Tweet: Résumé, LinkedIn Profile, Bio, and Cover letter each has a purpose in your campaign and branding. Learn how to approach each with a purpose.

Clients often approach me to help them with their marketing. Often, too, they come with the idea that once their résumé is done it can be used to broadcast their message through the different channels and means to get them the attention and the action they need to make their transition successful.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

To launch a successful campaign each of the available channels—résumé submittal, LinkedIn response, cover letter with a résumé through an inside contact, or a prospect letter—must be used differently and appropriately to exploit their full potential and to get the most impact. Although the foundational résumé provides the basic branding and the message required to establish your value proposition in the job market, other avenues complement this message to provide the dispositive insight to the reader about you on why your message deserves attention and further action. The purpose of this blog is to disabuse the notion that résumé is all that is required to properly launch your marketing campaign and that every other message in a campaign is a “copy and paste” version of this résumé!

So, let us take a closer look at each of the elements of your marketing collateral and how to design and fashion it for most impact.

Résumé: Your résumé is a statement of your value proposition stemming from your chronological accomplishments and how you translate those accomplishments into a compelling message that a hiring manager can get excited about. Contrary to common apprehension a résumé is not about you; it is more about the job you want. Also, it is not about yesterday, but it is about what you want to be doing tomorrow.

Almost every résumé I see initially when clients first come to me are opposite to what I just stated. They start with a Summary (which anchors them to “yesterday;” are full of bulleted statements that read much like the job descriptions written in the past tense, which are not accomplishments; and fail to provide any differentiated value that makes it stand out).

So, to make a forward-looking résumé based on your accomplishments (not just your experience) requires a different mindset, design, and effort. In such a résumé your leadership story (narrative) must jump out as a coherent and compelling statement of what separates you from all the others in the same area of work. This is what makes this part of the résumé design so hard and challenging. Merely populating your bullets with results and numbers is nearly not enough, as such an approach does not tell a story, raising more questions in a reader’s mind. (For example a résumé bullet: As a Regional Sales Manager increased sales 15% in Y-1, can be an impressive bullet, but it does beg the question, why not 20%?)
Despite the need to salt your résumé with story-telling bullets its length must be contained to make it concise and compelling. Here, more is not better. Typically, a two-page résumé with a strong leadership narrative, a compelling story line, and a highly differentiated portfolio of accomplishment is a tour de force for anyone who wants to flaunt their strong leadership salt.

Although résumés are usually submitted in electronic formats and are scanned by Applicant Tracking system (ATS), often surrendering their graphical and esthetic designs to machine-digestible text, the original must be carefully designed, laid-out, and presented for great visual appeal with clean, clutter-free look, easy-reading font (San Serif is preferred) and error-free presentation. Often, résumés are seen for the first time by hiring managers and interviewers when you bring them to the interview. This is where a sharp-looking résumé, printed on an impressive stock, presented without folds, does make an impact.

LinkedIn Profile: A LinkedIn Profile provides the following elements to make your case to its reader:

1. Your Headshot
2. Headline
3. Summary
4. Experience
5. Posts
6. Publications
7. Projects
8. Languages
9. Skills and Endorsements, and
10. Recommendations

I have not listed your Education, Interests, and Personal Details in this list, but they have their place in the overall picture you want to present. In this discussion I am going to mostly focus on the Headline and Summary parts and then, briefly discuss others.

It is best to start with the Summary, which provides 2000 characters of narrative that tells your story in a personal, somewhat intimate, way to its reader. Unlike a résumé, which does not use personal or collective pronouns (I, We, Us, etc.) your narrative in the Summary part reads much better when you use personal pronouns throughout. This changes the tone of the narrative and makes it more personal and intimate in its read.

It is best to tell your most compelling accomplishments with actual stories as exemplars of your leadership. Small paragraphs (3-5 lines each) make it for an easy read with active tense and short sentences. It should read very differently from how a résumé typically reads (more formal, staid, and factual) even though it may tell a story in each stint or bullet.

Once the Summary is finalized the Headline should flow from it. Do not make your headline read like a job title; make it read more like newspaper headline that intrigues the reader to “buy” it. So, instead of casting your Headline as Senior Marketing Manager at Salesforce, consider, The Marketing Genius that Proposed Dreamforce as its name for the Salesforce’s Premier Industry Event! You have 120ch. for your headline. Use it wisely!

The Experience part provides much greater detail to tell your story at each stint (2000ch.), which helps you with choosing the right words for good search results.

LinkedIn search result is based on the weight it assigns for the words appearing in decreasing importance, starting with the Headline. So, make sure that your Headline has the most important search word you choose so that others can find you on LinkedIn. As you go down the list of items I have enumerated the search weight progressively decreases. So, in the Experience section it is a good idea to have some repeated key words for a better search result.

Your Headshot is visually the most important element you can present. Make sure it is a clean headshot (of ONLY you), professionally taken (no selfies), and presented well (no passport or driver’s-license photos).

Bio: A bio is usually a good collateral to have for senior professionals (above VPs) that provide a one-page narrative of your career in a easy-to-read format with highlights of your career, without much detail (unlike your résumé). A bio is useful when someone at a high level quickly wants to take a look at your past and decide if they want to take the next step. A bio is effective when you send a prospect letter to a senior executive at a company, where a job opening does not exist, but you are sending a letter with an idea for them to look at you to pursue this idea further.

If you enclose your résumé with such a prospect letter the likelihood of someone intercepting that letter, and, seeing the résumé attached to it, promptly sending it to the HR for action, sabotaging your original objective is quite high. A bio attached to such a letter is less likely to have such an outcome.

Cover Letter: In today’s job market ethos, cover letters are disparaged. The main reason for this stance is that they often do not provide any new insight or value to the recruiter or the hiring manager. Most submittals of cover letters are banausic, with a copy-and-paste from the job description and parts of your résumé. For this reason alone companies such as Amazon expressly forbid cover letter submittals with résumés. Because with such an approach you are telegraphing that you’re too lazy to have any original idea on how to make your company better in your new role, so you’re just taking this easy way out to “impress them.”

Instead, a meaningful cover letter must immediately grab its reader with some insight about the company, its market, competitor, or changes that are around the corner and how you are going to address these challenges head-on in your new role. Such a letter requires thoughtful research, a well articulated point-of-view (PoV) and a compelling argument as to why you are the ONLY candidate that can do this for them. This is why such letters are not easy to write. You may also want to view your cover letter as your closing argument that forces the hiring manager to look at you differently from other candidates.

So, now that you understand the role of each of these elements in your marketing collateral you may want to plan your effort to create each of these elements to suit your strategy and how you want to execute it to land your dream job.

Good luck!