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Build Your Personal Brand: Create Your Own Frame a presentation on job-search branding, framing and mojo

Presented at the Colorado Workforce Development Center’s 50+ Job-Seeker’s Group meeting

by Liz Ryan www.humanworkplace.com

Build Your Personal Brand

Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Liz Ryan: We’re here to talk about your job search, and your professional brand and direction. Exciting! You’re going to get a job, and in order to get your job-search engine started, you’re going to choose a direction for your job search. You have certain requirements as you begin this job search, and we want to figure out what those requirements are. We may as well begin your job search by understanding exactly what you’re looking for in a new job, right? You’re going to start right there, by asking yourself, “What am I looking for?” You’re going to decide what you care about in a work environment – the industry perhaps (if you care) and/or the size of the company. You’re going to ask yourself, what sort of environment do I want? You get to pick. Do you want to focus on government agencies, or not-for-profits, or fledgling startups, or middle-sized companies or large corporations? And here’s the thing: you’re going to brand yourself, through your resume and your LinkedIn profile and in other ways, for the jobs you most want to get – not for all jobs. Your branding depends on your direction. As we ask the question, “What are employers looking for?” what can we say immediately? Participant: It depends on the business. Liz Ryan: It depends on the business – yes. In what respect? How could these businesses vary from one another? Participant: Someone in the music business and someone at IBM aren’t going to have the same needs in an employee. Liz Ryan: Exactly. Different organizations have different…what? Participants: They have different cultures. Liz Ryan: Cultures. Let’s draw a little spectrum. OK. What are going to be the names of the poles on our spectrum, corporate culture-wise? What shall we choose as points -- the two extremes, what are we going to label them, in order to come up with our homegrown corporate culture spectrum here? Participant: Left brain and right brain. Liz Ryan: Okay, that’s great. Let’s label our two poles Left Brain and Right Brain. So do you care where you end up in terms of that culture? Do you care what kind of organization it is? Participant: Sure. Participant: Of course. Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Liz Ryan: You do. Who cares here? Who cares? Participants: Yes! We care. Liz Ryan: Who’s looking for the left brain? Want the quant-type environment, or a largely defined, analytical environment for instance, or a more formal environment – that’s going to appeal to some job-seekers. What, no one in the room is looking for that? (Laughter) Liz Ryan: What’s your experience in that arena? What is pushing you folks away from that? Participant: Lack of being able to use everything you’ve got. Liz Ryan: Lack … Participant: Lack of identity. Liz Ryan: I love you guys. Participant: Yes. Liz Ryan: It is interesting when I talk to 25-year-olds and I say, “But what if they, the employer, weren’t able to see everything that you’ve got and use it and exalt it, how would you feel about that?” -- and what do they say to me? They say “What do I have? I have stuff? What do I have?” They don’t know, and we can’t blame them – we didn’t know we had anything to offer either, at that age. Most of us didn’t. Participant: Yes. Liz Ryan: Because you have to be of a certain age to experience what it’s like to not have people want and accept and appreciate and celebrate what you bring, right? When you’ve lived through that and chafed under it, you realize how important it is. Who has had that experience so far? How about it? What is it like? Do you have a story to tell about that, Sarah? Participant: It’s just very frustrating. It feels as though you’re offering ideas and guidance and no one wants it – and you’re not able to use your talents. Liz Ryan: That’s so frustrating. People can’t see what they can’t see. Ever have a boss who couldn’t see? How do you stay in the conversation with a person like that who can’t track with what you’re saying, and can’t see beyond his or her nose – right? So we do care, and perhaps we care more about things like that, about the environment and the urge to use more of ourselves in the job, as we get older. We care where we end up and that is the point of branding. The point of personal branding is that we get to choose -- once we care and once we vote, by our actions, on where we’re headed next. We really do get to choose. Once we decide and vote, all of a sudden – I know I sound a little hippie child being in Boulder, Colorado and all Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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but I am from Northern New Jersey. They will kill you as soon as they look at you over there, and I say that with affection because I consider myself a Jersey girl all the way. Northern New Jersey? No. Anybody? East Coast? I heard a couple of east – you’ve got the accent. Coney Island, you say? Participant: Long Island. Liz Ryan: Long Island. Participant: Close enough to Coney Island. Liz Ryan: What part of Long Island are we talking about? Participant: Huntington. Liz Ryan: Huntington. Participant: Oyster Bay. Participant: Matawan. Liz Ryan: Magnificent! Participant: New Jersey. Liz Ryan: But of course! How ‘bout it? Am I lying, my East Coast people? Did you get your driver’s license driving the New Jersey Turnpike? Fuhgeddabout it. It’s a death match. It’s like the turtles, baby turtles trying to get down the sand to the water. Okay, back to the branding. When we brand ourselves, when we stand in that brand, we’re actually going to bring the right employers in. Getting clear about your brand, what we call your frame, means understanding what you want to do, and in which environments. When you choose it, it’s incredible how much more powerful you are. When you just read job ads and respond to them, your posture toward your job search is “I guess I could do this job” and “I could figure out how to fit into this environment.” That’s the opposite of the approach we want. There are actually a lot of jobs posted. There are several million open positions out on SimplyHired.com alone. The jobs are out there, but it’s very intimidating to apply for them of course, because of the endless lists of requirements in them and because of the ridiculous, daunting Black Hole recruiting process. You’re going to bring in the right opportunities and push the wrong ones away, with your branding. That’s going to be on your resume and in your LinkedIn profile and even in the conversations you have while you’re networking, and your conversation in online forums and in LinkedIn groups and everywhere you have conversations online. You’re going to be very Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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powerful as soon as you zero in on that new frame for your job search, because it’s not the common job-search mentality. The standard job-search approach and philosophy in this country could be called “Grovel, Knave.” It’s terrible. It’s like we’ll conspired to agree that jobseekers have to grovel and beg for a job. Why? It’s a business transaction. The employer needs something, and a finite number of people have that thing, that essence that the employer desperately needs. It’s a sorting process and it’s a sorting process of equals, because if the employer doesn’t think we have what they need to solve their problems, they shouldn’t hire us – so if they do hire us, and all the way through the process leading up to hiring us, they should value and respect us – of course, right? Otherwise, why would we want to work there? We’re going to create a new frame for job-hunting, and it has nothing in common with the standard “Grovel, Knave” mentality that so many of us are familiar with. It’s our own frame, brimming with confidence and delight at having all these interesting conversations and meeting all these fascinating people on a job search. There’s no supplication in it, no trying to please anyone, no grasping and groveling and bowing and scraping and trying to be acceptable to employers. If you’re meant to work for an organization, they won’t just find you acceptable; they’ll be thrilled to meet you. You’ll be thrilled to meet them. It’s very obvious when you run into it. It’s not especially rare, and I can give you names of employers here in Colorado who values their talented teams that way, but I won’t list them because I’d forget someone and they’d be miffed. My point is that the dogma “You just have to grovel and beg on a job search, because that’s how it’s done” is absurd and untrue, on top of insulting. Grownups don’t beg. When you call the plumber and ask him or her (a him, most of the time, right?) to come to your house and fix the tub drain, you don’t start asking the plumber a bunch of questions to see what his greatest weakness is and where he sees himself in five years. It’s a straightforward business transaction. You explain that your kid put a sock down the tub drain and you listen to the plumber tell you how he’d be likely to address that problem. Boom! Case closed. You like his approach, or you don’t. But we buy into the Kool-Aid that says that we have to really contort ourselves into pretzel shapes on a job search, because someone it’s something else, more than a business transaction, you’re hoping these people at the employer’s shop find your acceptable as a human being, and sufficiently deferential, and so on. Here’s what that is: that’s an employer that doesn’t deserve you. If they don’t ‘get’ you , they don’t deserve you. It’s simple. Liz Ryan: Part of the standard job-search frame is “You’re going to have to crawl over a lot of piles of broken glass to work here, but it’s worth it, to work for such a fine employer.” You’ll be able to tell at every moment during the interviewing process and during the whole selection pipeline, as they call it, whether that is true for you, or not. You’ll be able to tell whether these folks get you, and of course you’ll be figuring out whether you get them. We don’t have to Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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adopt the view “I just have to put my head down and keep giving these guys what they want” throughout the hiring process. A friend of mine just got a very good job. He started this week, in fact. Along the way to getting that new job, he was in a very long and drawn-out selection pipeline for a different job, working for a local city government. I wrote about it in the Daily Camera, a few weeks ago. So my friend was down to the final two – he was one of the last two candidates for a big job in this local city government in a town not far from here, ten miles down the road. The story in the Camera was called The Universe Helps the Job Seeker. My friend was one of the last two people for this job, and they said to him, “Now, we just need you salary data.” He’s like, “Great. What do you need?” They said “We need the salaries for all the jobs you’ve ever had.” He said, “You mean going back, like, to 1986?” They said “Yes.” They wanted him to report every salary he had ever had. He asked, “Why do you need all that?” and they said “Well, we’re going to verify all of those salaries.” He said “That feels kind of intrusive.” The lady said to him, “Well, you’d give up salary information if you were applying for a mortgage,” which was kind of apropos of nothing, since of course the fellow wasn’t applying for a mortgage – he was applying for a job. Couldn’t they gauge his worth without that historical salary data? They were looking at it more of an integrity thing: tell us all this stuff so we can verify it and make sure that in general, you tell the truth. Now, is this employer going to share its salary data with this job-seeker, and tell him all sorts of confidential things about the city government? They’re not going to do that. They’re setting it up, this relationship with their presumably valued and final-stage candidates, as an unequal thing. We demand this information from you, and we’re not opening the kimono an inch on our side, because of the old frame called Grovel, Knave, which is so well-established and so cozy and comfortable to so many people on the employer’s side of these interactions. My friend said “I’m not comfortable with that.” He said “I’ll give you my current salary and my last one, my most recent salary.” Now he says he wish he hadn’t even budged that far, but he did, and the lady said “Oh, it’s too late, you’re out of the running – when you balked at the salary request you were history.” What does that tell us? He walked away from that deal, and of course, he got a great job offer two weeks later. So that city government, with its request for the data on every salary you’ve ever earned at every job, what were they really testing him for? Participant: Submission. Liz Ryan: Submission. It’s a submission test. We’re going to hire the groveliest person we can find for this job, who also has the qualifications. Does it make sense, you guys? I don’t want you in a job like that. The thing we’ve earned these years on earth, the reason we get to be in this room is because we’ve earned the right to choose. That’s the key, but we only get that right to choose if we actually choose. Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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If we go out to market with a wheelbarrow full of skills and say “I have this, I have that. I don’t know if you will be interested. Perhaps some fresh pomegranates today” we have no choice, and no brand. I’m not being critical, by the way. That’s the way we’ve been trained to job search. We’ve been trained to say, “Look in the wheelbarrow. I have typing skills and organizational skills and quantitative skills and I can program in these three languages,” and to list all of those words and those phrases and those certifications and degrees. That’s what’s significant about me – all these buzzwords and degrees and accolades, all this stuff that other people conferred on me. We’re taught that it’s the external stuff, conferred on us by other people, that is valuable. Who we actually are, what we’re passionate about and what we feel born to do and called to do? Oh, that’s never in the picture. No value there – that’s just our crazy silly ideas. That’s the standard job-search frame. “Only trophies are valuable.” Forget that garbage, you guys. That’s just stuff. It’s trophies. What’s significant about you has always been in you and it’s the number one reason why people have always hired you and love to work with you and the reason you’re going to get hired again, when you re-connect with that power. There is nothing wrong or ‘less than’ or defective or wanting about you, you’re amazing right now. We’ve been served a bunch of toxic Kool-Aid that says that over-fifty job seekers are less appealing, deficient in some way, behind the curve etc – it’s so insulting, and so untrue! I know (laughter) I get a little worked up, a little fervent. But I get worked up because life experience, instinct, judgment, wisdom, everything you guys have in spades, gets discounted in this very left-brained, point-factor-based, bullet-point-ridden job search paradigm, the Grovel Knave paradigm and the keyword-searching algorithms and all the rest of it. Don’t get me started. Black Holes will rip you to sub-atomic particles, and that’s never our ideal state. There are way more employers than you could ever contact, so you get to choose. You don’t have to just reply to posted job ads. Perhaps you’ll decide you don’t want to reply to posted job ads at all. This is your quest, your journey. Where do you want to be? Who wants to be over here? Mostly quant – do I see hands? Nope. How about here? Kind of halfway but leaning more toward the – yes, maybe a couple. Let’s say three people in the room. Over here, kind of more into the right brain stuff. We got a big majority and very, very much in the right brain, creative holistic, a minority. So it’s like a typical bell curve distribution, right? A lot of people want to use both sides of their brains, and there are a lot of ways we could have drawn this. We said left brain, right brain, but we could have said authoritative, hierarchical, formal, data-driven, right? Policy-bound. We could have used any of those kinds of descriptors, right? Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Thinking in advance about what you want in a new job is the key. It sounds fluffy. It’s the key to getting a job you want, because when you know what the target looks like, the sorts of organizations you’ll be pursuing, then you can brand yourself for that audience. It’s no different from product or service marketing. Understand the audience, first. What does this audience care about? How does your next employer’s mission mesh with your own mission? That’s the key. People who are out there hiring are more interested in people who are interested in their missions – of course! No one wants to hear “I want to work for you because your company is 100 yards from my house.” That’s not the most appealing message to a a hiring manager who’s passionate about his or her work. “I’m so excited about what you’re working on” is obviously a much more appealing message, right? Being a supplicant, being a reactor to things that you see in the paper, that doesn’t work very well. That’s where we get the horror stories of people sending out hundreds of resumes and hearing nothing back. The Black Hole is just broken. It doesn’t work for anyone, for job-seekers or hiring managers either. This is marketing, right? It’s just like marketing products and services. We’re going to figure out who needs this product. We’re going to go after them. In your case, we’re going to answer the question, “What is the business pain I solve?” Not, “What are my skills?” No one cares. “I’m savvy and strategic.” Yuck! I don’t like those kinds of words, you guys. Why not? Participant: They’re standard, generic words. Liz Ryan: That’s right. They’re generic. Everyone says them. Talk is cheap. When you think about it, praising ourselves is a form of groveling, isn’t it? “I’m savvy and strategic.” I’m such a baby boomer. My brain goes to little Shirley Temple. (doing a tap dance and singing in a Shirley Temple voice) “I am strategic. I am, I am I am!” With the pout – the Shirley Temple pout is part of that frame, right? Gotta have the pout. But, you know what I’m saying? Why would we ever say “I’m strategic?” [Laughter] We’re taught to do it. I’m not being critical. We are trained to praise ourselves that way, except confident people in their power never praise themselves. Out there, in the real world, out of this job search paradigm, we never praise ourselves. Who would? It’s not polite. It’s groveling, because we’re saying “When you hear me say I’m strategic you’ll know what I get done.” Powerful people sit in their power and have conversations. They don’t lean forward, grasping. If anything, they lean back. I mean I wish, going back 20 years, doing Fortune 500 HR, I wish that I had ever had the confidence or the mojo to say in a meeting, “I don’t really have any ideas on this topic. I don’t understand this topic and I actually feel really strange about the fact that you guys are all much better versed in this stuff than I am.” I never, never would have been able to say that. Why not? Participant: Well, it shows weakness. Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Liz Ryan: For sure. It’s so crazy – now I say “Well don’t ask me, I’m an idiot” to my colleagues every day, but I didn’t have that confidence before. I thought it would be the worst thing in the world if I showed any weakness on the job. [Crosstalk] Participant: But they think it shows weakness. Liz Ryan: Yes, I would be afraid. You ever go into these meetings where you have the bio battles, like the great ape display thing and “Oh, so you’ve got 17 years of experience - really? Well let me tell you something – I’ve got 19 and a half years experience. So step off!” - right? And I’m talking to my fourth grader about how kids get fearful, you know, how children put other people down when they don’t feel good about themselves and then in the middle of talking to my nine-year-old, I’m like “Wait, they do it when they’re 55, too.” It’s the same dynamic. Nothing is different! It’s fearful people with big holes in their stomachs, you know what I mean? Big holes, right here. So my message to you about this job search stuff is when you get solid in the product – not that I’m trying to commoditize you, obviously, but for the sake of our marketing analogy, product and pricing and promotion, when you get that down, which is to say how you’re going to show up on this job search and how you’re going to brand yourself, and when you remember what you’ve done for the employers that you’ve worked for, not your skills and your trophies and your diplomas and I have this certification. That stuff is good. I’m not dissing it but it’s necessary but not… Participant: Sufficient. Liz Ryan: You know that term? Necessary but not sufficient. You’e got to have it, whatever ‘it’ is, a certification or a degree or a type of experience, and it’s important, but it’s not enough. This weekend, I was writing LinkedIn headlines all weekend. What a dweeb I am, right? I must have rewritten 40 LinkedIn headlines for the members of my discussion group, called Human Workplace and that’s a Yahoo! discussion group. It has 25,000 members. You would be welcome to join if you’re into that kind of thing and I said, hey, this weekend, I will rewrite your LinkedIn profile headline if you send it in and they did, about 40 of them. I’m sure they will be coming in for the next few days. The number one branding problem that people made in their LinkedIn headline was what? Participant: Oversell. Liz Ryan: Oversell, 100 percent. How have people oversold? “Please find me acceptable.” How do they do that in words? What kind of words do they use? They say “Results-oriented marketing professional with a bottom line strategic orientation and the ability to work well with all levels of staff.” What does that brand say? Whose brand is that? Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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It means nothing. It’s empty boilerplate. It means nothing, right? Here’s one of the ones from this weekend. This woman is an office manager. She’s looking at it holistically. She’s zeroing in on how she performs her office management role. She’s asking herself, What pain do I solve? So this is the headline she comes up with: Office manager/business air traffic controller looking for overbooked CEO to make sane. That’s her brand. She’s going to make an overstressed CEO sane, and she’s got this visual idea going, a busy air traffic controller calling the shots, watching the radar, giving the pilots clearance to land on Runway Six. We can see it easily in our minds! She’s an Office Manager who’s keeping the planes where they need to be. That’s a great LinkedIn headline, because she isn’t trying to sound like everyone. She’s saying “This is me. This is how I conceive of the job.” She’s putting some personality into her LinkedIn headline. She’s saying “Oh, is my headline too jaunty, too informal for your company? That’s fine. Don’t call me, in that case.” She’s branding herself! She’s deciding who her audience is – it’s a cultural thing, in her case – she really wants to find that CEO who needs her to keep his or her life organized, and keep the planes hitting the right runways – and her LinkedIn headline is going to keep those people coming into her sphere, because she’s being herself and unapologetically using a human voice in her headline, and throughout her LinkedIn profile, and branding herself as actually herself. Liz Ryan: She’s telling us, this is your problem, most likely. If your problem is that your CEO is awash in work and doesn’t have anyone pushing tin around the airport and the runways, I might be able to help. I love to do that work. That’s a dramatically different message than “I have all these skills. Please consider me.” Skills, schmills – we need to hire a warm-blooded, complex, thinking human being for this job, not a bundle of skills. People don’t come in slices or ribbons of skills. They come as earthy, wonderful, brilliant, insightful people with histories and passions. Who would want to hire a bundle of skills when they could get so much more, like all of you, your ideas, your creativity, your ingenuity, and your emotional energy? Now this office manager -- is she going to appeal to everyone? Participant: No. Liz Ryan: No. Why not? Participant: She only needs one job. Liz Ryan: She only needs one, and she’s telling him or her – most of them are him, the CEOs she’s looking to connect with - she’s saying “This is what I do – this is how I show up. This is how I see the job.” That’s a lot more powerful than “I have six years of this, and three years of that.”

Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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From this little LinkedIn headline for this saucy Office Manager, we get a movie in our heads. We get the visual of the air traffic and the Boeing landing on runway three. We get it. She’s not the person who says “I can type and I can use Constant Contact.” Her brand is about her, how she views the job and where she thrives. It’s a brand full of self-awareness. That’s what all of us need! That gets us out of the Grovel, Knave framework. We are taught to say “I can spin and weave and sew.” Those are skills – great. We need to wrap up those skills in context, which is what I write and speak about incessantly. Context, relevance, and meaning – otherwise why should anyone care? You can spin? Awesome. Have you ever spun anything where it was the right thing to do and it made a difference for the people for whom you were spinning? That’s the key. At the end of the day, did your spinning do any good for anyone? Does this perspective make sense, folks? It’s going to be holistic, and it’s going to be a view of you and your background from a higher altitude than “I’ve done some of this, and some of that.” Tell us a story. Put a picture in our heads, and engage the right brain. You’re going to do that in your branding, in your Human-Voiced Resume ™ and your Pain Letters ™ and in your LinkedIn profile, and if you’ve got job-search business cards, which are nice to have also, you’re going to brand yourself there as well. OK. So you’ve got a product that you’re going to define and you’re going to define it for possibly several prongs. What is a prong, you guys? A job search prong is a direction, and you can have more than one. You can have as many job-search prongs as you like, as many as you can keep track of and manage. Here’s the thing: you’re going to use a different resume for every prong. Participant: So you don’t include several prongs in one resume, like “I am interested in Sales and Marketing jobs?” Liz Ryan: You know what, some years ago this woman sent me what is easily the saddest resume I’ve ever seen, the poor thing. I’m not being critical of course, because we do an absolutely horrible job of teaching people to job-hunt; that is, we don’t teach them at all – and we certainly don’t talk about mojo and groveling and branding the way that I wish we would, in every college placement office and every high school and in outplacement and everywhere else people are talking about job-hunting. There is a lot of bad dogma out there that tells people to grovel, but we’ll give that a rest for now! Anyway, this resume I’m telling you about belonged to an HR person. I signed up as a volunteer to give resume feedback to job-hunting HR people, and this resume said “I would make an excellent HR VP, HR Director, HR Manager, HR Generalist, HR Analyst, HR Coordinator or HR department Receptionist for a busy company.” What’s happening with the brand there, you guys? Did the same people buy BMWs and Hyundais? No. Why not? Participant: Different feature set. Different buyer. Different price point. Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Liz Ryan: Thank you! Yes, different price point, different everything. We have to brand ourselves like a car. We have to know who that audience is. It can’t be “I can do this. I can do some of that. Will you give me a chance?” We need to be thinking about business pain, the pain behind the job ad or the pain that we can discern just by understanding a given employer’s business situation, and not even at an especially deep level. We can extrapolate these business pains pretty easily. Once we have a bead on that pain, we’re in great shape. Now we have a new frame – now we’re not groveling and writing to the hiring manager or going through the Black Hole recruiting portal with a message of “Please find me acceptable in thy sight, O HR people and hiring managers.” Now we have something compelling to talk to a hiring manager about – the very thing that is keeping him or her up at night. Now we have some heft in our message and some leverage in the conversation. This branding-by-prong idea makes sense because you don’t have just one way to present yourself. You have all sorts of different facets. You’re multifaceted. You’re not one thing. It’s not like “This is my resume,” right? If you have more than one prong, you’re going to have a strategy that’s going to brand you slightly differently for each prong. Each resume will absolutely shine with and brim with your passion and your relevance to each of those prongs, which correspond to business needs on the employer’s part. In one case, you’re the amazing PR person with a ton of other sorts of marketing experience – but the ‘front face’ of that prong is PR. That’s the emphasis, in that version of your resume. The companies you worked for, of course, don’t change, but you’re going to ‘pitch’ that PR-focused resume in the direction of PR jobs. See? In another prong, you’re more of a technical product marketer with some experience in PR and other things. Let’s say the third prong is Product Management. Your historical companies are the same across all three resumes, but the details that you share are going to differ and point in the direction of each of those prongs. Let’s diagram this on the whiteboard. Let’s pick three more prongs for this example. What’s our Prong A going to be? Participant: Technical writer. Liz Ryan: Technical writer, beautiful. What’s prong B? Participant: Proposal writer. Liz Ryan: Beautiful. And prong C? Participant: Marketing communications … Liz Ryan: I love it. That is a beautiful prong array, because you can do all these, but God knows we’re not going to shovel all this in one resume, because we want to look like you were born and raised in a Petri dish to do each of these jobs, and you’re going to use one customized resume to pursue each of your three prongs. If we had time, we’d build out a bit of the Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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marketing plan for each of these prongs, because of course your marketing plans and approaches can vary with the prong, as well as the branding. How are we going to take one amazing person, which is to say you, and frame him or her in three different ways to pursue each of these prongs? We’re going to do it through the miracle of framing! Framing is linguistic – we use words to create a picture, a mental model for the reader. We have to see it first, and then we can express it. We’re going to show how you’re absolutely perfect for each of these three directions, these three prongs, by framing you slightly differently in each of the three resumes. It’s extraordinarily easy to do, and I write these resumes all day long and have a blast framing people for situations that appeal to them, but we’re not taught how to do this in school, and that’s a shame. I learned about some of this framing jazz back in my Rhetorical Analysis class in grad school twenty years ago, and it’s very funny and wonderful that my path has wended its way back around such that I use this framing concept in my work every day now, with job-seekers and with employers as well. We can frame just about anything, you guys. I teach a class over at the Lees School of Business at CU-Boulder, and my colleague David, who works with the MBAs on their job searching, said to me The students who wrote Pain Letters™ last year got interviews for jobs they were not qualified for on paper.” Why do we think that is? Framing. When we show up to talk about the pain that we believe a hiring manager is facing and it is keeping him or her up at night, then you have an excellent shot at getting an interview. We can’t say you’ve got the job at that point, but you’ve got the interview. Here’s an example of a Pain Letter™ because we haven’t talked about those yet, in this conversation. Dear Jane, Congratulations on the $50,000 matching grant that the Frog & Toad Society just received from the Ford Foundation. What a testament to your impact on the frog and toad population in Northern Colorado. We call that the Hook. The Hook is the first part of a Pain Letter ™. It grabs the reader’s attention, because you’re talking about him or her, or his or her organization, and not about yourself. I can only imagine that the pressure to generate $50,000 in individual donations over the next ninety days has got to be a major item on your radar screen. So, you’re going to hypothesize about the pain. This one is easy – this is an actual letter we wrote, more or less – the not-forprofit employer had just received a $50,000 matching grant, but of course they weren’t going to get any of those dollars unless they generated the same volume in donations on their own. So we make the pain hypothesis in a very chill way, saying “I’d have to imagine” or “I wouldn’t be surprised to find.” We’re not going to be presumptuous – that’s the last thing we want to do. Then, once we’ve laid out our best guess at the business pain that is on this manager’s plate, we go into a relevant story from our own past. We call it a Dragon-Slaying Story. ™ When I was fund-raising for the Amphibian Society, we had a similar challenge and used a combination of grassroots marketing and face-to-face networking to bring in $40,000 in three months. If any of this is worth a phone call, I would love to talk when your schedule allows. Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Sincerely yours, Evelyn Nesbit That’s a Pain Letter ™. How is that different from a cover letter? Participant: Cover letter just kind of tells them, hey, I’m qualified. Liz Ryan: Please your majesty, would you please? Right? This says – and the cover letter is like this. Here’s the employer up here and here’s you, dogmeat, groveling, right? The Pain Letter ™ comes from another person looking at the industry or this company’s situation, not a supplicant, not another head of cattle in the lot, but an interested observer and well-wisher on the same plane and level as the hiring manager, saying “I don’t know – how would I know, I don’t work in your company – but I am paying attention, and it seems to me that you might have one of those Red Scaly dragons flying around your castle. If you do, I’ve been there. I’ve done some of this stuff but, you know, it’s totally up to you. Call me, or don’t call. It’s your call, of course.” It’s a non-grovelly approach, because it says to the hiring manager “It’s fine if you call me, or if you don’t.” Why do you care? You’re only sifting here, trying to separate the people who actually have the pain that you solve and might need your help, from the people who don’t. It’s a sales qualification process, if you have some background in sales. In sales, there are so many potential customers – we’re not emotionally attached. What do we care if they call us or not? We don’t have time to talk to these customers unless they have our type of pain, so if they don’t have the pain, we’d actually rather that they don’t call us. Same thing here! Participant: Right. Liz Ryan: You probably noticed that in the Pain Letter ™ we didn’t mention the job opening, and we didn’t mention the spec or the horrible list of bullets. That’s the last thing we want to mention! We are creating a new frame for the hiring manager to step