Since Tom Peters published “In Search of Excellence” and promoted the concept of ‘brand you’ and personal branding as a vital component in career management, authors, journalists, web site creators, HR people and the like have speculated on what the concept is and how to apply it effectively. In the meantime developments on the Web have crept up and brought us social and business networking, with sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Naymz, Plaxo, etc, etc, etc, and brought a new perspective to personal branding. We join these sites, complete the registration, create a profile and without realising it have stumbled our way into creating a personal brand. Does this matter? The Daily Telegraph reported in January that a Microsoft study revealed 7 out of 10 employers researched candidates online – so, yes, it does!
We should understand this process and how damaging inappropriate information can be – the drunken photograph on Facebook can turn an employer away without the candidate ever knowing. What can we do about this? We are all already branded whether we like the idea or not, to deal with it we should take charge of it. A well thought out and dedicated career website, describing you positively, hosted on a reputable career management service will allow you to be found by the search engines and present a coherent, professional image. This will counter the inadvertent branding from social and business networking and allow you to take charge of the “branding” to ensure that it works for you – not against.
AccendoCV has identified these and other risks and created an easily accessible solution, a Web CV. This is a personal career website. It comes with a wide choice of attractive templates, and a professional CV writer will do the hard work based on information you give them. Your CV and personal contact details are then stored in a secure area of your website, which you can provide access to by giving recruiters a password. The CV writer can, of course, also write your CV to help create a complete and coherent “brand.” To complete the picture you can take your CV to the next level by adding a short video resume under the tutelage of AccendoCV and using your personal career website as the delivery vehicle. This is an important expansion of the traditional CV and creates a unique opportunity to control & define those all important first impressions.
This package of career tools will separate your application from the crowded job market place, and enable you to use today’s technologies to have a powerful and positive effect on your career.
