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Marketing Resume Tips Build Your Personal Brand
As a marketing professional, you know the importance of branding a product or company. By applying this same strategy, you can use your resume to build your own brand to differentiate yourself from the competition (other job seekers), convey your value (how you benefit employers) and generate results (interviews). Follow these tips.
Use Your Resume as a Marketing Tool
“Marketing professionals must bear in mind that their resume is the most important marketing document they’re ever going to write,” says Terri Robinson, president of Recruit2Hire.com, a recruiting company specializing in marketing and sales professionals. "By using the same principles of creating a great marketing campaign, they can create a winning resume to stand out from the crowd.
h4.Start with Your Value Statement
Your resume’s career objective should serve as your value statement. Use this section to summarize the key strengths and main value you bring to an employer. “Tell me the highlights of what your career encompasses, and communicate the really significant accomplishments you’ve delivered for your employers here, and you’ll have my attention,” Robinson says.
h4.Here’s an example of a value-driven summary that incorporates a candidate’s top accomplishments:
Fortune 500-experienced marketing manager with an eight-year track record of strategizing and executing sales-driving marcom campaigns that have:
• Captured market-leading dominance (market share gains of up to 58%) for both newly launched and existing product lines.
• Increased sales by millions of dollars (up to $5.8M per campaign).
• Improved closing ratios to record highs (up to 85%) by equipping field sales with high-quality, low-cost print collateral.
Emphasize Benefits, Not Features
“Marketing professionals have a big advantage when it comes to career writing,” says Deborah Wile Dib, president of Advantage Resumes of NY. "You know how to market products. You can use the same techniques – showing benefits, not features – to market yourself on paper.
Robert Boroff, a recruiter and the managing director of executive recruiter Reaction Search, calls this “selling the sizzle,” adding, "When you see fajitas being taken to a table, it’s not the steak people are drawn to – it’s the sizzle. Sizzle points create spark and interest from hiring managers.
