Stop Writing Your Executive Resume Right Now:

Create Your Strategic Career Plan

If you want to shorten your job search, do not start with your executive resume. You will save time in the long run by being strategic early on. In fact, if you do not follow this advice, you are likely to stretch your job search from a few months to years. Avoid falling prey to the most unfortunate myth about your executive job search with this one strategic tip.

Your Executive Job Search Does Not Start with an Executive Resume

Yes, the title of this post says it all. Stop writing your executive resume right now. If you are writing your own executive resume, you need to put down your pencil, turn off your computer, and stop capturing your voice into your smartphone. This probably goes against everything you have ever been taught about executive job search, but it is true. If the first thing you are doing in your executive job search is writing your resume, you are bound to lengthen your job search, if not fail altogether.

The five top pitfalls of starting a job search by writing your own resume first are clear:

1. You have not yet identified the industry within which you want to work.

2. You have not yet selected a job level, whether it is individual contributor, manager, director, vice president, COO, or CEO.

3. You do not know how to temper your entrepreneurial roots to fit into a thriving organization.

4. You do not know which jobs you should apply for, but you think you will find them on job boards.

5. You believe you can pull out, capture, and write about exactly what a future hiring executive needs to know about you, on your own.

Turn Your Executive Job Search into Success with these 5 Steps

I know you want to get started, now that you have decided it is time to get a new executive job. But, clearly, starting with your resume is a bad plan. Here is a quick plan you can follow. Note that these steps all precede your writing your own resume.

Stop writing that executive resume and focus on strategy first. You will go faster and farther.

1. Pick an industry. You will not fit into every industry, but you will fit squarely into one or two.

2. Select the right job level for you, knowing that in some cases, the authority of a given title will vary by industry, company, and company size.

3. If you have most recently been an entrepreneur, start to think about your role as an executive leader rather than a start-up type. Keep the hunger, lose the lone cowboy approach.

4. Select a category of jobs; then use LinkedIn, your existing network, and strategic networking techniques to meet the right decision makers–or those who can effectively introduce you.

5. Hire an executive resume writer. If you are an executive leader, add a key member to your strategic team. Doing so indicates you are willing to include another type of expert whose knowledge does not mirror yours.

These steps might go against what you believe is conventional wisdom. However, if you have completed these steps, you will see immediately how your executive job search will go faster–all because you chose to stop writing and start strategizing.

Do you need to refocus, retarget, or rebuild your executive job search? Call Five Strengths.

Image courtesy of Stock.xchng / fcl1971