Have a Better Resume than the Other Candidate

The resume is the ultimate self-marketing tool, and yet, when was last time its structure was reinvented in response to structural changes in the job market?

The only indicator a hiring manager has of your knowledge, skills and abilities is her perception of what those abilities are. While what you know is important, what the hiring manager perceives you know remains as the only indicator at her disposal.

We spend small fortunes on university degrees to gain skill acquisition while the resume – and its LinkedIn counterpart – remains as the more important vehicle to account for how potential employers & recruiters perceive you.

In this webinar, you will learn resume techniques based upon Information Theory & Interdisciplinary Epistemology. We will represent your resume and deconstruct its individual bullets as boundary objects using pedagogy in one discipline within the context of another. Adopting heuristics to resume structure, we will also create mental shortcuts recruiters can use to ease their cognitive load of making a hiring decision.

Your resume is a self-promotional marketing tool that is underutilized when candidates treat it as a summary of experiences instead of a document accurately reflecting how the financial value you add to the firm exceeds the financial value of your remuneration.

  • Leverage information theory techniques because resumes are the epitome of potential information transfer.
  • Use Information Theory to increase the gravitas of the words you choose.
  • Align resume format against how recruiters scan resumes.
  • Learn techniques to improve clarity of each resume bullet.
  • Link resume bullets to organizational metrics & financial outcomes.
  • View your resume as a real estate broker views a neighborhood.
  • View each resume bullet as Hollywood views the way movie posters market their movies.

Why hire me to revamp your resume when you can listen to this webinar and do it yourself!

Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is suppa@suppa.org.

© Vincent Suppa 2017

BIG DATA: How to Explain It & How to Use It for Your Career

BIG DATA is the triumph of data over intuition. But who wins and who loses?  Who is perceived as having the best intuition? That would be the seasoned professional with twenty years in his field who goes with his gut instinct to make the tough calls.

When a June 2014 Harvard Business Review cover story said experience is overrated, I considered the all the traditional trends that are less and less correlated to success and how this is a big advantage for the less experienced! Newly entered professionals could gain advantages on par or greater than their more seasoned counterparts.

HBR Experience is Overrated
The world is changing at increasing rates as companies are competitively forced to compress their product life cycles.  Firms must acquire more of the talent they immediately need instead of having the luxury of time to develop it from within. This puts pressure on budgets to migrate from L&D to comp plans.

Illustrating the impact on recruiting, imagine a company needing to hire an in-house recruiter. It must select between a recruiter with twenty years of experience against one with five years of experience. Our candidate with less experience, though, has almost all of her recruitment experience in big data analytics to pull candidates in through social media. She never posts jobs since her developing expertise lies in pull recruitment!  Instead, she developed skills in big data analytics to get coders to script the right algorithms to target qualified candidates who did not even realize they were looking for a new position.   

Meanwhile, our more seasoned recruiter has two decades in traditional push recruitment. He posts jobs before wading through hundreds of qualified and unqualified resumes alike just to tell the difference.

Never before could the less experienced adequately compete with the more experienced. If experience is overrated, it is because it has been replaced by employee nimbleness – the ability of employees to learn.  HR Avant Garde invites to you to learn the practical side of big data.

In this BIG DATA webinar, updated from two years ago,  we invite you to learn:   

  • How BIG DATA changes career paths of even the most unsuspecting!
  • How BIG DATA changes the way business decision are made.
  • How BIG DATA changes who makes the decisions & the reshuffling balance of power.
  • What BIG DATA skills can you bring to the office tomorrow to increase your value?

Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is suppa@suppa.org.

© Vincent Suppa 2017

An Executive Perspective on HR: A Strategic Framework for HR

There are no HR problems. There are only business problems with HR solutions.

Most HR professionals speak with confidence about whether or not they are adding value to the HR function. However, executives no longer think that is good enough. The C-suite is now demanding to know if HR adds shareholder value to the business – not to its own function.

When HR is not adding shareholder value and performs as a hygiene factor, firms accept industry standards and decrease their vertical integration by outsourcing significant portions of the HR function.

CEOs do not want to have HR conversations with HR. They want to have great business conversations with HR. How can HR measure its business success instead of merely its HR success? This is accomplished by discovering the link between HR initiatives and, through pro forma income statements, its impact on net income.

When HR professionals don’t present pro forma income statements as part of their project portfolios, they are bereft of the information that  definitively answers the question, “Did HR add shareholder value?”

In this webinar, discover eight income statement categories that all HR initiatives should impact. If your HR project does not impact at least one of these eight categories, consider not greenlighting the project at all for the benefit of the company.

Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is suppa@suppa.org.

© Vincent Suppa 2017

Hacking HR: The New Employee – Employer Compact

Welcome to our new feature entitled Hacking HR. We are developing content specifically to help non-HR professionals navigate the system to gain access to coveted jobs.

Why Hacking HR? Executives and company founders create new positions within their firms while entrusting HR as gatekeepers of those jobs.

Hacking HR will expose non-HR professionals to specific operational advice – tips you can immediately begin using – to enhance both the quality and earning ability of your professional life. Learn from an HR insider on how HR decides on who passes through the gate and who does not.

In our first installment of Hacking HR, we present an 18-minute webinar explaining why this new feature is even necessary. You will learn how the Employer-Employee Compact of past decades has been eradicated with many firms still acting – to the detriment of its employees – as though no such radical transition has taken place.

Today’s new employer-employee social compact has not been explicitly acknowledged, although it’s now an implicit part of today’s economy.

  • Learn about the new compact that openly recognizes jobs are not permanent, but the employer-employee alliance can be permanent to the benefit of both.
  • Leverage the new business reality by making the business case why your employer should encourage – and pay even pay you – to build networks & expertise outside the firm.
  • Leverage your former company by either joining or even establishing an active alumni network.

Once you understand this new compact, we believe you will agree that hacking HR – ethically of course! – is more needed than ever.

Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is suppa@suppa.org.

© Vincent Suppa 2016

Financial Literacy (Part 3): The Strategic Cube Method

At every meeting, HR Avant-Garde reminds its members that mere acquisition of knowledge is not what enables us to professionally excel. Professional excellence happens when that knowledge is applied to profoundly change how we approach our profession.

Our two previous posts and 18 minute webinars provided financial literacy for the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. We now present how to use this knowledge to improve the quality of your professional life.

We introduce a new approach to apply financial knowledge to business strategy by presenting the Strategic Cube Methodology.

This quick time-to-market approach has served several professional pursuits:

  • Reaching for Job Interview: Many candidates scour the internet to repeat back to the interviewer what they already know about their own company. Instead, imagine the power of a candidate concluding her interview after articulating something strategically applicable about the company.
  • Analyzing the Competition: Reverse engineer your competitor’s public financial documents to determine their strategy.
  • Quarterly Strategic Review: Identify any gaps between a company’s mission statement and its tactical execution. This is known as strategic drift.
  • Positioning your Startup Company: Target lagging metrics to ensure they match intended strategy and measure how closely both stay on track.

In eighteen minutes, learn The Strategic Cube Method and, perhaps, come up with ideas on how to build and customize your own!

Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is suppa@suppa.org.

© Vincent Suppa 2016