Monday, January 21, 2008

My Personal Headhunter

I have to say that I've not had the most encouraging fortune with recruiters and headhunters. For the longest time I've experienced seeming tremendous interest initially and as soon as the one position didn't turn out to be a match they seem to lose your contact information. As I and many people can tell you, the job search process is not a quick one, at least not for me. I truly believe it needs to be a good fit and my personal professional history is staying with an organization at least 4 years; I'm not one to jump from job to job every year or two.

A week or two ago I copied an article to my blog written by an individual named Dean Tracy who is an independent recruiter. He is based out of the southeast Bay Area and has written some really good stuff that's been published on MSNBC and TheLadders. So Dean came across his article on my blog (with full credit to him, of course) and dropped me a note about his services. We started to correspond and he critiqued my resume and my own branding/marketing of myself. Clearly my blog is part of it but really, not a lot of hiring mangers or recruiters look much past the resume and that's what needed the most immediate work.

Dean shared with me some of his insights and suggestions, as well as examples, and I took them to heart. I stayed up until 2 AM that night starting from the ground up. Some of his suggestions included creating an executive profile section--just a few sentences, some formatting changes, quantifying the value of my projects and responsibilities, and detailing some of the skills. With a couple of exchanges after that first big re-write I have a resume that I am really proud of. Dean later did most of the writing for my longer profile that I posted to my web site and he's got a great sense of style and writing capability. With that said, he's an excellent asset with great sense of presentation, has some great connections, particularly in northern California, and is a really good guy. He's not just a resume/profile writer, he's a well connected recruiter who lets you exchange ideas to get things dialed in just right and then presents you.

Dean's contact information is: www.DeanTracyJobs.com

His list of publications and blog is: http://www.deantracyjobs.com/publications.html

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