Do You Effectively Communicate Your Brilliance?
Curt Skene’s In2Win! Career Coaching Supplement.
Today a resume is never enough. Employers want and need a richer three-dimensional view that shows how strategically you think, how you perform and how well you can lead others. In every interview and information session you need to be able to clearly articulate how you combine experience, knowledge, and soft skills to solve complex business problems.
A few excellent communication tools are blogging, mind mapping and presentations. Make sure that whatever you choose to present it communicates a clear message in a style that you can call your own. You always want the employer to know that this was your original thought process and not something you “cut and paste” from the Internet.
Make sure your insights are smart, relevant and timely. While this may seem like a daunting challenge rest assured that like most executives you truly do know your business; so treat this like a regular client or business meeting. I suggest using the phrase “When I stepped back and thought about your business this is what I came up with…” This communicates your ability to take a longer term, bird’s eye view of a situation.
One powerful idea is to stand up and use a whiteboard, if available. As soon as you do watch the energy shift to you and how you now own the room. This takes tremendous confidence but it demonstrates instantly your great leadership potential.
Publishing, speaking and contributing useful ideas makes your expertise visible before an employer meets you.
Why I Wrote This Page
Because repeated visibility creates trust before a real conversation ever happens. Publishing your thinking doesn’t just inform people, it makes your name and ideas feel familiar, and familiarity reads as credibility even before someone has verified anything.
This is why professionals who blog, speak, or post thoughtful insight regularly seem to have an easier time getting taken seriously quickly. It isn’t always that their ideas are dramatically better. It’s that a hiring manager who’s already encountered their thinking arrives at the interview with a head start on trust that a stranger doesn’t get.
You don’t need a large audience for this to work. You need enough visible, original thinking that anyone who checks you out finds real substance, not just a resume.
Action Steps
- Publish one piece of original thinking a month, an article, a post, a short analysis, in your specific area of expertise.
- Comment substantively on other people’s posts in your industry, not just your own content. Visibility compounds across a whole community, not just your own feed.
- Before any interview, assume they’ve searched your name, and make sure what they find supports the story you’re telling in the room.
In2Win! Afterthought
Curt’s current observations and updated guidance will be added here.
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