct from the Job Shopper: take away email for a week.  Ban it.  OK, don’t ban it.  That’s ridiculous.  We all have people we need to communicate with quickly.  But encourage your office not to use it unless it’s necessary.  Absolutely necessary.  At the end of the week, have a discussion to see what alternatives people found.  Is it possible that 25 cc’d messages were less productive that 1 short meeting?  Is it possible that people had more time to concentrate on the things that really matter?

The irony here is that when email and the Internet first entered our office, the quesiton was how to stop innappropriate use of the technology which would waste time.  Today, appropriate use of the technology is actually the big time waster.  So ban it. For a week.  Then talk about what went wrong and what went right.  It’s possible that more went right than wrong and that you’re whole office may learn how to use the technology more effectively.

You can read the rest of Michael Schrage’s blog post here at the Harvard Business Review Blog

Our real-life, real-time job search experiment continues with Episode 2: Your Blog.

Yesterday we suggested to our job seeking executive, Tim Krenn, that he create his social media identities on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, that he  take a headshot that could be used across all the social media platforms and that he think of a blog topic that he could write about.

Today we take a second step and discuss why the blog is so important and the specific steps to create a blog of your own.

For the uninitiated, a blog is a website with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material including graphics or video that relate to a specific topic. For our purposes we’re talking about a professional blog. One that relates directly to your professional experience and expertise.

WHY BLOG?

There are a lot of reasons why a professional blog can serve as your single biggest resource in your job search.

1. Build your personal brand – you have the capacity to determine how you are perceived by others through the content you generate and publish on your personal blog. You can demonstrate your particular expertise, your insight, your ability to analyze industry trends and convey your unique professional skills in a way that a resume simply can’t. Post by post, you can demonstrate your thought processes and perspective and differentiate yourself from every other job seeker with a similar background.

2. Provide thought leadership –your blog can be used to express your personal expertise in your discipline, answer questions that are important to people in your industry (and prospective employers), provide useful resources and information and even showcase your past successes.

3. Become more human – increasingly blogs are being used as a way to bring a more accessible and personal voice to life. Blogs are always personal in that they’re written by an individual with a unique perspective, experience, humor and a distinctive voice, and your readers can gain a more thoughtful and intimate knowledge of who you are by reading your regular posts.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – done right, your blog posts will be indexed by all the major search engines so when a prospective employer Googles your name, your posts will appear in the results, reinforcing your reputation as a thought leader in your industry.

GETTING STARTED

There are a lot of blogging platforms out there that provide you with the tools to create your personal blog at prices ranging from free to about $100/year. You can research them all or you can take my advice and build your blog using Wordpress.

If you go to wordpress.org, you can reserve your blog name and start creating right away for free , or you can take the advice that we gave Tim Krenn and use a Wordpress hosting company like Bluehost (Google Wordpress hosting to get a list of companies providing this service) to get your own domain name and email account for about $80. Although you have to pay for this service, owning your own domain means that you can modify the look and feel of your blog in much greater detail and also provides you with your own branded email address.

From a branding perspective, you’ll be perceived as more professional if you have your own domain, and preferably one whose name conveys what you’re writing about. Tim selected the blog name BullGooseSales.com to write about power sales and networking and created an email address tim@bullgoosesales.com that would automatically forward to his Gmail account.

Now, the tough part – creating content on a regular basis that demonstrates your professional expertise and resonates with your target audience.

And how do you build an audience? Stay tuned, we’ll be getting to that.

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.

Michael Mauboussinn, on the other hand, urges us to think twice in his book…Think Twice.  Jim Hasket from the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge blog sums it up:

Now Michael Mauboussin, with his book Think Twice, makes the case for a more careful approach, suggesting that we place too much emphasis on intuition and personal experience as opposed to the “wisdom of crowds,” mathematical models, and systematically-collected data. He argues that “blink” serves us well in stable environments where feedback from previous decisions is clear and where cause-and-effect relationships can be identified. Unfortunately, in his view these conditions are more and more rare. As he puts it, “intuition is losing relevance in an increasingly complex world … more is different.”