into, that says “I know you have this goofy job spec out there, but you and I both know that the job spec has very little to do with the real need, which is simply the need to make that pain go away,” right? In a Pain Letter ™, we’re not going to mention the spec or the opening or the bullets – that’s the wrong frame entirely, the supplicant please-your-Majesty frame, but instead we’re going to talk about something much more important than the crazy, delusional spec that they wrote in the fog of insanity, the legacy of Jane and Michael Banks, right? From Mary Poppins, remember? [sings] Come on. [sings] No? This is the spec for Mary Poppins. Mary Poppins, the children ran through a slew of nannies and so they wrote their own job ad, this is back in the mid-sixties, you guys are my contemporaries, perhaps you remember the movie with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke? The kids wrote the spec, but the dad didn’t like it and he ripped it up and threw it on the fire; so the nanny ad went up in the chimney smoke and here comes Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Julie Andrews with her umbrella, floating down from a cloud, the best nanny in the universe. No? You don’t remember? They get delusional. I used to arm wrestle the hiring managers over these bullet points, figuratively speaking of course These hiring managers, they come in and say Oh, the person that I’m going to hire has to have this qualification, and this one, and this one, and this other one. And I would say You know Joe, it’s funny because you only got here a year ago. You had none of this stuff and yet you have been promoted. You’re a manager. Now you want this person to, you know, play the outfield and have a taxi driver’s license and speak Greek and see through walls. It’s a bit of a tall order. But I was kind of stupid about my argument, too, those years ago, because I framed the bullet problem in terms of “It will take longer to find the right person.” What I should have said, had I thought of it at the time, was “These artificial and whimsical and non-critical requirements are constraining the market hugely, the market for talent. You’re slicing off the best parts of the talent population with these stupid bullets that you don’t actually need.” And the managers would say “I picked up this stuff on the job, because I’m really smart.” So of course I’d say “So you want somebody who has all this stuff and they don’t need to be smart, to be hired into this job?” And then the standard response was “Liz, you’re busting my chops. I just want all this stuff.” So then I would say “OK, if you leave these 15 goofy job requirements on the spec, I’m going to kill one out of every five bullets, or one third of them, at random. So maybe you should decide, or I will decide. And you might not like my method.” Right? Folks, I don’t want you to respond to the spec. The spec is made-up, delusional stuff. It doesn’t even necessarily correlate to the job. IT’s fear-based. It’s a totem. It’s the manager saying “Now that I’ve invented this person on paper and in my mind, he or she will show up and save me from this business pain.” I understand that. It’s a natural response to the stress of this business pain. We’ll SPEC the pain away! We’ll invent a magical person on paper, and the person will walk in the door. I call it the Design a White Knight method. As an HR person I would have to ask the hiring managers all the time “Did you want an actual living person in this job? I can’t tell. I’ve never seen a living person with this set of qualifications. I don’t think there are any people on the earth that actually have this stuff. If you give me some amino acids and a Petri dish I can grow up a person but it will take like thirty years.” Ha ha. HR humor. You guys, in a job search, don’t respond to the spec. It has nothing to do with the reality of what’s happening on the ground. You know that. You’ve written these specs. “Well, let’s have the person also see through walls and fly. That should be fun to watch.” Seriously. The spec has nothing to do with anything. Ignore. Certainly don’t lower yourself to say “I have this and that.” What the manager actually needs is for a certain type of business pain to go away. Let’s speak to that. Let’s take the whole conversation up a notch. Either the product isn’t selling, or market share is eroding or suppliers are killing the employer with pricing increases or customers are getting frustrated with hold times, or the infrastructure isn’t sufficient to support the business Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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anymore as it’s growing or they don’t have a clue how to purchase the raw materials they need – you guys are my contemporaries, and you know these business pains. Speak to that. Speak to the pain, not the spec. I was talking to a headhunter friend of mine and she said “I was sitting in an office where a hiring manager, a CTO, poked his head into the office with the HR VP and he said to her, ‘Hey, that job spec I gave you yesterday, why don’t you put the CPQ certification on there and we’ll require that one from our candidates.’ The HR VP said to him ‘What is that certification? I’ve never heard of it.’ The CTO said ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s in all the magazines right now.’ He doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t have the certification. But he wants the HR person to add it as a must-have item on his job spec. That’s how insane things have gotten. She’s like, “I’ve never heard of it.” He’s like, “Me neither, but it’s the new thing in our field.” [Laughter] Liz Ryan: He has no idea what it means. Well, so what, let’s throw it in there. It’s insane. So ignore the spec. That whole process is so broken. You’re going to go directly to the hiring manager with one of these Pain Letters™. There are all kinds of manifestations of you. You’re going to identify a few of them for your job search and you’re going to write a separate resume for each one – we call them prongs. You can have three, four prongs, whatever number you can manager. In your technical writer resume, you’re going to emphasize the technical-writer aspects of your past, even in the jobs that didn’t specifically require technical writing. You’re going to show the relevance. We can do that! We’ve got a room full of right-brained people! We’re going to frame that resume like no one’s business for your technical writer prong. Same role, same years, but we’re going to choose to highlight different aspects of the job. Where do we do that? In the bullets under each of your jobs on your resume – where you tell us what you got done in each of those assignments in your past. So right now we’re looking at your Technical Writer prong, and so we’re focusing on your Technical Writer resume. What are those technical writing nuggets, the ones we want to highlight in this resume? What do technical writers do? Participant: Editing. Liz Ryan: Editing. Participant: Proofreading and … Liz Ryan: Proofreading. Sucking information out of subject matter experts is a big one, right? Researching, compiling organizational systems, and other higher level, cerebral things; let’s bring it all out in this resume. It doesn’t matter what the title was, so much, at your historical jobs. We’re going to frame the overall resume as your Technical Writer resume. We do that in Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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the Summary at the top of the resume, very clearly and confidently, and then we continue to frame you in the bullets under each job that you’ve held, to show the technical-writing aspects of that job. You’re going to tell us about the most technical writer-ish things in this version of your resume, right? The actual job title of Technical Writer, you might have had once in the last fifteen years. No problem! That’s OK because every Human-Voiced Resume is going to have a summary at the top of it, that brands you as a technical writer, or as something else. This is not like a JD or an MD where you have to pass the bar exam or pass medical exams to practice, or you go to jail. I’m talking about Technical Writing right now. If you’ve done it, you claim it, period. You get to brand yourself a technical writer if you’ve done some of that work. We get very left-brained and we think oh, I can’t call myself something that I wasn’t paid on a business card to be called. Does that make sense? Who says? If you’ve done these things that technical writers do, I don’t care if you ever had the title. Who cares? Where is it written? But this is all part of the Grovel Knave job-search frame. We believe in our bones, “If no one has ever paid me to do this type of work, then I can’t claim it, although I actually performed the work. If I never held the title, I can’t claim it. If I was a volunteer, I can’t claim it. If it was only part of my job, I can’t claim it. If my boss at the time wouldn’t have said that that was part of my job, I can’t claim it, even though I did all this stuff.” Hogwash. Claim it. It’s yours. Can you answer questions about it? Awesome – then claim it, every second of it. Yes, you can. We had a guy come into one of our workshops, and he’s a lawyer, with 16 years in a law firm. He says in the workshop “I want to get out of law. I want to do standup training. I love to develop and deliver training.” You don’t hear that every day. I asked him “Why?” He said, “Well, years ago they had me do a course for the young associates in the firm, and I just loved it and I got into it and now I do all the client training, all the associate training and the firm’s employee-development strategy.” And this is fantastic stuff to do, and much closer to his heart than actually practicing law. So I said, “Let me see your resume.” He had it with him, luckily, and at the top of his resume is a summary. It says “Attorney, 16 years in corporate law, yada yada, legal legal legal legal, and I’m looking to transition into standup corporate training.” Who’s going to open the keyhole and let him in? Nobody, because if any other candidate for that training job has two minutes of training experience that they’re willing to claim, they’re going to get hired ahead of him, right? He doesn’t have a chance, as long as he has that stance “Please sire, allow me to pass through the gate and be a trainer.” He doesn’t need permission. He needs to give himself permission. I told him “I have little boys, so I actually have a foam sword in my car. I can go out and get it right now and dub thee Sir Training Knight,” whatever he might want to title himself. Do you see? He has to step into it. He’s been training people and developing training for fifteen years. It’s not his title – so what? I asked him to retitle himself a training person, and in our society that is hard to do, because we feel so much more comfortable when other people confer these titles on us. But of course, it’s branding, it’s framing. When he claims it and says in his summary “I’m a standup trainer and instructional Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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designer whose greatest joy is to make dense technical or legal information run and accessible to lay people” or something like that, he’s