Writing a Resume for a Global Job Search 05/01/2012
 More and more executive mobility is going beyond borders especially outside the United States. Individuals seeking a fast-track have a willingness to go where the action is in the market for top talent. This movement, of course, is predicated on the industry sector or market vertical for any executive but the globalization of the workplace provides worldwide opportunities in any sector or vertical. Languages fluency can be an advantage but it is not a deal-breaker that inhibits relocating to new global markets given that English is nowthe universal business communications tool. Further, cultural differences are diminishing rapidly as we converge iPhones or Androids in hand to a common communication style with one another. The Global CV Resume (CVs) are the most ubiquitous tool of the job search in any country. Though their emphasis in the initial search process is decreasing, eventually one needs to have something tangible to handover to human resources/personnel for their records. Certainly it is assumed that the hiring manager would want a document to review and use as a contextual format for the actual interview with a candidate. We still erroneously assume that resume styles diverge markedly from one another in Asia, Europe and the Americas when, in fact, they are converging. The new global resume is an amalgam of the more modern USA look with the content expectations of Europe and Asia. This is because former notions of resume construction have dissolved or gone by the wayside with the advent of the internet and the digital resume. Length of the Resume If you are not writing an academic CV which has remained fairly traditional and consistent, then the conventional wisdom about the length of a resume is now blurred across continents. The dated rule of the one page resume lingers only in the MBA resume book, but for executives in the workplace, the length of a resume has no hard and fast rules. The one page resume has given way to multiple pages because when read digitally, as 99% are nowadays, the length is ignored while scrolling down the screen. Thus, American resumes have come more into alignment with the typical length of European and Asian resume standards, e.g. two or more pages. Photos More and more, European and Asian resumes are including photographs. Of course this is problematic in the USA due to discrimination issues and potential for litigation. However, a photo is considered a given on Linkedin.com. Including a one’s linkedin.com URL in the contact section of the resume is an alternate option that can be used anywhere. Personal Information Far more personal information is offered up on European, South American and Asian resumes than in the USA. Outside the UK, it was traditionally expected that one disclose age, and marital status. This is less and less the case as recruiters are expecting information to be relevant to the position. Personal interests and hobbies are looked for globally to gauge a well-rounded cultural as well as cultural relevancy. In the USA, personal interests are given less attention and considered more extraneous information for the most part compared to Europe. Layout and Language It is important to Anglicize words to British spelling not American for most of Asia, and the UK. American spelling can be acceptable in Europe and Latin America and may even please recruiters in some countries there. Not all resumes are on the same size paper, and even if read online initially, they will be printed eventually. Check the country you are targeting for paper size. For example in the UK resumes are printed on A4 paper (297mm X 210mm) while American ones are on Legal (216mm X 279mm). Be sure to set the paper size for printing on the resume you send. Make it Memorable Aside from the differences noted above, resumes today are astutely focused on your accomplishments, abilities, and branding. How you sell yourself is far more important than anything else. That is where you should place your attention and emphasis. 2 Comments  Beyond the major international corporations, mid-sized companies and start-ups are providing opportunities for up-and-coming professionals and executives to relocate globally within many business sectors. For example, I consulted to a top financial officer at a second tier consumer brands company who was given the opportunity for his next role to move to China and run a manufacturing and distribution site as general manager. Originally he turned it down seeing it as a side-track to his quest to achieve top management status. After we discussed his career goals, he reconsidered this option as a way forward within his company. Years ago the international assignment was a given for a rising management star or top performer. It was getting your “ticket punched” on the journey to the top echelons of the executive suite. A global career is far beyond those simple goals today as it is now a career path. Being willing to work worldwide can ensure career survival, longevity, and resiliency as well as advancement. Here are five reasons why you should consider working outside of your native or naturalized country. Everything is Global This is not a cliché but a given. A little over ten years ago in Silicon Valley, venture capitalists were asking startups to write into their business plans a component for outsourcing parts of the business, preferably off-shore. This was a term-sheet requirement for A and B rounds of funding. What they were asking for then is now SOP (standard operating procedures) for all companies. Not just large corporations and startups, but all companies are seeking markets and manufacturing sources worldwide. The major providers of specific products, services, and commodities are not located in one country anymore. Corn, once an indigenous crop from Latin America, is not