Branding, Career Development, Job Search
Nii Ato Bentsi-Enchill
4 Ways Helping Others Can Define Your Brand

“You are only as good as the good you do for others.” ~Unknown

The above quote has been part of my email signature since 2011 and has come to represent both the philosophy by which I try to live my life and the mantra upon which I base my career & business. As I have worked with various clients on defining their professional brand, I have realized that more than anything -- a brand is our offer of value to others. The beauty in this perspective is that we all have something of value to offer and contribute to the world. The challenge is how difficult it can be to identify and articulate this value in a way that resonates with others and inspires them to engage with you.

If you think about it, a job posting is just the far wordier equivalent of the classic, “Help Wanted” sign, hung in a retail store window. Employers are seeking the best person they can find to help them deal with a specific set of pain points that are currently hurting their business. Your job as a candidate is to develop a brand and career platform that demonstrates your experience in resolving this or a similar enough set of pain points to be compelling.

4 Ways Helping Others Can Define Your Brand
Job Search, Culture, Career Development, Career Advancement, Networking, Resumes
Nii Ato Bentsi-Enchill
How Culture Impacts Talking About Your ...

“Don’t boast, it’s not the right thing to do.”

These are the words I often heard from my late mother during my childhood whenever she thought I was feeling myself just a little too much. The irony of her instruction was the fact that she, objectively, had a lot that she could boast about without anyone giving her the side-eye. My mother was the first woman to serve as the Director-General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. She was also the first woman chosen to run as a Vice Presidential candidate in Ghana’s political history.

Despite being a woman of many firsts, she was incredibly humble both by nature and by nurture of the collectivist and humility-led Ghanaian cultural context she grew up in. You would never catch her bragging and she taught me accordingly. To this day I feel awkward in the face of praise and uncomfortable when discussing my own achievements.

Does this feel/sound familiar to you?

How Culture Impacts Talking About Your Achievements
Career Development, Career Advancement, Job Search, Motivation
Nii Ato Bentsi-Enchill
Speak Up, You Never Know Who is Listening

It’s been an interesting journey so far in my 18+ months of adventures and lessons as a new solopreneur. I am still yet to “arrive,” but looking back, I’ve made significant progress thanks to the community I’ve found and built on LinkedIn. One of the scariest things about joining, and more specifically, contributing to a digital, public conversation, is a fear of the unknown. This “unknown” relates both to peoples’ receptivity and response to what you or I share. This is a valid fear/anxiety that we can all trace back to the butterflies in our collective stomach when we raised our hands to participate in the classroom. On LinkedIn, similar to the classroom setting, everyone is listening, our participation matters, and also counts toward our grade.

Let me ask you a question... why did you join LinkedIn?

Was your goal simply to create a profile just to say that you have one, or were there some higher aspirational purposes for the time and effort you expended? I’ll bet that you had goals of (re)connecting with friends/professionals you already knew, meeting new people to expand your network, and furthering your professional development, including finding new jobs. The challenge is, it’s very hard to achieve any of these goals if you remain a silent observer or passive member in this digital, public, professional square.

Speak Up, You Never Know Who is Listening
Job Search, Job Search Wellness, Mental Health
Nii Ato Bentsi-Enchill
5 Ways Therapy Can Benefit Your Job Search

I’m no actor, but conducting a job search can certainly feel like an endless cycle of auditions. You do research, memorize lines, & deliver several tailored monologues to countless people in hopes of landing your coveted role. Through all of this, you are doing your best to be your best authentic self when you show up to each interaction. Doing this consistently is hard, but it can be even harder if you are also feeling depressed, anxious, or managing challenging life circumstances, nevermind a global pandemic.

Let’s not forget that while you are job searching, there is no pause button for the other roles you play in your life. You don’t get to temporarily stop being a spouse/partner, parent, caretaker, or friend, just so you can focus on your job search. The regular demands of your time and energy in these roles coupled with the added stress of conducting a job search can be a lot for anyone to handle. Let’s collectively acknowledge that this isn’t easy, and that’s ok. The question is, how can you manage these various roles/responsibilities, demands of your time, energy, & emotions in a way that works best?

For some, the answer might be... therapy.

5 Ways Therapy Can Benefit Your Job Search
Resumes, Job Search
Nii Ato Bentsi-Enchill
What Kids' Show & Tell Can Teach About ...

My 8yo daughter just started 3rd grade and even in virtual scooling, “show & tell” (S&T) is still a thing. It struck me that S&T is the first practice any of us ever get in delivering a presentation to an audience. While there’s no pressure to convince anyone of anything, and there is little at stake except for potential “cool points” based on your item, one thing is universally true -- kids must have a physical item to show or the whole exercise is pointless. Kids must show evidence of the thing they tell their classmates about or they won’t be believed. If we learn this lesson so early on about the need for evidence to back up stories, why as adults do we forget about it when it comes to writing our resumes?

