Face To Face Personal Branding - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Face To Face Personal Branding - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Your resume is the traditional way job seekers create their personal brand. Its the first impression that most job seekers make. But theres a downside to creating your personal brand through a resume. Your resume is prescreened between 2-5 times before a hiring manager sees it. What does that mean to you? It means most times youll never have the opportunity to make a first impression with the hiring manager, because even the best resume only gets through prescreening a small percentage of the time. When you depend on your resume to make your first impression, it usually fails. Lets compare this to making your first impression face to face. Heres 6 reasons your face to face personal brand is more memorable: Time Spent: Youll have more time in front of a hiring manager face to face than theyll spend on your resume. Since resume readers spend an average of 15 seconds on your resume and youre likely to have many minutes face to face with a hiring manager, you should be able clearly see where youll have more time to make an impact. Hiring Manager Attention: When youre face to face, you have a much better chance to gain the hiring managers full attention. When scanning your resume, the hiring manager could be interrupted by a call, by email, someone stopping by to talk literally anything could distract the hiring manager from giving full attention to your resume. Memory: The hiring manager has a much better chance of remembering you after youve met face to face. Your chances of being remembered from your resume are much lower. Sheer Numbers: The hiring manager sees hundreds of resumes sometimes hundreds in a single day. That hiring manager will see far fewer candidates face to face, making your personal brand much more memorable when you make it face to face. Personalization: When youre face to face with a hiring manager you can directly ask about his/her needs and then respond, personalizing your communication to meet the hiring managers needs. A resume is only a one way communication, so youll have a tough time personalizing it without understanding the hiring managers needs. And of course, Prescreening: You have much greater odds of being seen by a hiring manager going directly, rather than indirectly using a resume to gain attention. Your resume will first have to get past an automated prescreen through an applicant tracking system, through an HR rep or recruiter and up to 3 additional prescreening steps (for large employers) before youll get the chance to make a first impression with a hiring manger. So what would you rather do? Risk that your resume wont get through prescreening and youll never have the chance to make a first impression? Or extend your efforts to make your first impression with the hiring manager? Author: Phil Rosenberg is President of http://www.reCareered.com, a leading job search information website and gives complimentary job search webinars at http://ResumeWebinar.com. Phil also runs the Career Central group, one of Linkedin’s largest groups for job seekers and has built one of the 20 largest personal networks on Linkedin globally.