being grown in Pakistan. Advances in genetically altered crops have enabled agri-business to expand production across climatic zones. In emerging markets, the ongoing quest for energy resources and raw materials has fueled economic growth in Africa and South America. The value to manufacturing products closer to local markets is a driving necessity with the rising costs of fuel and transportation and shrinking margins on consumer goods. All of this adds up to all business being done beyond borders. It is exceeds the capacity of any country to generate all the executive expertise and niche talent for multinational corporations locally. And there is an advantage to companies to develop their management teams’ ability to work with a distributed employment pool. Compensation packages for management are being localized without the ex-pat benefits that made relocating executives to other countries often unfeasibly expensive. With rising salaries in emerging market a leveling out of equity pay is making global work not just feasible but expected by companies. The World is Homogenized Language and culture used to be barriers to entry for an executive moving into emerging markets from the USA and even the EU. This is no longer the case as access to global media creates global trends in fashion, entertainment and sports, specifically football. If you are reading this article online, then Google Translator can do a reasonable job of translating into your native tongue. The tools we use to communicate in business are online, ubiquitous and viral in nature. The adoption rate of social sites such as Facebook and Linkedin testify to that fact. There is no equivalent social site duplicating Linkedin in Australia or India because there is no need at this point. Given the homogeneity of products across borders, expertise in manufacturing, marketing and sales is product-driven more than culture-driven, especially in fast moving consumer goods, pharmaceutical and personal care products, as well as food and beverages. Today a stroll down a street in Istanbul or Mexico City or Taiwan would show business people dressed in what is euphemistically called “western” garb. Further, being bilingual or trilingual is very commonplace today with English commonly spoken by all business professionals. It is the USA that is now the oddity in the global business world by its generating mono-lingual professionals. That will be the challenge to the upcoming generation of US executives to compete with executives from other countries. We are all becoming more alike in the business world in terms of communications and cultural style. Be it called modernity or globalism, the economic bonds that tie us into a whole also enable a worldwide workforce and career opportunities. Growth Opportunities are not Local The climb to the top is faster and easier in emerging markets. I have had clients who made fortunes at after the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of modern Russia. They took advantage of the economy and company-building opportunities by offering up their expertise in management, and deal making. Glass ceilings due to gender and class hierarchies do not exist everywhere. Often a young, ambitious female executive will have more and better opportunities working outside of India where the so-called glass ceiling is higher. Companies held privately by wealthy families in many emerging markets limit the upward mobility and financial rewards of young non-family executives working in them. Seeking work in multinational or global companies from the EU and USA often enables these young executives to rise farther than they would have otherwise in a country-based privately held company. Countries in distress such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece are witnessing a quiet exit of executives seeking opportunities. These executives are looking towards South American and elsewhere in the EMEA depending on their country of origin and language fluency. Going where the jobs are is now a cross-border proposition. Given the average executive tenure at a company continues to shrink in time to just a few years, working in geographic location is not a life sentence anymore. A Backup Plan for Career Advancement When a local market dries up for a product or service, an executive that has multi-country business experience can more easily return to other regions and start over even in a new sector or domain. They have a backup plan built-into their career by having had previous experience elsewhere. In fact, any global experience is perceived as foundational, and it doesn’t have to be geographically specific but, more likely, domain specific. For example, textile, furniture, steel, and technology manufacturing have moved from the USA to Asia. Following the product off shore enables continued employment at the management level. Hiring managers and search firms do seek a candidate whose has had prior experience in a sector but geographical experience is counted as well. The Consulting Option When an executive reaches a certain point in life, a desire to dial-back from the daily high pressure and demand of work provides incentive for them to seek more flexible options. Consulting allows them to stay active in their field while working independently and autonomously. Moreover, the successful senior executive moving into consulting also becomes highly desirable for board level positions. The ability to consult globally certainly expands access to the marketplace as well as builds reputation locally that acts as a strategic business advantage. Thought leadership for a consultant is a given. Corporations want to hire an expert. Being perceived as a global expert enhances a consultant’s differentiation. The above reasons are not hypothetical rather they are real scenarios from my clients’ experiences and the challenges they have faced. Their responses have been to go global, stay global and expand their horizons further. For information on how I work with professionals and executives globally to advance their careers, go to my website. When you schedule a free, no-obligation consult with me and mention the Careerzine, you will receive a complimentary copy of my new ebook, The Digital Resume.  