Build your personal brand through Resume 2.0

This blog post is inspired from the movie 3 Idiots.Great movie with an excellent message for the educational system in India. Watch this video clip especially the interview scene- from the time 4.43 till 6:50..


The key message from the interview is that ones' simple, honest and direct approach may or may not yield results ( in this interview it did yield result) but for sure will resonate well with ones belief systems. This self belief has certainly helped Raju Rastogi ( the student in this movie) to speak his heart out. What worked for him was not his resume,certainly not his grades or qualification but the direct connect that he was able to establish with the interviewer with utmost honesty. I like this statement " It took 2 broken legs to get me on my feet" -brand Raju Rastogi


Now imagine Us.The body of knowledge, interests,passion,hobbies all that we have accumulated painstakingly for so many years....how can we capture all that and represent ONESELF as a brand in a 3 page resume or within the 45 mins interview time.Tough isn't it 


The good news is that you don't have compress all that into a 3 page resume or a 45 min interview.We are living in interesting times.There has be a  tectonic shift in the way candidates are identified by organizations. For example Jason Zimdar, a graphic designer got his dream job @ 37  Signals without a resume. How is this possible? Its all about personal  branding. Much is written about the  need for personal branding and the ways to achieve it. Dan's Swabel Me 2.0 is an interesting book on personal branding.


 All it takes is 10 mins a day to just pen down your thoughts in some journal...even better if you can KEY down your thoughts in some kind of an online journal..


Although this blog post is not a prescription on how to build a Personal brand, here are some baby steps to get started:

• Read interesting blogs: Based on your chosen topic, identify interesting blogs using technorati or blogpulse and read these blogs regularly.. You get an RSS feed onto your desktop
• Start writing blogs: Use any of the free blogging tools like blogger,wordpress etc and get started with your online journal entries. I am sure there will be great inertia to start blogs as we are grappled with 2 questions: 
• What Do I write?
• How to ensure that am factually correct?

Don't worry about it. You are not writing a book for a world wide audience on day one. Let your blogs be based on your interests , areas in which you are  passionate about or on core subject matter. Content is more important than getting it grammatical correct( but don't ignore it)...The blog requires a theme and a personality and some mental disciple to put your thoughts on a regular basis.. Very simple isn't it

• Get your social Media foot print: Suggest you have an account with Facebook for personal and professional contacts and Linkedin for purely professional reasons.This will certainly help you to get new connections,exchange ideas, promote blogs as well as to answers some questions on Linkedin.This will certainly make you more visible
• Get Portable: Based on your interests, create portable video and audio files. Video files can be posted on Youtube and can be made viral through social media. Audio podcast is another interesting way to reach a large audience.You can push your podcast into Apple's iTunes or any podcast alley.
• Graduate to next level: Once you have gained confidence. start contributing to vertical specific  blogs or websites.Forex:www.boxesandarrows.com for Usability, www.junta42.com for marketing related content. This will help reach the right people within the industry

In all this there are 2 basic principles to be followed:

• The content should be original - true reflections of your thoughts and opinions
• Leave a trail - Make sure you leave your website or blog address or social media connect details

With better inbound links and social footprint your blogs/websites might get better ranking on Google.These initiatives will certainly make you easily searchable on the web.

New trend is that  organization wanting to recruit you will not longer be interested in the 3 page resume document. What will be more valuable and interesting is all the content that you have generated all along.The interviewer will potentially use all this information and form opinions. With the new age resume there is no need to compress information.  Get started and everything that you write gets automatically added to your new resume  - Resume 2.0

Make a journal entry and your valuation starts.....