Rock the Vote: My New Site has Been Nominated for the CSS Design Awards

I am out-of-this-world excited to announce http://www.ShawnGraham.me (my new digital home) has been nominated for the CSS Design Awards—a contest recognizing the world’s greatest websites and an inspirational showcase celebrating emerging talent.

Check out my new site and, if you like what you see, show some love by casting your vote. Just click on the thumbnail of ShawnGraham.me to cast your official nod.

And if you would, please ask friends, family, your friends’ families and your family’s friends to vote as well. Winning this award would mean the world to Moly and I—over the past few months we put our heart and soul into bringing the site to life.

I hope you enjoy my new virtual digs as much as we enjoyed creating them.

I have a brand spanking new website.

For the past few months, I’ve been conspiring with a rock star designer on a complete overhaul of my virtual digs to coincide with the launch of my freelance career consulting and marketing communications business.

For the past few months, I’ve poured my heart and soul into every word of every page. And today I’m excited to announce that my new site is officially live and in living color.

So welcome! Please let me show you around…

I wanted my bio to be a little unique — I wanted to share my story: from the apple farm on which I grew up that was purchased by my grandparents in the early 1900s, to my first entrepreneurial venture at age 10 to today. Oh, and there are even a few pictures to look at.

Since consulting is at the heart of my business, I wanted to provide a menu of services for each of my focus areas brought to you in four snazzy buckets: career, higher education, entrepreneurs, and medium to large businesses. Along those same lines, I also thought it was important explain how I work with each client starting with our first conversation.

Next, you’ll find speaking which includes a real, live glamour shot from a recent presentation to a group of eager and highly-talented MBA students at Duquesne University. There you’ll also find an overview of presentation topics, a list of the organizations at which I’ve presented, and some good old-fashioned testimonials.

My blog includes a fresh new design, tighter categories, links to sites I like, and of course no blog would be complete without Twitter and RSS feeds. I also came up with a fancy new name—Creative Combustion.

The press page includes my media mentions in a few well-known publications and is meant to establish instant credibility as well as thoroughly impress my mom (pronounced “mum”).

Finally, I’ve added a fancy new contact form to make it easier for us to connect. So what are you waiting for? Drop me a line to let me know what you think of my new digs or so we can start to explore how we might be able to work together.

Cathartic resume process helps you sail into career dreams

This is a guest post by Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, chief career writer and partner with CareerTrend.net.

“I have invested hours and hours in the attached (resume worksheet).  I found the process everything from cathartic, to exciting, to tedious and insightful.”

These were the words of a recent client, (we’ll call him ‘Ben’) in an email he wrote me, after completing an intellectually laborious process of career brain dump, an introspection that would serve to equip my writing team with the insights and word stories to fuel his resume.

Ben’s experience is fairly typical. Another client (Jill), who called me last week to exclaim that she’d just accepted an offer from a major product company in a senior sales management role, reminded me of the note she had written several months ago while in the throes of our resume collaboration. Accompanying Jill’s completed worksheet, her note said:

“A very impressive document – I don’t know whether to hug or hit you for having to fill it out ;>)”

Interestingly, many careerists whose careers have sailed smoothly along through the years feel panicked and isolated when the winds of change capsize their vessel, and suddenly they are left clinging to a tiny life raft in a sea of confusion.

When these senior leaders and executives call me, they often have tried – and failed — to write their own, interview-generating career story; and since most proven professionals have solid writing and communications skills, their resumes have a certain polish about them that may cause the untrained eye to consider the resume ‘fine’ and job-search ready. Instead, they find their resume communication efforts sinking to the floor of a competitive and stormy job-search ocean.

The process of constructing your career resume vessel, as well as the end-result deliverable (the ‘resume’) are as integral as regular puffs of wind to the momentum of a sailboat – and as such, ‘fine’ just won’t cut it!

Alas, this is where the opportunity to refurbish one’s career vessel is crystallized, and a complete overhaul — a blank-slate remake of the resume engine and surrounding container — must be invoked.