golden. Now he’s in it. It’s just his brand. You’re going to go right into the hiring manager. How are we going to find the hiring manager? Trivial, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn. They’re there. If they’re not on the company’s own website, they’re on LinkedIn. You just do a sort on the company’s name. You’ll use the people search area of LinkedIn, and you’ll search using the most likely titles for your own hiring manager. So let me ask you, who’s going to the hiring manager for your next position – what will his or her title be? Participant: Chief economist maybe. Liz Ryan: Chief economist. OK, fantastic. Yes, or when in doubt, CFO. You can always go up. You can always go up. Don’t go down because you might hit it wrong, right? Don’t go sideways. Go up. You can always – right to the CEO, but then again a lot of CEOs have the attack dog admin so we try to avoid the CEO unless you’re clearly a direct report to the CEO. No no no, I’m not dissing the attack dog admin, that’s his or her job, God bless, those jobs aren’t easy. That’s the job. It calls for that mentality. We don’t need permission. The summary is the key to the frame in your resume. That summary is important. You’re going to use a human voice and say I am a technical writer. I love what I do. This is not “results-oriented” zombie speak. Here’s an old and a new summary. OLD SUMMARY: Results-oriented PR professional with a bottom line orientation and ability get to the bottom of any situation. Works well with all levels of staff, motivated self-starter. Seventeen years of corporate PR. What kind of job is a PR job? It’s a communications job, right? So we train people to say “Possess excellent communication skills.” I beg to differ! When you say ‘excellent communication skills, superior communication skills’ on a resume, what are you saying? Participant: I’m better than you are. Liz Ryan: For sure, and the sad thing is that it’s not true. I mean, here’s the page. This is your chance. If you’re an amazing communicate, then communicate with us right now, here on the page. Give us the evidence that you’re a fantastic communicator. You ever look at these personals ads, Patricia? I look at them for rhetorical analysis purposes. Ha ha! And what do they say? These personals ads, they’re sad, but they’re just like the way we are trained to job hunt. The women say “I’m 48 but I look 30. Some people think I’m 20.” What vibe are you getting off this woman? Participant: She hates herself. Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Liz Ryan: She’s so fearful. Eww. What guy wants to go on a date with a woman who’s so insecure? It’s sad, but we don’t really want to be around this person. Women do it in personals ads, and guys do too, of course. The guys say, I’m so cool and sexy. Chicks dig me. And what do you think, ladies? Participant: Insecure. Liz Ryan: When people are themselves, it’s great. When people are in their power, it’s great. We love to interact with them. So we don’t want to do the same thing with an employer, saying please, find me worthy, right? Instead, we can say “This is the stuff I do. I like it. It’s fun.” That’s a much more powerful place to stand. We can say “I’m a nerd for this stuff – what are you gonna do? I love it.” Rather than “I can do it, please, your Majesty, give me a chance!” On to Prong B! Our Prong A was a technical writer. Prong B is proposal writer. Oh, so that was the before, the after for the PR guy. I’m jumping around. It’s very uncharacteristic of me. Jumping around? Me? [Laughter] Liz Ryan: Yes yes, we were going to go over the revised, upgraded resume Summary for the PR guy. Okay, the new PR summary is, “Ever since I began writing business stories for my college newspaper, I’ve been a zealot for business storytelling and its power in shaping audience behavior. As a PR person, I’ve gotten my employers covered by USA Today, CNN and the Chicago Tribune.” What is he saying about himself? Participant: He has a lot of connections. Liz Ryan: He has got connections. But what else? He has done it already. He sees it from an altitude. He loves it, he loves PR, and he’s admitting that he was enough of a little dweeb to get the worst job at the college newspaper but he turned it into a career. We believe him. We see him in our mind’s eye dashing across that college campus with what? A Walkman? or a cassette, right? Jimmy Olsen, a reporter. It’s an archetype. This is right brained stuff, you guys. Visual people, architects, right brain, right brain, right brain. List of things, I spin. I weave. That is the mentality we’ve been taught, that what’s powerful about us is the skills, the certifications, etc. whereas actually our power is right there, it’s in our stories and our conviction and what calls us and speaks to us about the work we’ve chosen to do. We’re really trained to emphasize skills, and skills are the worst! They mean nothing. Anyone can claim Great Communication Skills or Negotiation Skills. It’s just a horrible boondoggle, this Skills Dogma garbage. What does it mean? Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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The skills dogma is the worst piece of dogma ever to come down the pike because it posits the notion that there are such things as concrete and transferable from one context to another, things like communication skills, negotiation skills that coalesce in a person to make him or her powerful. That’s not how we experience people, though, in real life – as compilations of skills. We experience them as funny or volatile or peace-making or insightful or whatever, and as different things and in different ways at different times, because context is everything. It’s ridiculous to say “This guy has X skill.” Let him tell you a story, instead of saying “I have this skill.” If we hear a story, we can make our own determination about the skills that the storyteller has or doesn’t have. Now we have something, a skill-in-context, at least on the day the story took place. We have a frame for the skill, like “I may have this ability, but I can tell you that on this day I did this thing and it made a difference.” Now we see the guy, in our mind’s eye, in action. We see how he rolls. Obviously it could be a woman. The idea of abstract skills that we acquire once and then carry around in a backpack with us – that’s just ridiculous. That isn’t how people show up. If somebody says to me “I have excellent negotiation skills” and they don’t tell me a story, I’m going to say, “Does that mean you negotiated peace accords between Middle Eastern countries or that you got the vendor to throw a couple of extra creamers in with the coffee order?” [Laughter] Liz Ryan: You know, I don’t see it when you tell me “I have these skills.” Talk is cheap, and on top of that I don’t trust your assessment of yourself. How could I? I don’t even know you. I need the story. I need the proof. I’m from New Jersey, right? Tell a story every single time. Tell a story in your headline, like that air traffic controller. Tell a story in your LinkedIn profile. Tell a story in your resume summary. That can be the same as your LinkedIn summary – the exact same paragraph, right? This guy says, “I wrote the business stories for my college newspaper.” What do people want to write about in the college newspaper? What does every kid want to report on? Sports, right? And scandal. Participant: Yes. Liz Ryan: Maybe the Greek system. They don’t want to write the business stories, but the guy did that, and turned it into his career. We see mojo in this kid, perhaps he graduated ten years ago, but we see the throughline, and why he loves this work -- and heck, we see the selfawareness, so we’ve got some recursion going on – he not only does what he loves, but he knows it, he chose it, and he sees it. So now we’re up at a pretty high level, we’re talking about synthesis – this young man has what we call Career Altitude ™. He’s looking down on his career even as he’s living it. He isn’t one centimeter above the ground pushing the work on his desk forward. He’s doing that too of course, but he’s also flying at a high level looking at where he’s been and what he’s doing now and where he’s going, and he’s flying above that roadmap looking at where he’s headed and making sure he’s steering to get there. That’s ownership, an Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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entrepreneurial bent, self-direction, whatever the heck you want to call it. Personal leadership, sense of purpose, there are million names for this thing, and we can bring them all out in a brand and on paper and electronically, once we see it ourselves. That’s the key! That’s why when people say “Please write me a resume, Liz” I sort of joke with them and say “Hang on, I need to get my mirror.” It starts with your “Aha!” that ties together for you what you’ve done and what you want to do – it’s a frame that includes your past and ties that into your chosen path. That’s what we mean by Create Your Own Frame. That frame will be unique to you and very compelling to the hiring manager, because it’s the opposite of “I guess I could do this job, and I hope you’ll give me a chance.” The job you’re pursuing (or the set of jobs) falls completely into the linguistic/philosophical frame, the mental model, that you built to incorporate your past and your future. The air traffic controller Office Manager is one example. She isn’t saying “Please allow me a chance to interview, Your Majesty, for I type well and swiftly, verily.” She says “My deal is that I’m the air traffic controller for a crazed office, and I tell the planes where to land and I actually love it, the chaos, making some order out of it, but not so much order or process that it squelches the energy and kills the spark. I like to keep a crazed CEO sane by managing the schedule, the VIPs in my CEO’s sphere, and a million details every day; and I act as a handler, when the CEO has press briefings and public presentations and so on – I love the whole package; it’s what I was born to do.” Are you going to be attracted to that conviction and clarity? Lots of CEOs will be. We don’t need tons of people to respond to our brand. We need one employer who gets us. In a branded resume or LinkedIn profile, we see personality. That’s one reason we use a human voice. There are other reasons to do it. A human voice in a resume distinguishes us in an immediate, powerful way from every other candidate. It creates a bond with the reader, and that’s something you don’t get from a traditional resume. Branding means making choices. It means pulling in the right people and pushing the rest away. There’s no brand “all-purpose wonderful employee for every organization and every manager.” We have to decide. The all-purpose brand is the pleasing brand, and it’s mush. It’s no brand at all, or it’s the zombie brand “results-oriented professional.” Participant: Yes. Liz Ryan: People are not bundles of skills. They’re all of a piece. You’re going to have a reaction to a person, to their energy, and I’m sorry if that sounds Boulder-ish, but we experience it all day every day so we may as well acknowledge it and talk about it. People are not bundles of skills. They not reducible. They’re irreducible. Participant: That’s a good word.