Stop me if you’ve seen any of the language below in a resume -- no judgments if it’s in your own ;-)

  • “Proven track record of increasing sales.”

  • “Extensive experience delivering projects on time and under budget.”

  • “Demonstrated success in program development.”

While these statements don’t sound so bad at first, upon further review, they offer nothing of substance. Though meant to sound impressive and allude to success/accomplishments, in their current form, they are nothing more than claims. Further, since there is no evidence that substantiates them, they’re essentially baseless claims → until proven otherwise.

What Kids' Show & Tell Can Teach About Resume Writing

Job Search Strategy

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5 Ways to Redefine Success in Your Job Search

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5 Ways to Redefine Success in Your Job Search

For the average professional, a job search is neither a sprint nor a marathon. For many, it feels more akin to an odyssey. When running a marathon or sprint, we have the psychological safety and assurance of knowing a pre-determined end to our exertion. With an odyssey, we neither know exactly when it will end nor what specific challenges we will encounter. This combination makes it very easy to feel discouraged and/or desperate along the way. Maintaining positivity and motivation through the course of the typical 4-6 month job search is hard enough in normal times -- let alone with the added odyssey-like obstacle of a global pandemic. While the end-goal of attaining a new job is clear, the journey can be quite fraught if your only measure of success in the interim is getting a job offer.

Put another way, if your only measure for job search success is a job offer, anything else will feel like failure. This can be a very damaging mindset given the numerous challenges and myriad factors beyond your control in a typical job search. To be clear, I’m not debating the end goal, I’m proposing establishing additional ways to (re)define success in your job search so that you can tangibly and healthily measure your progress as you go. Here’s what this can look like...

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3 Reasons Why Curiosity is Your Key to Authentic Networking

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3 Reasons Why Curiosity is Your Key to Authentic Networking

As is increasingly common these days, I met my wife through a dating app -- 'Coffee Meets Bagel', in case you were wondering. In my version of the story, which I’m confident she will back me up on, our relationship started because of my opening question once we connected (evidence below). Before reaching out, I carefully read her profile and came up with a question I sincerely wanted to know the answer to, and that I hoped would be of enough interest/value to her that it might spark a response. Two years and a heap of conversations later, we got married in February 2020. I guess you could say that my question was the catalyst for our connection -- but why...? Because it was borne of genuine curiosity.

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How to Work on Purpose - 3 Things to Consider

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How to Work on Purpose - 3 Things to Consider

My wife is dope. Not just because I love her or that she’s an amazing clinical social worker & supervisor, but also because of how clear she is about her likes and dislikes both personally and professionally. There is a lot of power that comes when you can give clear and immediate “yes” or “no” responses in life regarding your preferences. During a recent conversation about some misgivings she has in her new role, she said something that really stuck with me, “I want to live on purpose.” In the context of her professional life, the dual meaning of that phrase became clear -- she wanted to work with: A) INTENTION and B) A DEFINED MISSION.

As we find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic that has put life as we once knew it on an indefinite pause, now is perhaps the best possible time to evaluate for ourselves what it means for us as individuals to work on purpose.

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Why Your Values Should Lead Your Job Search

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Why Your Values Should Lead Your Job Search

I recently shared a post on LinkedIn that put forward 3 premises:

  1. Your personal life & career are not two separate things

  2. You are a whole person

  3. You don’t stop being a whole person when you are job searching

While these ideas might appear simple or even obvious, they merit stating because our modern socialization has caused us to lose sight of them. For better or worse, many professionals define their identity through their careers. Though I recognize that someone well placed in a career, doing what they love can derive a lot of satisfaction, I must push back from my holistic perspective to state that you are more than just your career. Life circumstances can change, market conditions, industry trends, your level of interest/passion, etc. -- when that happens, where does it leave the individual whose whole identity is inextricably linked to their career? Unfortunately, the answer for many is, lost.

One of the few guarantees in life and in work is that things will change. So, in the face of inevitable changes, you must be able to navigate life and career with something that stays relatively stable over time -- your values.

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3 Ways to Empower Your Network to Help You Land a Job

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3 Ways to Empower Your Network to Help You Land a Job

They say that “knowledge is power,” yet far too often, job seekers don’t provide their network with enough knowledge to enable their contacts to help them more effectively in their job search. At the most basic level, the more information we have as humans, the more we are empowered to act in an appropriate and timely manner. This rule applies to both our personal and professional lives. Six of the worst words you can hear either at home or at work are, “I wish you had told me...” -- add to that “sooner” or “more specifically.” Whenever those words have been spoken to me, I immediately felt a sense of regret around what could have been had I shared, more, specifically, or sooner. I don’t want you to feel that sense of regret when it comes to your job search, which is why I’m such a strong proponent of empowering your network → through detailed and timely information sharing.