To help careerists wrap their mind around the action steps, time and energy involved in writing a show-stopping and competition-beating resume, I’ve offered a mere ‘sampling ‘ of steps you MUST take, whether on your own or in partnership with a professional resume writer:

1. Deeply reflect on your areas of value that you offer a company, ‘going forward’ in your career. For example, if you are a Sales Management Professional, start by brainstorming 10-20 key traits, abilities, skills and/or achievements areas you particularly excel at, and enjoy. If cultivating efficient, committed and profit-focused team members is among the list, good. This is a start. But …
2. Now, you need to consider:
   1. Why is this of value?
   2. Can you sustain a resume story on the written page, and beyond, with fleshy examples of ‘how’ you cultivate such teams?
   3. Why did this trait/ability offer impact and value to your past employers?
   4. Why will this experience and competency matter to your target company?
   5. Show, don’t just tell, that you embody the adjectives and verbs with which you describe yourself in these bold and bragging statements. (Note: Singing your own praises is okay – in fact, expected — in a resume; you just must support those statements with beefy proof!)
3. As well, consider rough waters you encountered along your career journey, and how you used specific leadership, problem-solving, influence, process improvement (and so forth) talent to navigate those waters, adjust the project sails and create the results that bettered your department’s, division’s and/or company’s market positioning, product placement, revenue and/or profit gains, and such!
4. Be able to showcase these challenge encounters in a way that paints a color-rich, concise snapshot. Think challenge, action and results (CAR), and then expand beyond the ‘CAR’ by articulating what specific leadership strengths you stretched and deployed. Nuance your story.
5. Be able to organize your snapshots into key groupings that support, at most, 3-4 primary areas of your unique value. By trimming your 10-20 key traits, abilities, skills, etc. down to an overarching 3-4 key areas of value, you help the reader navigate your resume course versus drifting along, unfocused. By doing so, you are guiding them to the destination port – ultimately, that of calling you in for an interview.

These 5 tips are illustrative of a much-larger set of resume process steps involving self-introspection; focus on who you are now, and who you want to be tomorrow; research of types of companies, jobs and opportunities that you realistically and optimistically are equipped to explore; research as to what troubles your go-forward companies are facing today, tomorrow, two years from now; … and much more.

As well, you must apply acumen to knit together the career details, trim back loose threads and shape a career pattern that creates a functional vessel with just the right balance, to prevent your vessel from sinking and to compel you to sail into your career dreams.

Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter is chief career writer and partner with CareerTrend.net. Collaborating with professionals in career transition, or those individuals who desire to ignite their existing careers, Jacqui is one of only 27 Master Resume Writers globally and holds a BA in writing. An intuitive researcher, she unearths clients’ compelling story details and applies an inventive approach to career positioning documents and social media profiles. Jacqui can be found blogging at the CareerTrend blog, or sharing careers and other talent-promotion and leadership-related musings via Twitter at @ValueIntoWords.

StartWire: Eliminating the resume “black hole”

No matter how hard you try to avoid it, at some point during your job search you will undoubtedly fall victim to the dreaded “resume black hole”—a mysterious place at hiring companies where hundreds of thousands of job applications go never to be seen or heard from again. And that means you, along with scores of other job seekers, will be left frustrated not knowing whether you’re still under consideration or if you were rejected weeks or even months earlier.

In my 10+ years working as a career consultant, I have to say there’s no more frustrating aspect for job seekers than not hearing back from companies to which they’ve applied—something StartWire, a new company focused on radically improving the job search, hopes to change.

“If you’re able to easily track an order from Amazon.com every step of the way, why shouldn’t you be able to do the same with your job applications?” asked Chris Forman, CEO of StartWire, as he was explaining the rationale behind his new business venture. And as luck would have it, the information needed to provide status updates to candidates is already available as part of the Applicant Tracking Software packages used by most large companies.

With StartWire’s new data aggregation engine, job seekers are able to view the status of their applications online through a customizable dashboard and/or receive daily text updates from a list of 1,000+ employers (a list they hope to grow to more than 4,000 employers within the next month).

