3 Tips to Writing a Strong Career Biography

3 Tips to Writing a Strong Career Biography

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Did you realize an executive biography can be an integral part of your job search?

Employers and recruiters have often reviewed bios as a part of a leadership or executive portfolio. In fact, don’t be surprised if you’re asked for an executive biography when submitting your resume.

But don’t resort to the tired opening, “James has served as the IT Director of XYZ Company for 6 years” in your bio.

Instead, power up your biography with these writing techniques – creating a vibrant, clearly written narrative of your leadership career that demands attention:

1 – Summarize your work history – but consider where to start.

Many leadership biographies are designed to spell out your career chronology by starting with your current role.

This is because when you’re aiming a level up, you’ll want to grab the reader with a potent description of your authority and relevant achievements, as in this excerpt from a CFO bio:

As the CFO for XYZ Company, Jason has taken on all the accounting and financial functions, quickly spearheading capital raising efforts that boosted the firm’s line of revolving credit by $25M in support of 300% projected growth.

However, there are times it can make sense to write a narrative that starts at the beginning of your career. This is especially true if you’ve risen up in the same company for a number of years, and you want to show how your early work affected your career trajectory:

Routinely selected for promotions due to his ability to create operations improvements, Ted began his career at ABC Corporation in field sales, where he quickly achieved 140% of quota in the first year.

2 – Wrap your job search goals throughout your bio.

Like your resume, your biography should be written to show forward-projecting capabilities, with a message that tells employers what you can do for them in the future.

This opening sentence for a leadership biography (for a candidate targeting an executive role in an investor portfolio company) shows how your career goals can be stated alongside your past accomplishments:

Frank Wilson, a former GM and VP of Sales for profitable ventures, holds a record of revenue growth and innovation that took companies from the idea stage through expansion, assisting investors to create go-to market strategies and lead successful exits.

3 – Weave your philosophy and approach into the story.

A bio gives you the chance to inject your personality, work style, and even your legacy into career search documents – allowing employers insight into what motivates you.

An executive biography can also spell out the reasons why your leadership approach has been successful in generating profits, as shown in this excerpt:

A believer in open and transparent communications among employees, Sarah has created an environment that facilitated a 100% increase in gross income year-over-year, with top-notch staff motivated to outperform competing companies.

So, take a creative approach when writing your career biography – allowing yourself freedom from the confines of a traditional resume, and injecting some colorful language that shows the reasons for your ROI as a candidate.

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The Magic of An Executive Biography for Your Job Search

The Magic of An Executive Biography for Your Job Search

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If you’re an executive or rising leader looking for your next choice opportunity, you’ve probably shined up your resume in anticipation of calls from recruiters, and taken the time to prepare a targeted cover letter.

But have you considered using a biography as well?

A narrative of your career designed as a short, yet powerful summary of your accomplishments, a career biography can help different members of your target audience (such as CEOs, networking contacts, or Boards of Directors) grasp your value proposition and personal brand.

In fact, you’ll find that some interviewers will react more positively to an executive biography than they will to your resume, favoring the bio because of its brevity and narrative flow.

Here are some reasons to incorporate an executive biography – as well as your resume – into your leadership job hunting portfolio: (more…)

Want Stronger Results? Try a Networking Resume

Want Stronger Results? Try a Networking Resume

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Trying to engage high-level decision-makers in your job search? Planning to contact recruiters or network during business meetings?

You might find that these audiences quickly become overwhelmed when reading your full executive resume — or that a multi-page document is simply too much to handle in a busy networking situation.

Networking Resume by Laura Smith-ProulxThe solution? A Networking Resume — a powerful sound bite that encapsulates your career in a single page and gets more traction in your search by supplying a quick picture of your bottom-line brand value.

Also called a Marketing Brief or Networking Biography, this single-page document allows you to zero in on what you want, while hitting the high points of your career.

It’s especially useful for job hunters in the midst of person-to-person contact who want to avoid the hassle of tracking multiple sheets of paper.

Best of all, a Networking Resume is fairly simple to construct, especially after you’ve invested significant branding effort into writing your full-fledged executive resume. 

Here are 5 easy steps to take when condensing your leadership expertise down into a potent, single-page marketing tool:

1 – Skip the job descriptions.

There’s no room for lengthy explanations of teams led, budgets managed, and so forth. Instead, you’ll want to pull out some results-focused stories from your work history or a bullet-point executive accomplishment list that reflects the high points of your career.

 

2 – Distill your career into just titles, dates, and companies.

A Work History section on your Networking Resume will present just the facts of each job in your career, and believe it or not, this can be very effective.

Often, recruiters will be skimming for progression in your background, and writing a short summary of your job titles can quickly demonstrate promotions and the increasing level of responsibility required for a leadership position.

 

3 – Give your success stories a label and some context.

The best part about writing a Networking Resume or Biography? Giving more detail on highlights of your work, using full sentences that pack in metrics and tell a well-rounded story.

While these items should be featured on a full resume, they rarely will be allowed the same breathing room. Consider fleshing out each Challenge-Action-Result story, highlighting up to 3 achievements.

 

4 – Write a branding tagline that speaks to results.

If you’ve been able to make significant impact as an executive, here’s the place to show it. Break your brand message down into a straightforward and condensed headline that describes how you get results (as shown here).

Struggling with this step? Keep condensing it, taking out words and refining the tagline until you have a powerful sentence that conveys impact. Here are some ideas:

Turning Around Challenged IT Organizations by Building Loyal, Productive Teams
Generating 650%+ Revenue Increase Through Competitive Market Strategies

5 – Sum up your education and board affiliations.

Condense your educational background down into just a few lines, using common abbreviations for degrees, states, universities, etc.

You’ll also want to cut to the chase on professional associations, speaking engagements, and volunteer affiliations; use the organization’s initials to conserve space; list keynotes with the word “Speaker,” followed by the name of the organization.

Now, you’re prepared to give a snapshot of your professional background and executive abilities to recruiters and hiring authorities, without worrying about information overload or excess paper.

You’ll still need a full resume for interviews, of course, but your new Networking Resume can serve as a value-packed, concise introduction to decision-makers.

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