Tag Archives: marketing

By John Sumser

Have you heard about personal branding? It’s the idea that in the 21st Century, you are responsible for the degree to which you are known; that you are responsible for your own marketing.

The theory goes that you are a brand and your success depends on that brand being widely visible. So, you need to have sexy visuals, lots of recommendations on LinkedIn, Search Engine Optimization of your profile and resume (this is a trick that makes your profile appear higher in search results).

You need a personal coach, a visual resume, video clips and a hundred other services. Then, people will easily find you and yours will be a life of leisure.

It’s a lopsided battle. Since there are only two or three John Sumsers, we don’t have to fight very much to see who’s on the top of the Google search results (I usually win). For the John Smiths of the world, Google-centric employment branding is some kind of a nightmare.

It is true that marketing is a personal responsibility in the 21st Century. We are being freed from our safety nets. At the same time. technology is making it possible for us to tell our stories in interesting ways. We are all going to have our own personal advertising agencies staffed by, who else, us.

Google the term ‘personal brand’.  There’s a magazine, a Wikipedia entry, tips galore and the earnest enthusiasm of early adopter evangelists.

To hear the soothsayers tell it, you need a broad public face that competes with large corporate brands.

This is more of the foolishness that is brought to you by the people who think that your friends are a network that can get you a job, recommend a restaurant and help you find a church. Somehow, your network is uniquely suited to deliver you to the exact people with whom you wish to interact. That’s the magic formula. You have to build your own personal marketing department while exploiting the connections you’ve made by working on the little league team and tending the community garden.

Assume that the gargantuan stuff is poppycock. Actually, you can assume it is something much more guttural, I just can’t call it that here.

But, you do need to toot your own horn in the world in which you live.

Most of us live in small cities where the employmnet and income generating opportunities are very specific. We don’t need to build personal brands as an avocation; we need to build our reputations as great workers and contributors.

If 100 people in your town know that you are an amazing plumber, coder, customer service rep, leader, executive or whatever, that’s probably enough to grease the skids of your career. While you do need to work on and manage your reputation, you don’t need a personal brand consultant.

Unless your name is something like John Smith, you live in a huge city and have no idea what you want to do.

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Guest Blogger John Sumser, a member of the Glassdoor Clearview Collection, is the founder and editor-in-chief of HRExaminer, a weekly online magazine about the people and technology of HR. Widely respected as an independent analyst, Sumser has been chronicling and critiquing the HRTechnology industry for eighteen years. During that time, he has consulted with more than 100 HR vendors on matters of strategy and positioning in the market. Prior to his involvement in the HR Technology industry, Sumser was a senior executive in Defense Technology. From large scale software development to naval architecture, he was the leader of tech development teams in a broad variety of settings. His passion is the intersection of people and technology.

The Glassdoor Team is a small yet seasoned group of individuals looking to provide greater transparency into one of the most important aspects of our lives – our jobs. Contributions to the blog are designed to present a unique perspective on current events, offer commentary on the inside workings on specific jobs at a multitude of companies, and provide details on the latest happenings from within Glassdoor.

By  Kevin W. Grossman

I’ll go out on a “social” limb here and say that companies with good career opportunities and good workplace culture are those that understand and embrace marketing and have smudged glass doors.

No need to scratch your heads, especially if you’re a job seeker. Let me explain.

First, take a look at their company career page. Wait, they don’t have one? Then move along unless there’s another professionally compelling reason for you to stay.

For the many that thankfully do, is there anything on the page beyond job listings that gives you an idea of company culture? Look at the people pictures on their website – do they look like real people who really work for the company and not pretty model stock photos? Are there any video testimonials from real people who really work for the company talking about what it’s like to really work there?

Really. Happy (passionate and hardworking) employees make for great employment branding, customer service and ultimately overall product/service brand marketing. That also means it should be a mobile and social-friendly site.

And have you reviewed the company LinkedIn profile so you can see who you may know in the company, even if it’s a 2nd degree contact you might be able to get introduced to? You should make the time to do this because it’s still about whom you know.
In fact, you should research those organizations you’re interested in via all your professional networks of choice and find out who you’re connected to directly and even indirectly and what it is they’re saying about company (or not saying).

Find out as much as you can about who influences the applicant-selection decisions and then do your best to connect with them and share your interest in said job/s. Don’t overwhelm the contacts you know (or don’t know), but don’t underwhelm them either by simply applying on the corporate career page (with the pretty model stock photos).