According to Forman, initial response has been remarkable. “Companies need to start treating job seekers like customers—after all, the job search can be pretty darn emotional.”

Beyond their application update engine, they also offer an expanding assortment of tools designed to help you more effectively leverage your social networks to find a job.

Have you tried StartWire? If so, post a comment and share your thoughts on whether they’ve been able to make the “resume black hole” a little less dark.

Fast Company Blog: Customer Engagement – Why All Companies Could Use a Little MOO

What do you do to make your customers happy that they forked over their hard-earned cash to buy your product or service? I mean beyond the fancy marketing pitch and slick packaging that you used to encourage them to actually buy what you’re selling, what do you do after the sale to make them feel good (or even ecstatic) about their purchase?

Add a little punch to your communication process

MOO.com, producers of high quality ecofriendly business cards, took what would normally be a bland, matter-of-fact order confirmation email and made it fun–something that’s much more engaging for customers.

Read more...

Does your resume lack texture?

If you rely solely on job duties, as is the case with most resumes, a recruiter will have no way of knowing if you were the best (insert job title here) or the worst. To stand out from hundreds of other candidates with similar backgrounds, your resume has to have texture.

Move beyond generic job duties

Ideally, every job-related bullet on your resume should address what was involved (your task), what you did (your role), and the impact that had on the organization or purpose behind what you were doing (your result).

Before you roll your eyes and say you didn’t make a big enough splash to qualify as “impact” on the organization, understand that impact could be something as simple as making a recommendation to management to try to make something better. For example, if you worked as a cashier and noticed the ChapStick hidden away in the far corner of the store wasn’t selling, and suggested they try moving it near the cash register, and the store ended up selling more ChapStick—that’s impact.

Show scale and scope

Unless you tell them, recruiters really have no way of knowing if you worked on something really small or really large. So if you say you worked with a client, they could be a small “mom & pop” shop or a huge multinational corporation or any and all points in between. When possible, mention the names of notable corporate clients. Or, if you can’t for confidentiality reasons, describe their size “a $300 million health care company.”

If you managed a huge project, look for opportunities to articulate how huge—How big was the budget? How many people were on your team? What was the ultimate deliverable? Was it widely adopted and/or successful?

Tell a story

Each bullet should be a self-contained, stand-alone short story. Include enough detail to give the recruiter a grasp of what you did while also remembering to cite specific examples or points of distinction that will help differentiate you from someone with a similar background. In almost every case, you should be able to tell each “story” in one or two well written and concise sentences.

Eliminate run-of-the-mill job duties

Read over every bullet of your resume and ask yourself “If I was the greatest candidate in the world and I was competing against someone with a similar background who was the worst, how might each bullet look different?” Bullets that focus solely on your run-of-the-mill job duties aren’t going to cut it.

So, how will you add texture to your resume?

What makes a great in-store display?

My local Giant Eagle is at it again. This time, they’ve created a massive wall (and I mean wall) of Pepsi just in time for March Madness. But the sheer size of their in-store promotion is only part of what makes it a source of creative inspiration for entrepreneurs and small business owners.

What else can we take away that could help drive sales and engage customers? Let’s take a look at following four key elements:

Location. Giant Eagle’s display is located just inside of their front entryway—space most other retailers waste by using it as storage for hundreds of empty shopping carts. By using their entryway, every customer will see their display on the way in and on the way out.

Theme. The Pepsi display incorporated both their hometown Pittsburgh Panther’s men’s basketball team and the NCAA basketball tournament which establishes a local connection to a major sporting event–something that might sound obvious but that many business owners fail to do with marketing campaigns focusing on a local audience.

Potential “add on” sales. What goes better with Pepsi than chips? At the edges of their display, Giant Eagle did a great job of incorporating complementary items–a key element of any effective sales strategy.

Value or potential savings. It’s one thing to say an item is on sale, but it’s another to really drive that message home by highlighting value or how much money your customers could save.

You don’t have to be a big grocery store to use in-store displays and visual merchandising to drive sales and engage with your customers. Don’t be afraid to incorporate any or all of the elements mentioned above to see what resonates best with your target audience.