Marketing Yourself in an Executive Career Transition

We’ve already highlighted the expectations for an Executive Looking to Make a Career Transition. Now that you have a basic understanding of what to expect and how to prepare for a transition, let’s discuss the best ways to make yourself marketable and potentially limit the time spent in transition.

Promote Your Expertise

As an executive, you’ve proven in one way or another your worth as an integral part of a business. Whether you ran your own company or had a prestigious role in a successful business, you probably possess the qualities and experience that hiring managers are looking for. The next step in your transition is to expose your skills associated with past successes to hiring personnel.
Consider the company you’re interviewing for. Is it a job where you’ll be working together with others on a constant basis, or will you be managing a team? Dependent on that role, you’ll want to adjust your resume and your interviewing techniques to convince hiring managers that you can meet and exceed their expectations.

Adjust Your Resume

Each resume you send should be a little different according to the job and the company.  Review and update your resume to included accomplishments that would appeal to each company. If you’re applying for a leadership role, talk about a time you managed and led a team of workers to success. If you’re going to be working with other people, talk about a time you participated in a group project and exceeded management’s expectations.

Cut the Fluff

When it comes to advertising yourself – less can be better. Hiring managers don’t have the time or patience to read a long, drawn out resume of unnecessary information. Include only anecdotes or attributes that they’d deem impressive, professional and applicable for your position.

Along with limiting your resume to the best most relevant info, you’ll want to promote your highest successes first. Think about watching a new TV show, if it doesn’t capture your attention within the first moments it’s likely you’re going to move on to something else. This also applies to your resume. Don’t let the hiring manager grow bored with useless information, it’s more likely they’ll move on. Use the beginning of your resume to capture their attention with outstanding accomplishments or skill sets. You want to immediately grab their attention so they remember and consider you as a top candidate.

Be Creative

Unfortunately we live in a time where your experience (i.e. age) can be held against you. This is where you may need to make some creative tweaks to your resume to highlight your professional or educational past while omitting details that may be held against you – like how long ago those accomplishments took place.

In other words, some things are best left unsaid. Let’s say you were the leader of a management team that completed a project which was extremely beneficial to your previous company…however this was done in the early 90’s. Consider omitting the time frame of this project and simply detail your responsibilities and contributions to that project.

Another example is if you held many different roles at different companies, but they were a long time ago, consider adding a separate section in your resume that simply lists your job titles. There’s no rule that mandates you need to include dates. However, if you are asked about the time frame of those jobs it’s best to be honest. This applies to your education as well. If you are older and graduated a long time ago, consider omitting the dates and only discussing them if asked.