So the debate is on: is it better to rely on our experience in today’s world, or make decisions based on based on all of the information you can get your hands on.  There’s a saying here that’s handy: Over analysis leads to paralysis.  Must be true, right? It rhymes.  The key to the phrase is “over”.  No one said the Analysis was a bad thing.  Gathering information, weighing the pros and cons and using all the information available to you in a reasonable time frame is just smart.  Just not too much of it.

Here are five tips and strategies to making a good decision in a timely manner:

1.)  You don’t have unlimited time…

When you’re buying a house, you have to weigh opportunity with timing with analysis of the market.  Can you look at every house on the market?  Probably not. You can look at healthy sampling and then make a decision.  As time passes, so will the opportunities to purchase houses you’ve seen.   Spending too much time on decisions can cost you opportunity.  The same applies to any business situation.

2.) Be prepared to back up a decision…

Sometimes things go badly and you have to answer for your choices.  Most successes and failures are made up of a combination of luck and careful planning.  Make sure when things go badly, you can show it was due to luck (or lack thereof).

3.)  Committees generally don’t make decisions…

Gathering together your colleagues to seek advice is a good idea, but these groups can sometimes just bog down the process because you’ll tend to focus on making everyone in the room happy.  You need to gather information, consider it, and then make a decision.  You won’t make everyone happy…except maybe yourself.

4.)  Don’t be afraid to make more time…

While time costs opportunity, time can also help you choose the right path.  Need more insight?  More studies?  More options?  More time to think?  Take it. Or take a reasonable amount of it to make a truly informed decision.  Sometime deciding to put off a decision is a good decision in and of itself.

5.)  See what other people have done…

This isn’t going to help all the time, but there’s no reason why you can’t do a quick search online to see what others have done in a similar situation.  Just remember, their outcomes are particular to their situation.  Yours may be different.  And then there’s always that luck thing…

A copy of a letter da Vinci wrote (full text below. original at right: click to enlarge) to the Duke of Milan seeking a position as an armorer was recently made available and contains some universal truths that today’s resume writers can learn from, including:

1. focus on the needs of the employer. At the time that da Vinci wrote this letter, he was already an accomplished painter, sculptor, physician, musician and inventor. But daVinci didn’t focus his pitch on his artistic facility, but on his ability to create wondrous instruments of war – meeting the immediate needs of the Duke.
2. don’t tell your whole story, just enough to whet their appetite – notice that da Vinci didn’t include drawings or detailed descriptions of his war-waging creations. Instead he teased the Duke with descriptions of devices that could bridge streams, besiege fortresses, hurl mortars, destroy ships, tunnel under rivers, and protect chariots. At no point does da Vinci explain how he would accomplish any of these tasks, but the descriptions alone are enough to intrigue the Duke and secure an interview – exactly what your resume is intended to do.
3. describe what you can do, not just what you have done – da Vinci doesn’t just provide a laundry list of the projects that he’s completed, but describes how engaging da Vinci will benefit the Duke. The descriptions of endless means of offense and defense are nearly irresistable and provide the Duke with all the reason necessary to meet with da Vinci.
4. use language that engages the reader – my favorite line in the letter is his description of the mortars he can build that will “fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.” He didn’t write that he could create a series of mortar assemblies capable of firing up to six projectiles per minute. Instead he used descriptive language that enabled the Duke to envision a storm of projectiles blackening the sky and instilling terror in his enemies. And what Duke wouldn’t want the power to unleash that firestorm?

Isn’t it time you revisited your own resume to incorporate some of da Vinci’s timeless tips of genius?

Full text of da Vinci’s letter:

Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.

2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.

3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.

4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.

5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.

6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.

7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.

8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.

9. Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.

10. In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.

11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency – to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.