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Liz Ryan: We have the business world so stuck in the left brain. I always say – What would we say about Winston Churchill? What would we say about Winston Churchill, through the lens of this goofy skills dogma? If we decided to reduce Winston Churchill to a list of skills, we’d say that he had had statesmanship skills and he had diplomatic skills and he had writing skills and editing skills. That’s ridiculous. The story is this: Winston Churchill got Britain safely through World War Two -- so back off. [Laughter] Liz Ryan: OK? That’s his story. Human beings are story animals. This whole skills thing, like “Let’s impose a fake, scientific rigor onto the actually messy and very human business world, and then it won’t feel so messy and sticky and ‘people-y’ anymore, right? Ridiculous! You’ve got people in a social situation as you have in the business world, and we try to squeeze all the humanity out of it so it feels more manageable. Except all the power and creativity and energy go out with the human stuff. Oops. So back to the job search: we’ve got a different summary for the proposal writer. This is a different prong with its own brand. It’s not exactly the same as the technical writer. Now this person is saying, I’m passionate about writing proposals to get funding for important causes resonate for me. Wow. As an executive director, you’re going to take that seriously, or are you going to be more attracted to someone who says “I’ve written 14 grand proposals, of which 82 percent received a second look?” You might like that quantitative approach, and the good thing about branding is that what we write brings in the right people for us. You see a lot of personal branding that relies on other brands, like “I worked for great companies, so I must be okay, right?” to such a great extent that the person’s own brand and power is completely subsumed by the company brands, of the employers they worked for. That is sad, because there’s no power in other people’s brands attached to your resume. Let me bask in the reflective glow of the brand of Sun Microsystems, where I worked before. They liked me. I must be OK, right? We can say “This work speaks to me” rather than “I’ve done this work for ten years” or “This excellent company over here had me doing this work, so I must not be terrible at it, right?” You can say: “You know what I love to do? I love to support causes that I believe in, by giving my time and my energy and my heart to writing proposals that get funding. That’s my joy.” Wow. Now an executive director can say, “Whoa,” and if they don’t like it, if they don’t like the person who wrote that, it’ll be obvious. No need even to waste anyone’s time with a job interview. It wouldn’t be a good fit. Remember I mentioned my friend who applied for a job with a city government, and they wanted all his salary date? They needed him to cough up the salary information, and he Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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wouldn’t, and he got bounced. He said, “No, thank you. I so appreciate you making that decision. I feel as though I’vedodged a bullet.” Does that make sense? Participant: Great response. Liz Ryan: Great response, right? I feel as though I dodged a bullet. Thank you for rejecting me. My gosh, of course he got a fantastic job two weeks later. Well, let’s get back to our three prongs. The last one is Marketing communication, so we’re going to write a third summary, because we’ve got a different facet for the saame person. Now, what is she saying about herself? We already heard about her technical writer side and her grant-writing side. What’s this one? Marketing communications. Participant: Sales statistics. Participant: Yes. Liz Ryan: Totally. She’s going to say, you know, I’m a marketing communications person who’s especially happy or who thrives or who’s at home in an environment where we can capture the minds and imaginations of buyers and really intersect with them in important ways to grow the business, whatever. We can have fun wordsmithing her third summary, but my point is that it’s the same person with all these different aspects. Now where does the sticky part come in here, when you have multiple prongs? It’s when you wrap these three prongs together on LinkedIn. Participant: Yes. Liz Ryan: You only get one LinkedIn profile. So now we have to create the super prong, the umbrella that brands this person. And what’s a high level frame that incorporates all these three things? Technical writing, proposal writing and marketing communications. What is she going to say in her high level branding? She’s a writer who’s not just a writer – she does tons of other things, but there’s a piece of each role that is about writing. Of course, we’re not going to say “I can write.” Talk is cheap, and apart from that, lots of people can write. But what kind of stuff? What does this all have in common? All of these types of writing are designed to do what? Participant: Business writer? Liz Ryan: Yes indeed, and she’s a technical writer so she’s going to get users to be able to use the product although it might be complicated, right? Here in her grant-writing prong, she’s writing to get grant givers to give money to causes that she personally feels very strongly about; and here in her third prong, her marketing communications prong, she’s trying to get consumers or BtoB purchasers to be excited about the product or service she’s working on. Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Participant: So it’s mostly persuasive writing. Liz Ryan: It’s persuasive writing, isn’t it? It’s persuasive writing. Does this make sense to you guys? Your situation is analogous to this. It’s going to be different prongs, but it’s not going to be, “Here is where I worked and these were the titles.” Throw that stuff out So, I hope we’ve gotten this idea of branding across, and the idea of job-search prongs, and the notion that each prong has its own brand that connects everything you’ve ever done to the direction of the moment, the prong you’re dealing with. I hope I’ve made the point that there is not just one representation of you. You get to show up in any of your various personas. You’re not stuck to just one, but in each case we’re going to say something about how or why you do the work you do, something vibrant and specific to you, not something that holds your trophies out in front of you like “Look at the trophies! Don’t look at me – I don’t have anything except these trophies, that you’d be likely to care about.” We’re going to use a human voice, all the time. We’re going to write the way we speak. Participant: Can you walk us through a resume, what it should look like? Liz Ryan: For sure. Let’s start at the top of the resume. You’ve got your name, Joe Blow. You don’t need to include your street address anymore. You could do it if you want, 123 Park Street. What’s the bad thing about including your street address? Participant: They start to wonder about your neighborhood, your social class etc. They make associations. Liz Ryan: People make associations. Street addresses have strong associations. People literally will go on Zillow and see what your house is worth. It’s up to you, but you don’t need it. You could just put the name of your city and state, spelling out the full name of the state, and be done with it. You don’t need a zip code. They’re not going to write to you. But what do we absolutely need under your name? Participant: Your email address. Liz Ryan: Yes, your email address. And what should your email address look like? First name, last name. Sorry to be boring, but that’s what I recommend, because what happens is once they correspond with you or once they hear from you, they want to start typing your name (because they remember your name) and they want it to auto fill as they compose an email message for you. So we don’t want to use an email address on your resume or in your job search that doesn’t correspond to your actual first name and last name, in that order. Dots between your names are fine, of course, or a date at the end if Gmail already gave away your name and all its variations. Just don’t use an email address like Loneranger6, you know, Buffboy45, whatever it is. [Laughter] Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Liz Ryan: First name, last name at Gmail, first name dot last name, first name initial. As long as they can start typing that first name and have your email address completed by their autofill feature, you’re fine. You need a phone number, just one, probably your mobile number, and you need and one more thing. Up here in the contacts section, you’ll want to include your LinkedIn profile url. That’s a customized url for your public LinkedIn profile, without all sorts of extra letters and characters, just LinkedIn.com with a slash after that, and then the word “in” and then another slash, and then your name. That’s your customized LinkedIn profile url. So with the HTTP in front of it on your resume, because in case you’re sending your resume to someone by email or otherwise electronically, we want them to jump over to LinkedIn and check out what your profile says about you, along with your endorsements, your groups and so on. Here’s an example of a LinkedIn profile url: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lizryan Moving down your resume on the page, after the contact section at the top, we get the summary, and this is the big statement and it’s different for every prong. Right? You can use a human voice, and you can tell a story. You can tie your chosen path to your favorite things as a kid. That is fun to do. It’s not for everyone. It’s a choice. Here’s what that might sound like: When I was a kid, I dug for dinosaur bones in the backyard (not that there were ever dinosaurs in Baltimore). Now I dig for obscure information as a business librarian helping people solve figure out where to find resources and how to use them. Does it make sense? She’s encapsulating it. A summary is supposed to wrap up and summarize who you are professionally at a high level, right? Who is this person? How does he or she play ball? That’s what we’re going to do in the summary, and then we’re going to go chronologically back through your resume, starting with the most recent job. People always ask me, “How far back do I need to go?” So how far back should you go? Participant: Ten years. Participant: Ten. Liz Ryan: Ten is good, 10, 15. It’s all about relevance. Participant: What if none of your jobs are relevant? Liz Ryan: Can you say more about that? Participant: If we’re in the mood to change our jobs now, how is it relevant what we did in the past? Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Liz Ryan: Oh, that’s a great question. Everything is relevant. It is all relevant. Let’s get out of this left brained idea that only industry and function give relevance. What other kinds of relevance are there? I’ll give you an example. I had a client who came from the East Coast. She ran an animal shelter. She ran an animal shelter for something 15 years. She has always worked in animal shelters, but it’s really hard to get in as executive director or any kind of a manager in an animal shelter when you move, you change states. Why? Participant: Because they’re entrenched. Liz Ryan: For sure. They know – in every animal shelter in this country, they know who’s number one, number two, number three, number four, number five and they even go down to like the high school student who bathes the animals on weekends and walks them. It’s a system, they earn their stripes and they work their way up. God bless, they kill themselves for the animals and they’re so dedicated. It’s not bad. There’s nothing bad about – these people work their tails off. [Crosstalk] Liz Ryan: I mean they have earned it. They know. That’s one thing they know, their succession plan. OK? There’s no like “Oh my gosh, we have no idea who would succeed the executive director if she left.” Very unlikely, or at least we’d have to say the Board of Directors is asleep at the wheel if you’d ever hear that in a shelter. So anyway, this lady arriving from out of state is not going to get in at a high level but she still has bills to pay, and she wants to work. It’s not that cheap to live here in Boulder County. So, she has to change industries, and so she says, “OK, I’m looking at this one job. They’re opening a call center here in Colorado. They need a Call Center Manager.” I said, “Well, we can probably get you the interview if you want to check it out.” She says, “Yes, I want to get the interview.” She’s an animal shelter manager. That’s her past. Piece of cake, right? So we write to the guy, the VP of Operations. Dear Jack, congratulations on the groundbreaking in Wherever. What a feather in your cap to be creating 200 jobs during the worst downturn in recent memory. Boom, that’s called the hook. Next comes a paragraph break. I can only imagine that as you’re getting the new call center online and bringing in 200 associates and getting them trained, you’re going to be dealing with a constant shift in altitude from, organizational and operational infrastructure to daily firefighting and tons of handholding and mentoring for these young trainees. When I ran the second largest animal shelter in the Chesapeake Bay area, we enabled 150 adoptions a week and constantly installed new process infrastructure through a constant process of sifting and shifting from a high altitude to an on-the-ground view. That was in an environment punctuated by constant barks, snarls and yelps, and then were the animals. Why is she using humor in her letter? Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Participant: To be remembered. Participant: To keep the person behind the letter in the conversation. Liz Ryan: One hundred percent. To be remembered, to keep the person alive. She is such a left field candidate that she has got to use humor. I mean, if they’re going to respond to her at all when she has exactly none of the qualifications listed on the job ad, she may as well be herself, right? How can that hurt her? Remember what we said before? If they don’t get you, they don’t deserve you. She’s going to use humor in her letter, for sure. Participant: Yes. Liz Ryan: That’s the only way she is going through that keyhole. Saying regular standard stuff, Yes your majesty, here stand I, a lowly peasant of thy realm, on bended knee…. Participant: It’s not going to happen. Liz Ryan: Not going to happen. In the Black Hole, she is the absolute last candidate they would ever have talked to. So she figures, I might as well just be fully myself. She got the interview. We knew she was going to get the interview. Does it make sense? That is right brain relevance. She saw a different relevance. You’re installing process. You’re making it up as you go along. You’re writing manuals. You’re training these people. You got – it’s the air traffic control thing again, right? All this craziness around you. An animal shelter, are you kidding me? She says to the guy, and this is the framing, “It’s the exact same thing. It’s high altitude, low altitude, craziness all around, we’re enabling adoptions, you’re shipping huge containers across the country or whatever, same exact thing.” She flatters him with the high-level frame. She says to him in effect, “You see it now, don’t you, darling?” He can see it now in his mind’s eye. He can see the animal shelter and he can see how it’s kind of like his call center. Does it make sense? She’s driving home from the interview. She calls me. She goes, “You were not going to tell me what a call center was like?” [Laughter] Liz Ryan: I said, “How bad was it?” Some of them are bad. Some of them are – she goes, “This was the Starship Enterprise from hell.” [Laughter] Liz Ryan: There’s literally this console, this weird space age thing that’s elevated that I would be sitting in and the minions are down there. I would have to kill myself every day in order to go to Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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work. I was like, “Yes, some of them are bad.” She said, “This one is really, really bad but the ironic thing is they really, really liked me.” She had never set foot in a call center before that day. She has no idea what a cell center was like. Do you see what we’re doing? We’re building our frame and stepping into it. We invite the hiring manager to step in, and lots of them say “Yes, of course.” Emperor’s new clothes, in reverse. And they’re happy to come into the frame with you, once they see it, which is right after you see it. They write the spec because they have empty space all around them, do you see? They can’t see you yet. So they fill in the empty space and say “The selected candidate has to have all this stuff.” It comforts them, writing down all of this stuff on the spec. You have to have this software. You have to have this certification. It’s all fear-based. It’s when they’re sitting in the office stressing about the business pain that is bothering them. They’re not thinking, at that moment, about the complex and funny and wonderful people they know and the fact that the people they know and rely on tend to be quirky and multifaceted and haven’t necessarily stayed right on that corporate ladder and wouldn’t have all the certifications and things they’re asking for – they lose sight of that, and just start writing bullets and don’t know when to stop. Writing the bullets assuages the fear. There’s another factor: they write bullets as though the principal task in recruiting people were sifting out and casting out all the riffraff! They think, If we don’t ask for all these things, all the requirements here in this endless job ad with its endless list of bullets, the whole world is going to apply for this job. So they ask for all this stuff that they end up not even caring about. They were ready to make her an offer to run the Call Center. She was like Er, that’s not going to happen, right? Participant: She turned them down. Liz Ryan: She turned them down. She said, “I want to mentor. I want to coach.” She didn’t mind a production environment, which in a weird way an animal shelter could be considered, but she really wanted to develop people even as the production engine was running. The call center execs were like “Oh yes, you can mentor, you’ll sit at this console and monitor the hold times and the waiting times and crack the whip over these call center agents, it’ll be great.” She kept looking. That job was --Participant: Quotas. Liz Ryan: Quota. When do I mentor and coach? After she got that response from the VP by showing him what she had just spotted herself, namely the relevance between the call center manager job and her animal shelter job, she realized that her background is relevant to almost anything and the same thing is true for you guys. I could not get you an interview at the Bolshoi Ballet to dance, necessarily, or with the US space program to be an astronaut, that would be challenging, but in most other situations, you guys can do it because all you have to do is flatter the reader to see the thing along with you. That’s what we have to do. It’s framing. Does it make sense, what I’m saying? Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Participant: Yes. Liz Ryan: Let’s do one together. Let’s do a really crazy one. What’s the relevance between an international aid organization where you worked as an administrative person, and a wind power company? What’s your segue? What’s the hook? Participant: Bringing people together. Liz Ryan: Bringing people together is a great one. What else? Participant: Merging cultures. Liz Ryan: Merging cultures and technology as an enabler, perhaps, right? As soon as you flatter them to say it’s the same thing, they’re like Oh, of course, it’s totally the same thing. You flatter them. They brought her in for that Call Center Manager interview, and it’s not the least bit surprising unless you’ve been drinking the Black Hole/speak to the job spec dogma. She had nothing on the spec, not one of the 15 requirements. I take it back, she may have had one or two – she had management experience and budgeting experience. The job spec is a left brained document. This analogy and story frame is a right brained activity. We are telling stories. Does it make sense? The hardest part of a job search is getting the interview. When you get the interview, I have total confidence that everyone in this room can get the job if you want it – although if you ever want me to come back and talk about interview, we will do that. The interview ratio is one to six on average. I mean that there likely to be about five other people in that interview process with you, although of course that number can drop quickly as people get screened out of the process. When you respond to a job, at that early stage before they’ve begun screening, the ratio is more like one to a hundred and fifty. So it’s very important to get through that keyhole, and get to the other side of the door, where the conversation can spread out and go in any direction, wherever it needs to go. We need to get through that keyhole so we can actually have a substantive conversation with these guys about the business pain and conditions on the ground. That’s our first goal once we start reaching out to employers, whether they have a job opening or not. They may have no job opening, but if they have pain and the will, in the form of money, to deal with the pain, you’re still going to be happy to be talking to them. So we need to get through the keyhole and we’re going to do it by avoiding the Black Hole and approaching your hiring managers directly. Write to these guys. You’re going to write a Pain Letter ™ and a Human-Voiced Resume ™ and staple them together with one staple in the upper left hand corner, letter on top of course and one- or two-page resume following the letter. The letter and the resume are on white paper, no pink blue whatever nineteen eighties Cyndi Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Lauper era resume paper. Give that stuff to someone to use as scratch paper. That era is gone. White paper, and the letter and the resume in black ink in the same font, so they look the same, and no horizontal lines, no curlicues, no design stuff unless you’re a creative person, or you know someone who wants to do some mild graphic things to your resume to help with the presentation. My focus is the content, to be honest. I would rather read an absolutely designfree plain resume with amazing content than see a beautiful resume that has nothing to say and that doesn’t brand its owner. Okay, you’re going to write to the hiring manager, whose name you can find most of the time on LinkedIn, if not on the employer’s own website. Joe Blow, director of operations, whatever. In an envelope and the envelope is this size, eight and a half by eleven, white. That way, the envelope is the same size as the packet and you don’t have to fold your packet to get it into the letter. We’re not going to fold it up because visually, you know, boom on the desk from the mailroom, and it has some heft, and it’s eight and a half by eleven, so the hiring manager has a bit of incentive to actually pull out your letter/resume combo and glance at it. You’re going to block print the hiring manager’s name, title and address on the front, not laser-print it. Participant: Would you ever go through a recruiter? I got my last job through a recruiter. Liz Ryan: Good point. You know what? If you have the kind of job assignments where a recruiter could represent you faithfully and would get assignments for you that you couldn’t get on your own, what the heck, do it. But check them out before you work with them because it can hurt you to work with that recruiter, right? If the recruiter is just using your paperwork to try to get an in with employers and actually has no relationships there, that would be bad, because your price tag went up by one-fourth by virtue of coming in through that recruiter portal. You could be blacklisted in effect by an employer if the recruiter is using your paper to spam the employer, because your stuff will come through the recruiter and the employer could easily feel like, “We don’t know this recruiter. We’re not paying fees to this agency. We’re not even going to look at the resume.” It’s sort of like you’re tainted by the portal through which your paperwork arrived, and that stinks for you because you could be an incredible fit for the job. Participant: Right. Liz Ryan: And you’re out of the pipeline because all of a sudden, you cost 25 percent more when you come through a recruiter, right? That’s how they get paid. Participant: Or a temp agency. Liz Ryan: Or a temp agency. So if you have ways to go to these people directly, I would try it before you go for a recruiter because that could be a conduit or it could be a door slammed shut. Does it make sense? Participant: You know, somebody said something about recruiters not working with you if there was a gap in there since you’ve worked. Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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Liz Ryan: Yes. Participant: Then recruiters don’t always get paid … Liz Ryan: They get paid when they make a placement, but they may find – some recruiters may find that their clients, the employers reject summarily candidates with gaps. That is actually a reason to go directly to the hiring manager and talk about pain, and leave the gap out of it – who cares about the gap, anyway? Why would that be such a big deal? God forbid, you got off the treadmill. How dare you, knave! Participant: That’s my problem. Liz Ryan: Yes. So, you know, those employers are going to hell. They have to be on their path. They’re going to hell. I just wrote a story about that in Businessweek. It’s called Not Working? Sorry We’re Not Interested and it’s about like how can you – it’s like … A thunderbolt is going to come and kill you because you have no ethics whatsoever as though your own company isn’t laying people off, as though somehow there’s some huge qualitative difference between the people who got laid off by their company through no fault of their own, and the people who survived the layoff. I’ve presided over corporate layoffs, sad to say, big ones at times; and often it’s the whole plant, the whole department, and it’s just Good bye. It has nothing to do with performance, so often – I would much rather fire people. I will fire people all day long, if they deserve it. Laying people off is the worst. It’s not your fault, you guys. This sucks. I know It’s horrible. We’re closing down this office. It’s the worst, right? Firing people who really deserve it is easy, because it’s the right thing for the company and undoubtedly for the person who’s being fired, as well. I mean, how many of those meetings have I sat in? Er, come in Jack, I’d like you to watch this video with me. Okay, here’s the video. Here is you going into the lunchroom fridge, taking other people’s lunches and eating them. At that point, you’re not going to have a long conversation. You’re done. You don’t work here anymore. Let this be a lesson to you, right? What do they always say when they’re on the video? “That isn’t me.” Kind of astonishing, really, like the chutzpah award of all time. [Laughter] Liz Ryan: God bless. God bless, right? So we’re going to have to wrap up. But does this stuff make sense at all, you guys? I’m talking about looking back at your career and your story, reclaiming every instant of it, making sense of the story and where it takes you, getting a new frame for yourself, branding yourself according to how and why you do what you do. Not lists of things and certifications and praising adjectives, right? Then figure out who these guys are, the people who need what you bring. Reach out to them with the message.