Did the title catch your attention and draw you into the article? It did for the readers the first time this article was published for the Association of Executive Search Consultants in 2009. It is a good headline, the way yours should be written under your name on Linkedin. But, now it seems either prescient or dated since a WSJ article earlier this week featured a venture capital company that hired from a person's online social presence not their resume. The title, however, was not intended to incite but merely to announce what will all too soon be reality. In 2009 it was somewhat of an exaggeration but not by much. Let’s modify it: the resume as you and I know it will be extinct, obsolete, and dead in less than 3 years - expedited by the the economy and technology. Yes, that’s safe to say. How many times have you printed and mailed by regular post your resume to an employer or faxed your resume recently? However, there are multiple copies of your resume are online, in electronic databases, posted on job boards (as ineffective as they are who can resist them?) as well as emailed resumes to companies and colleagues who forward them by email to others. It is the evolution of technology that has created the change in our actions. The Resume as Webpage When does it stop being a resume and start being a webpage? It already has because it is read 99% of the time on a screen. Nobody prints it until you walk in the door and by then it has done its job, right? Terms like a one page resume andstacks of resumes are all obsolete because there are no stacks or pages, just databases and links. How can you measure the length of document that has links to multiple other sites of information (see insert below for example)? But, it is simply insufficient to have a resume remain as an online pseudo page on a screen. If that was the case, we would be immediately buying our subscription to the New York Times online, ads and all – with no more newsprint on our fingers. It is obviously not such a simple trade off. Resumes, like many products and services that the Internet has touched in the past 20 years, are being transformed by the inherent nature of the technology. Marshall McLuhan was right. "The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. The phrase was introduced in his most widely known book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.[1] McLuhan proposes that mediaitself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself. Wikipedia, 2009 In the Web 1.0 days the Internet was populated with what was called euphemistically “brochureware" and "shopping carts,” meaning datasheets, brochures, and catalogs. The Web 2.0 Internet, due to enhanced tools and delivery capability, has enabled multiple kinds of content modalities. On a Web 2.0 website, you may watch a video, listen to a podcast, move through a set of slides, download a PDF file, fill out a form, take a poll, add a comment, share in a chat, add a friend, send a text message and retweet. Can a resume remain for long a static script of line after line of text in this environment? What are the implications to your job search, and to managing your career? The resume, as we knew it, is functionally obsolete online. Web 2.0 technology demands that we shift from our traditional preconceptions of what a resume should look like, and how it should be accessed. This is no trivial trend for hiring on the fringes. Given the global competition for work and the commoditization of talent at all levels, how well you use Web 2.0 tools to brand and differentiate will give you the edge. Here are some initial ideas and areas to help you to step out of the resume box. Visualcv If you want to see the Web 2.0 replacement of the resume, just visit www.visualcv.com . Interestingly, the term curriculum vitae or CV for short means a written account of one’s life. A resume is a condensed presentation from the French past participle, “résumé”, to summarize. Visualcv doesn’t expect a summary of your abilities, and accomplishments but rather a well- branded elaboration multimedia expansion of them. It allows you to build your self-presentation using video, audio, graphs and charts, slides, photos, illustrations, articles, white papers, and work samples. In addition, you can add logos of your current and former employers, links to blogs, and relevant websites, testimonials and endorsements. Linkedin.com et al This now 9 year old granddaddy of the online resume website, has slowly but surely seen the light and moved to expand your opportunity to present a full-blown professional profile. With the addition of the Applications feature late fall of 2008, Linkedin expanded member Profile pages to encompass a breath and depth of someone’s abilities and accomplishments beyond its initial fill-in the blanks modules. Overnight, you could upload slides and presentations through Slideshare and Google Presentations. You can now link Google Docs to your Profile that enables white papers, work examples, case studies, and articles to be displayed. Amazon book lists lets you display your knowledge and acumen through sharing all the great books you have read. Another Applications feature is the blog links to Wordpress and Typepad. I already had a blog and a newsletter on the Typepad platform, thus my blog posts and articles were easily linked to my Profile with one mouse click. Displaying knowledge of your industry, marketplace, and business by blogging about it is a natural extension and