• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

• Employers won’t buy generic employees.

• Employers will buy the intangible qualities implied by your brand (you are like Nike, too).

➤ How to Create Your Brand

Personal branding is about making yourself stand out so that people trust you and are interested in you. Guerrillas do this by leveraging their previous employers’ brand (names, slogans, and logos) to create an identity that is memorable and desirable to the people they want to reach.

For your cover letter, this means naming the projects you worked on or the clients you sold to. Be specific. Be detailed. Sell the sizzle and the steak.

For your resume, it may mean taking the logos (with permission, of course) of the companies you worked for or the product you developed and placing them on your resume for extra punch. Nothing will get an employer’s attention faster than a well-known brand’s logo, especially if it is a competitor or a coveted account (this reaction is known as the “halo effect”).

What would make the person reading your resume take notice of you? Could it be your training at another company? Might it be the companies you have sold to? Were you responsible for a major product that the employer might recognize? There are likely thousands of images you could use. You only want to put in 5, so choose the 5 your reader is most likely to be interested in. Putting in more than 5 makes it too crowded.

Table 2.2 is a list of suggestions for you to use in choosing your images.

Let’s get right into how to choose your most marketable skills and write about your accomplishments to reflect your brand. We will use the output you produce in this section with the clever design of your resume(s) in Chapter 5. You will reuse the info in LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.

■ EFFECTIVE BRANDING IS ABOUT SELLING WHAT MATTERS

This section is designed to help you do 2 things that are essential to branding yourself:

1. Determine your marketable skills, and

2. Find achievements that prove your claims.

The data you assemble here will help you write your Guerrilla Resume later (in the Chapter 5). DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP! In fact, if you can’t find the time to do these 2 things, please stop reading now and ask for your money back—this book will be of no use to you.

Ready? Let’s begin.

First, we will ...

Table 2.2 Resume Image Suggestion List

➤ Determine Your Marketable Skills

Your Guerrilla Resume will highlight your most valuable and attractive skills in such a way that employers are more likely to call you. So, what are your most marketable skills? Complete the following 2 exercises:

Exercise 1: What do you do well? What do you do better and more easily than other people? Is it the work you’re doing now? Something you studied in school? A hobby? Take out a pad of paper and write down your answers, no matter how unrelated they are to work. The goal is to get your creative juices flowing.

Let’s take a fictitious job seeker, Sally, and write down what she does well: public speaking, sales, client service, managing projects, solving computer problems, managing others, speaking French.

Exercise 2: What do you enjoy doing? What skills do you most enjoy using on the job or in school right now? What would you do even if you weren’t paid? Write your answers down.

Here are Sally’s answers to this second question: public speaking, bicycling, client service, solving computer problems, baking cookies, managing others, speaking French, serving as a Girl Scout leader, hiking, writing.

Now, you’ll see that Sally’s answers to question 2 produced a different set of skills from question 1. That’s okay, but you will notice several skills that appeared in both lists. That’s better than okay—that is exactly what we’re after!

When you write down a skill that you enjoy doing (question 2), which you have also written down because you do it well (question 1), highlight it in some way.

Let’s go back and highlight Sally’s skills listed in response to question 2 that were also answers to question 1: public speaking,