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Please keep me posted, and let me know how this stuff is working for you, what you’re running into and what you’re learning. I’m so excited for you – this kind of thing, the learning, the little “Ahas!” that pop up as you go through this process, they’re very fun to experience and I love to hear about them. I’ll be happy to hear from you, so please keep me posted and send me a LinkedIn invitation at [email protected] if you would like. Any super quick questions before I fly and pick up the fourth grader? Yes. Participant: I worked for a company for 17 years and it changed its name like three times and then got bought out by another company. Liz Ryan: Great. Participant: Do I represent it as being one 17-year-old – 17-year … Liz Ryan: I would – yes, I would represent it by the name they have now, and if you feel that you need to put in parentheses – what’s the name they have now? Participant: ABC Consulting Group. Liz Ryan: OK, ABC Consulting Group was, you know … Participant: Was Acme Explosives. Liz Ryan: You don’t have to go through all of the names that they ever had, just the name they had when they hired you. Just the one that hired you. So I would use the current name and if you feel like it would – there’s no need for this at all but if you just feel yucky about using a name where you never actually got a paycheck from them, you could put in parentheses “Was Acme Explosives” and mention the name they were using when they hired you. We don’t need the breakout, when each entity was bought. That’s the worst. This is a story frame. We’re just telling the story of a little boy or little girl who got excited about something and went on a journey and ended up right here, today. So all the stuff about this company split into these three units and that’s where I accomplished these eleven bullets, forget it. No one cares about that. Give us the story. What was the mission? What did you go there to make happen? How did you pull it off? Think missions – Ocean’s Eleven. What did you go to that job to do? We do not need “At this role in this company, I did these five things and at this role in this company, I did these other five things.” That’s way too much detail. You’re splitting up the story. We want the story together. We don’t want it chunked and chopped. If you had five roles in the company, just call your time there the most recent title, right? And if you feel weird about representing yourself in a higher level position for the whole 17 years, say – tell the story in a little statement we call the framing statement right under the name of the company. So you’ve got name of the company, where they’re located, where you worked. Not their headquarters. Where you worked as in the city and state where you actually did your work, and you’re going to include the years, not months, of your start date and end date, and your most Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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recent or current title and then you’ll frame the role by saying “I was brought in to help out in the mailroom and rose to become queen of the world.” That way, you make it clear that you we promoted over the years, although the title you’ll give as you share the employer name, location, title and dates is the title of the last job you held before you left that place. Don’t split out every title with dates and bullets. That’s so boring and awful. We want a story. You don’t have to give all the intermediate titles in there. Just give them the basic trajectory and then a few bullets, and the bullets are going to be story bullets. Not tasks. No one cares. Story bullets. “When our two biggest rivals merged, I launched an email marketing campaign that ramped sales 15 percent to two million bucks.” Problem, solution, impact. Yes? Give us the story. You only need three bullets or so per job, three ways you showed up and made a difference. We don’t need, “The job entailed X, Y, Z.” We could extrapolate that from the title. Make sense? Participant: What are some of the ways to research how to find the pain so to speak before you get ready to pounce with … Liz Ryan: That’s a great question. The key … Participant: If you assume it wrong, you could really just be shooting yourself … Liz Ryan: You know, the good thing about – you can’t really get that far off. How wrong can you be? I mean they’re not – if you hit it wrong with the pain, they’re not going to come to your house and slash your tires. [Laughter] Liz Ryan: So you’re fine. “I can only imagine, given your new distribution deal with the Wolfgang Puck organization that your talented marketing team is up against the wall” – how wrong can you be? The thing about the pain, it’s not insider information. That would negate the whole notion of pain-spotting because the idea is ‘I’m just out here and I’m an alert citizen.’ That’s why it’s appealing. You’re not saying “I heard this from my brother-in-law,” which is creepy. Does it make sense? It’s not supposed to be based on ‘my cousin used to work there and he told me.’ You’re just looking at their business situation like any reasonably astute citizen would do. What are the common types of business pain, you guys, that employers can face? Participant: Expansion or contraction. Liz Ryan: Expansion or contraction, number one, two, three, four, five and six, you know, you just nailed it. There are competitors coming into the market space. There are regulatory changes. These business pains are not obscure. We will write our next Ebook on the topic of Pain-Spotting ™, but you do it all the time in your non-businesss life so you’re going to see the parallels right away. Growing pain, contraction pain, turnover pain, we know these business Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com

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pains because we’ve lived them. We’ve surmounted them. That’s what we get to convey in those Dragon-Slaying Stories ™. We’ve been there, and we’d be happy to talk about it. So we are going to brand ourselves through our stories – in our Human-Voiced Resumes™, our Pain Letters™, our LinkedIn profiles and in our conversations with people. We’re going to decide on a frame for ourselves, not let ourselves be boxed in by someone else’s conception of what we must be. That’s ridiculous. We are the only people who have walked in our shoes. No one else knows our experience exactly the way we do. So we get to decide. We get to frame our perspective, our background and our beliefs about work and business exactly as we want to do. We get to use a human voice when we write or talk about ourselves. It is a new day. The human workplace is here!

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Human Workplace Search is a think tank, online community & consulting firm. Our mission is to reinvent work and career education for people.

Liz Ryan is CEO and founder of Human Workplace. Liz is a former Fortune 500 HR executive and one of the country’s most widely-read and well-respected career, workplace and branding authorities. Liz’s columns for Kiplinger’s Finance, Business Week, LinkedIn, TIME.com, the Harvard Business Review, Yahoo!, the Denver Post and the Huffington Post reach 30 million readers per month. Liz gives advice to 25,000 members on the Human Workplace online community and teaches career strategy and branding at the Leeds School of Business at CU-Boulder. She’s an opera singer, lives in Boulder with her husband Michael and has five kids. Molly Campbell is Director of Strategy at Human Workplace. Molly is a former Wall Street money manager and MBA who looked after $750M of other people’s money, then shifted to health care, became a holistic healer and grew a business naturally healing people and animals. Now Molly designs partnerships with Human Workplace clients from universities to government agencies, startups and international corporations. Molly is the leader of the Human Workplace Search practice. She has placed professionals with Peat Marwick, Owens Corning and Bacardi among other blue-chip firms. She lives in Boulder with her husband Jim and their two border terriers, Alex and Tommy.

Michael Wilcox is Operations Manager for Human Workplace. Michael makes sure our search clients, candidates, friends and new acquaintances get what they need.

REACH US: www.humanworkplace.com [email protected] (303) 440-0408 Boulder office

Copyright Human Workplace 2013 Not for duplication or transmission www.humanworkplace.com