I gave a little talk to prospective members of SIFE last night at St. Norbert College. Great fun. I love having the continued privilege to connect with college students on a regular basis.

The talk centered around a few points, which, I think are valid for almost anyone looking for a career, or a career upgrade. I basically covered some of the finer points of what I’m looking for in a resume, from the perspective of a hiring manager. I also discussed a bit about differentiation, and how joining SIFE, or any other community-centric organization can provide you with ample opportunity for differentiation. I’ve put the notes and a short slide deck here for download.

Resume readers are not rational readers.doc | Download file

Slide Deck.ppt | Download file

On a related tangent, there’s a whitepaper that came out yesterday from Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. that talks about the meaningful differences that companies need to make in their products to really constitute differentiation. If you replace product with “Job Seeker” and customer with “Company/Hiring Manager”, you’ve got an article on what how one might better differentiate oneself in today’s job market.

There is one interesting point in the whitepaper that states how critical it is to know what your customers really care about before embarking on differentiation initiatives. I look at this from the Job Seeker’s perspective and think “man, we’ve really got it easy.” Why? Well, for one, every job description out there has exactly the things that the hiring company cares about, which can help you in crafting the perfect marketing document (resume) to submit to that customer (hiring company). Secondly, we’ve got networks. We’re trying to build the same thing using social networks to market products to customers, but that’s not really gotten off the ground yet. Job seekers have a network of peers, friends, and loose ties that can help guide them in the right direction.