enhancement to your professional profile. The sum total of all these Applications is that they transform Linkedin’s original fill-in-the-blank, static, linear Profile cum resume into an embellished, expanded and elaborated portrait providing a wealth of information and deeper insights into a professional. All of the above applies to the other social networking sites with variations on the theme. Be it Facebook Pages, Viadeo, Ecademy, Xing or Orkut, any social networking site expects you to present a profile of yourself to the world. Wherever you have the opportunity to communicate, demonstrate, share and connect online, you are putting your persona and professionalism on display. It is the new resume. It is at your peril that you avoid doing this because recruiters, hiring managers and search firms are seeking talent in those sites. You can be selective, discriminating such as building visibility on sites such as Ivy Exec or BlueSteps but you still have to show up. Zoominfo.com Zoominfo should be separated out for two reasons. One, recruiters seem to love to peruse it as they expect to uncover a more candid expose of a person. Two, you are on it already so you have no choice but to manage your professional presentation on the site. Zoominfo uses the same type of software as CardScan that scans information off a business card and reads it into a contact management system like Outlook. Zoominfo scans the Internet and scrapes off information about people and builds profiles about them on its website. You are already on Zoominfo, if you have had any length of time on the planet functioning as an adult. Zoominfo is indiscriminate. It scrapes anything with your name attached to it: SEC filings, company bios, keynote addresses, church bulletins, little league team rosters, the green couch you sold on Craigslist…anything and everything. You could find a motley collection of the flotsam and jetsam of your life or nothing much of anything. One professional found that her boss had usurped her profile, or Zoominfo had miss-attributed all her achievements. Further, your profile, much like a mangled credit report on Experian, could have information about multiple people with the same name. Zoominfo is the malapropos vitae with unintended consequences. But you can rectify that by skillful editing, and inserting your own branded content. Blogs: Typepad, Blogger, WordPress Blog platforms are ideal to create, not just a blog, but a vitae that is even more personalized, interesting and even intimate. Unlike, Visualcv and the social networks that provide the look and feel, you create the color scheme, the look and the layout on a blog. This is your opportunity to truly express your personality, style, and branded image completely. There is no conforming to the requirements of any service provider. No boxes to fill in or an online genie to tell you that your profile is only 50% complete. You can stretch beyond the social networking profiles, the multimodal resume sites and fully present a professional portfolio of yourself using a blog platform. Now that’s awesome and really scary. It implies that you are clear on your brand, your target market and value proposition and are able to articulate in color, sound, video, design, word, and layout who you are. If you need help doing this, get help. But the more hands-on you are with the process, the more authentic will be the outcome. Typepad in fact gives its subscribers a tutorial on how to turn a blog into a resume page. Wordpress, an open source application, is so versatile that many people are using it to build entire websites. The advantages of these platforms are their low cost to build and maintain, their high Google ranking, and the facility of updating the site content without learning HTML. Of course blogs are used for writing posts that build your participation in the community of your peers, and business sector. Each blog post is an active, dynamic form of vitae building. Every entry serves to better demonstrate, and draw attention to your credentials, knowledge and expertise than the passive data on a resume. It is one thing to say that you are highly strategic and analytical on your resume even with a past example, but to actually demonstrate those skills in the blog that you write is by far the better route. The Resume is not Dead it is Simply Transfigured This trend to multi-modal, multimedia, multi-platform online elaboration and expansion of your professional self will only continue to grow while ensuring the death knell of the resume. As search firms, recruiters, and employers use ever more thorough, and granular searches online to uncover the top candidates and stars they seek, they will look well beyond a simple bland resume format. Technologists will continue to develop more innovative tools and amazing technologies, and you know the saying, “If they build it, we will find a way to apply it.” Finally, your competition will adopt and implement all these tools and techniques and you will have no choice but to keep up. But why not be ahead of the curve? Consider Malcolm Gladwell’s premise in the Tipping Point, that once a critical mass is reached, a direction becomes inevitable. So it will go with the resume now. In the spirit of the times, I have just published a little e-book called, The Digital Resume. I have watched too many good resumes go bad because their layout is so last century and their look is incompatible to viewing on a screen. You will see with specific directions and tips, how to make a resume be digital with fonts that render well online, proper margins, line spacing and the psychology of reading on a screen. Resumes require the same useability and user interface as a retail site like Macy's or Home Depot. While your resume still breathes life, then it best be digital. |
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