Those of you who are top of your game are already well aware of your brand.   You manage it closely and you tune it to meet your professional needs.

One thing you might want to add to your thinking is your email style.

If you haven’t heard that email is killing everyone, you are probably not paying attention.  We have too much and taming the inbox is a huge professional pain point.

God bless TEDChris for taking this issue on and building a charter to help us all get better in this area.

One thing I think I would want to add as a guiding principle is to generally get over yourself.  You send email for the recipient not for yourself.  Take the effort to understand your recipient and their needs.   This is important when you want something from the recipient (especially as it relates to career opportunities).

Get your point across quickly and in their language and you will go a long way to improving your brand and being seen as someone who “gets it”.

I recently had a chance to attend Recruiting Innovation Summit held at LinkedIn Headquarters in May’2011. The session “Behind The Wall with Social Recruiting” by Susan Strayer, David Kippen started off with an interesting  question “Recruiting isn’t social until you take it offline“.  The audience were asked to wear a tag to indicate if they agree or disagree. The question is bit tricky and opinions vary depending on whom you ask.

The big professional / social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare have provided recruiters with unlimited access to millions of potential hires, provided ways for recruiters to observe, engage and communicate with their target hires. Social networks have really made it easy to reach out to potential hires.

Given I’m on LinkedIn, I get a lot of emails from recruiters asking if I would be interested to take up a new job. Of all these emails, certainly 2 emails stood out and totally 180 degrees apart in their approach.

Here is the first email (only posted part of the text that is relevant)

Subject: Not your typical recruiter…here is why

I differentiate myself from other recruiters by approaching our relationship with honesty, transparency, and integrity. My goal is to build long-term, lasting relationships and helping to find the best possible jobs for each individual

I have my fingers on the pulse of the job market, and am glad to share my knowledge and make introductions. Let me know when would be a good time for me to call and introduce myself to you over the phone.

Here is how the second email goes

Subject: Senior Java Developer

My client is looking for a senior java developer. Is this something you are interested in? If so, can you forward your resume.

For various reasons, the first email was intriguing.

It gave me an opportunity to know the recruiter, help the recruiter understand what my interests and needs are and when I might be looking for a job.

Obviously, the audience had varying few points. If you are doing mass hiring, it’s not feasible to reach out to every individual potential and talk to them. But if you are actively sourcing passive candidates in fewer #’s,  take it offline to know each other better.

Reaching out to the potential hire via the social network is “not the end of it”. In fact, it is just the beginning of a relationship.

What are your thoughts on this? What worked and didn’t work for you. Please share your comments below.

HR Examiner published their latest edition of Top 25 Online Influencers in the recruiting industry. As John Sumser rightly pointed out in the article “The HRExaminer is helping us understand who we need to talk to and who makes things tick in HR.”

While John and his team are working hard to put up this list, rest assured having the list of influencers will go a long way for anyone who is researching the market space, new product launches that need feedback from influencers or even learning from these thought leaders. If you are not already following these influencers, I wouldn’t wait anymore.

If you want to hear and learn from what these influencers have to say, you can find them actively participating and helping the community in the following weekly chats on Twitter

#JobHuntChat on Monday’s 7:00 PM PST moderated by Rich DeMatteo (@CornOnTheJob).

#HFChat on Friday’s 9:00 AM PST moderated by HR Margo (@hrmargo)

#TChat on Tuesday from 8-9 p.m. ET & 7-8 p.m. CT & 6-7 p.m MT & 5-6 p.m. PT moderated by Meghan M. Biro (@MeghanMBiro) , Kevin Grossman (@KevinWGrossman)

You can use tools like http://tweetchat.com/ to follow the chat stream.

Enjoy!

Want to give yourself an edge in your job? Want to be seen as a cut above the rest?

You should focus on getting happy.

According to a recent HBR blog

…happiness is the single greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy. Only 25% of your job successes are predicted based upon intelligence and technical skills, though we spend most of our education and most companies hire based upon this category. The “silent 75%” of long-term job success is based upon your ability to positively adapt to the world: optimism, social support creation, and viewing stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.

Consider how you can not only find happy candidates but also make happy employees. Companies that manage this will have an edge against the competition.

Surprising?

Maybe. But if you think about the alternative, it seems worth the effort to give it a try. Let us know what you do to keep a positive outlook at work and how you have managed to hire happy people.

There is a lot of great advice about finding a job.

Recently, I found myself with a job opening and I wanted to share what got my attention.

It’s not surprising, that a lot of what candidates did, that worked for me, was putting in the effort. Effort to stand out from the crowd.

It went something like this:

Flattery and personal compliments got you an interview.

Now I’m pretty sure if it was full on brown nosing, it would have backfired. I would never want an Eddie Haskell on my team,

but..

comments like “I want to work for someone like you“, and “you seem like a fun executive to work for” — worked.

Shallow… ?

Sure, but show me someone who wouldn’t like to talk to a candidate who had a real interest in being on their team. That’s not to say I granted interviews based exclusively on flattery. Only that if you were in a gray area, informed flattery gave you a noticeable edge.

Having a plan how you could help me, got you on the short list.

Showing how you could help me, got me wanting to hire you. Those who went the extra mile to show me that they had done the research and taken the effort to decide how they could do the job — got my attention. I was truly amazed how many people came to an interview and expected me to do all the work. They wanted me to explain the job, the market, how everything worked and to babysit them through the entire process. Put a candidate who is all about taking next to a candidate who is about giving and the giver wins every time.

So my practical suggestion is do your homework. Know the market, the team and the opportunity. Even if you don’t or can’t really know, show that you made some effort to find out. Those candidates who guessed and were wrong, were still seen more favorably, than those who didn’t.

There are candidates who are willing to make an effort and if it’s not you they will be taking your job.

This is continuation to our previous article “Personal Brand: Key to career growth!”. According to the latest Kelly Global Workforce Index which obtained the views of 1,34,000 people in 29 countries across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific for future career change and use of social media for “Personal Branding”.

Below are the statistics

Future Career Change in North America


          Almost two-thirds (64 percent) expect to have to change their career at some stage in the future, comprising Gen Y and Gen X (both 65 percent) and baby boomers (62 percent)

Use of Social Media for Personal Branding

          30 percent in North America are very actively using social media for personal branding, while 26 percent from Asia and 20 percent from Europe responded to use of social media.