Not everybody you find is going to be happy about where they work or worked. In fact, we live between two worlds of business today – one where passionate Zappos love-zapped culture-centric companies focus on the internal and external customer and strive to create an emotional connection between product/service and consumer.

And then you’ve got the other one. The one we’ve been working in for a long, long time – the business as usual, non-transparent, top-down bureaucracy, one where customer inside and out usually run a slow second to productivity and profits.

The one with the better alignment and balance is the one who understands and embraces marketing and that emotional connection.

Which brings me to the glass doors; use the site with this namesake for your company research – Glassdoor.com. Yes, we all want to see inside and understand what makes the companies we’re interested tick, and the quicker the better. Most job seekers don’t have a lot of time to do research and apply for the “good” companies, so the more transparent and real a company is, the easier the research and the targeting.

There’s no guarantee you’ll get the job and it’ll still come down to whom is the most qualified time and time again.

So one more thing that may help with your own marketing tipping point – the glass doors are two-way, so keep your online nose as clean as possible. You may have heard that hiring companies aren’t supposed to use the information they find about you in social media – but they do.

In fact, over 75% of recruiters and hiring managers always consider your social media presence in their hiring decisions, so it behooves you to keep your online noses clean.

Keep it real, but keep it clean, especially when you’re noses are pressed up against the glass.

Good luck.

 Glassdoor.com is a career and workplace community offering a free inside look at jobs and companies with access to millions of job listings. Glassdoor enables employees, job seekers, employers and recruiters to simultaneously see – for the first time – unedited opinions about a company’s work environment along with details on salaries, company reviews, CEO approval ratings, job interview questions and reviews, and office photos as well as career advice.

By Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter

In this day of fast-food, social media attention deficit disorder-based communications, I must raise my hand and object. Not every business professional prefers these drive-through communications.  Instead, they prefer a resume entrée with which they can linger and digest.

In a recent blog post, “Resumes Are Not Dead!” by Glen Cathey in SourceCon News,  Cathey refers to “the limitations inherent with using Twitter, blogs, Internet articles, LinkedIn profiles and similar sources for talent identification” and refers to them as “shallow” sources of candidate information. He goes on to explain what he means by shallow, including referencing the limited detail available in such venues.

It is my firm belief (through my day-to-day career communications service to job seekers and interactions with hiring decision makers) that hiring leaders, board members, executives, supervisors and front-line managers are not conclusively ravaging the social media buffet to fulfill candidate recruitment initiatives.

Why Meaty Is In and Emaciated Is Out

A meaty and substantive career story, a well-forged tale that wraps around the hiring leader’s pain points and emerging needs, performs best.

LinkedIn profiles, replete with slide shows, blog posts, testimonials, snappy photos and groups joined, 140-character Twitter quips, Facebook wall conversations and “Like” affirmations do not a fulfilling, streamlined career enrichment conversation make.

Communicating a deeper, more introspective career message is imperative. Aspire to delve into rich tales of business solutions that untangled and resolved current issues and built fortresses for sustainable revenues and profits. In this way, a candidate connects with smart and thoughtful hiring decision makers who are in the throes of wrangling complex problems and future company goals.

Combining proof of problem-solving and business innovation that catapulted growth, with stories that layer in the “how,” the “why” and the critical “hurdle-leaping, people-influencing and process-improving” capabilities, the candidate creates texture and meaning that lures the reader.

Why Social Media Enhances (Not Substitutes for) a Resume

Often, with social media sound bites and the current trend for pared-down, ADD-focused resumes and other career positioning messaging, the outcome is a staccato, emaciated document that may initially influence a hunger but then fail to satisfy.

I wholeheartedly agree that forging social media relationships will attract your target audience to your value proposition—including visits to your blog musings, your LinkedIn profile and perhaps even your Facebook wall. As such, I am a power Twitter user, maintain a current LinkedIn profile and am fairly active on Facebook.

Yet, those engagements are called “social” for a reason. You must extend the message beyond the “social media relationship” to include a pragmatic, targeted, content-rich message that blends achievements with situations, that connects results with nuanced paths, decisions at forked-roads and encounters with flared personalities to a job well executed. You must, therefore, blend your online marketing prowess with a deeper-dive and focused career story that proves you are a leading contender for the target audience and jobs you seek.

The resume is the hub where all these engaging social profiles and interactions converge; or better yet, with a well-thought-out resume at the center, the social media spokes naturally emanate, supporting and extending your unique value proposition to a broader audience of influencers.