Build a Winning Personal Brand
The words "Curriculum Vitae" translated literally mean "the story of your life." Your CV is a very important document: With it rest your hopes and dreams for the future, that next step up the career ladder, a better position, more money, new challenges, etc. Therefore, if you do not want to miss out on that ‘dream opportunity,’ your CV has to represent the best you can offer. Writing a CV that has the potential to be short-listed and/or make a positive impact is a skill and requires expertise. Many brilliant professionals and top brains haven’t been able to make it to the top or get the desired results in their careers only because they couldn’t position their talents, skills, knowledge and experience positively.
Let’s look at the psychology of selection here. A recruiter or a hiring manager is a human being who, like all other human beings, is driven by emotions. It’s a well-established fact today that human decisions in any walk of life are more emotional than rational. The rule of thumb to help define the ratio explaining emotions vs. rationality in human decision-making is now agreed to be approximately 70:30. Dr. Daniel Kahneman and his team’s seminal Nobel Prize-winning work clearly establishes that we play in an “emotional” economy and not a strictly rational one. From consumer behavior to employee attitude to relationship health, everything is driven by human emotions. The science of behavioral economics has clearly upstaged the neoclassical theories of economics in explaining human decision-making processes. The same applies to building a CV. You have to learn to connect to the prospective recruiters/hiring managers. More importantly, you want their mind share in areas where you are sure you shine and possess strengths. The selection process is as much an art as it is a science. The element of human bias will never be completely eliminated. But that’s not always bad news. It, in fact, can be an opportunity if you are smart enough to crack this psychological code.
Let the biases work for you and not against you. This is where a CV built intelligently can help you. Why a powerful CV? Building a powerful CV is akin to building a personal brand. A good CV is like a positioning tool to position and promote your personal brand. It’s the first touchpoint with your prospective recruiters and needs to be handled smartly and with a great degree of care. A more basic benefit is that a powerful CV helps you get an edge in a highly competitive and crowded selection process. It helps you stand out and can definitely get you the right breaks, right career changes or upward career direction. Also, a good CV helps the recruiters peg you from a value perspective and, psychologically speaking, enhances your odds of getting a better remuneration/reward, even before you go to the negotiation table.
Last but not least, a smart CV will create a favorable mental predisposition with your interview panel and allow the interview discussion to be steered in the direction you want it to go. This can be the big difference between a successful or an unsuccessful interview. This, to me, is very critical for interviewers and interviewees alike, as too much time is wasted in trying to find faults/gaps, interrogate or indulging in a surface level show of one’s knowledge and capabilities. It's vital that the words used in your CV/resume really make the reader want to meet you and invite you to that all-important interview. Your CV/resume is your sales document to a recruiter/employer, and if it fails to sell you, then it will probably end up in the trash bin. A CV is like a brand statement. It does the rounds beyond the audience you expected to target, and thus builds a perception about you. It helps build your constituency, outside of your immediate network. It remains a potent and powerful tool to attract the right audience for the right reasons. If you are senior, and are doing well, your CV should be all the more powerful and should even be exemplary. So, what are the critical steps to build that "powerful CV?"
- Please spend quality time to research the organizations and the roles you are applying for. This is the most basic (yet most critical) step and surprisingly, the most ignored aspect of career management. The company web site and other public domain information do offer some important cues. They will help you understand some key themes that should show up in your CV. ...
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Author: Lalit Khanna