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Why It's Ok to Ask for Help in Your Job Search

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Why It's Ok to Ask for Help in Your Job Search

Let’s begin by recognizing and validating that we all have differing relationships with the notion of asking for help. Depending on our personalities, gendered upbringings, family dynamics, and cultural context, we all develop varying levels of affinity toward seeking help when we need it. Some of us don’t hesitate for an instant to reach out when we encounter a challenge, while others only see it as a last resort. No matter where you fall on this continuum, for many, the idea of asking for help during a job search can be a matter fraught with tension and anxiety -- but it doesn’t have to be this way! Job searching is hard no matter who you are simply because so many factors are beyond our control. If you agree with this statement, then I would strongly encourage you to give yourself permission to ask for help during your job search when you need it.

During a recent discussion about networking strategy, my client had several questions about how to approach her contacts. She also expressed concerns about them being either unwilling or unable to help her. After a few instances of her sharing her hesitations about asking people for introductions or to pass her resume along, it became clear that the issue was less about their response and more about her internal apprehension about asking for help in the first place.

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New Year. New Job. Here's How.

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New Year. New Job. Here's How.

2020 feels big and it hasn’t even started yet. For many, the new year is often an inflection point at which they look for opportunities to advance their careers by landing a new job. The good news is that January and February are considered by experts to be the top months for hiring. A CNBC report shows up to a 30% increase in hiring in January. The bad news is that you are not the only person making the “new job in the new year” resolution, which means increased competition. So, how do you stand out in a crowded field? Start by laying your groundwork now while other job seekers are easing their foot off the gas for the holidays.

How to Land a New Job in the New Year

Identify Your Target Companies

When goal-setting, it’s often beneficial to start with the end in mind. In this case, having clearly identified your target companies can set the tone for your entire job search.

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How to Take the Pain Out of Tailoring Your Resume

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How to Take the Pain Out of Tailoring Your Resume

Product marketers invest a lot of time and effort in researching the needs and desires of their target audience. Their goal being to learn the most effective ways to make their product appealing to said audience and convert them into buyers. They also segment their audience into groups and create targeted/customized advertisements that will better connect to their specific needs and sensibilities. In the case of the job hunt, you as the job seeker pull double duty playing the role of both the product and marketer. In an ideal job search, you have done the work to identify your target audience (companies), conducted thorough research (online + informational interviews), and you are now ready to create tailored ads (your resume) to get them to buy what you’re selling -- right? The challenge with this last step is the tedium that comes with customizing your resume for every application. Too many job seekers skip this step or do it minimally -- to their own detriment. So...how can it be done, and done less painfully?

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Don't Forget About Alumni While Networking, Here's Why

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Don't Forget About Alumni While Networking, Here's Why

Though we live in an increasingly digital world, the process of finding a job remains ever analog -- it’s all about who you know. Networking and referrals continue to be the best way for both job seekers and employers to make positive connections. The challenge that many job seekers face, however, is believing that their network is neither large enough nor strong enough to connect them to their desired job. I often meet clients who are stuck on how best to expand their network and broaden their reach. When I work with clients on their networking strategy, I usually start by asking them to list who they have considered contacting and the conversation normally goes something like this:

Me: Who have you reached out to so far in your networking efforts?
Client: Some of my former co-workers and a few friends who I know will help me.
Me: That sounds good. Have you thought about using your alumni network?
Client: Oh yeah! I completely forgot about that…

Typically, they will list former co-workers, friends, and sometimes family and it stops there. More often than not, my clients are oblivious to one of the richest networks they have immediate access to -- their alumni networks.

Why Knowing Your Truths is Key to a Successful Job Search

Why Knowing Your Truths is Key to a Successful Job Search

It is often said that “the truth will set you free.” I would extend that adage, adding that in many aspects of life, the truth will also protect you and guide you. The realm of job searching is no exception. Conducting a job search is fraught with many challenges along the way. These range from what job(s) to pursue and how to effectively market yourself, to what role to accept. One of the biggest challenges is maintaining resilience despite the inevitable frustrations and rejections you will experience. Searching for a job is hard enough. I believe that it can become even more arduous if we either aren’t honest with or forget the truths about ourselves.

I believe that there are two main truths that any professional should reflect on and identify before they begin a job search:

  1. The truth about what you want

  2. The truth about who you are

Having clarity and conviction on these two issues before you take your first steps into a job search will help you save time, act with clear purpose, and provide a degree of psychological and emotional shielding to deflect the slings and arrows sent your way. Think of it like taking an intentional step back and performing a pre-job search gut check before any actions are taken.