By Brenda Fabian, Director of MBA Career Services for Smeal MBA and Professional Graduate Programs
Your professional brand is an important way for others find you and view you. Make it easy for recruiters to find you. Consistently be the same person as an applicant, on your resume, cover letter, LinkedIn profile, and all of your application documents. For all professional documents and social media, I always use my middle initial. I am Brenda L. Fabian on my resume, cover letter, cover letter signature, and LinkedIn. As it turns out, another Brenda Fabian uses only first and last name. The more common your first and last name, for example Chris Smith, the more you might find it helpful to brand with your middle initial making it much easier to search for you on LinkedIn.
Be sure to avoid discrepancies between your resume and your LinkedIn profile for job titles, dates, results, and content. For example, if you list your job title as “student research assistant” on your resume, but “student worker” on LinkedIn, that inconsistency can raise questions about not only your attention to detail but your integrity.
Once you’ve submitted your security deposit, you have committed to the Penn State community, and you may include your Penn State Smeal information in the education section of LinkedIn and your resume.
The video, Personal Branding – What Color is Your Brand?, might be helpful for choosing your brand color.
The MBA career coaches at Smeal recommend using a heading that reflects where you are going rather than where you’ve been. If I want similar jobs, I can use my job title. If I want to transition into other roles, I might use a few phrases that capture my skills or accomplishments related to that next step. Please see the example below:
Option 1: Director of Career Services
Option 2: Career Development Specialist • MBTI Certified • Talent Management • Recruitment • Human Resources • Leadership Development
Use as many action-oriented words as possible in your summary. “Implemented, directed, and managed” are more active than passive verbs such as “assisted or supported.”
Emphasize skills based on the roles you’re pursuing. You might consider your communication skills to be your best attribute. However, if you’re applying for jobs in data analytics, consider listing data analytics first. For recruiters that value recommendations, they typically prefer to see at least three listed.
When seeking connections, or contacting anyone using LinkedIn, have an introductory phone meeting or a few interactions with the person before asking them to connect with you through LinkedIn. Asking to connect with a person on LinkedIn without first establishing a relationship can be perceived as transactional and unprofessional. Just sharing an alma mater is often not seen as an adequate reason to connect.