When it comes to personal branding, you can invest all the time and effort you want in to creating well-worded profiles, resumes, cover letters, and “About Me” websites, but if you don’t back up your written communications with constructive interactions, all of that work will be for nothing.

5 Steps to Reach Your Career and Life Goals

Step 1. Know What You Bring to the Table and What Drives You!

In order to bridge the gap from college to your first career you need to know yourself; what do you bring to the table and what drives you, what you value and what you can do that adds value.  All of this should be succinctly crafted into a personal mission statement. I’d like to quote Eric Hellweg who writes for the Harvard Business Review. He asserts that most companies, regardless of their sectors, have a mission statement. And most are awash in jargon and marble-mouthed pronouncements. Worse still, these gobbledy-gook statements are often forgotten by, misremembered, or flatly ignored by frontline employees.

For a long time, businesses could be successful by buying a domain name that exactly matched the keywords of what they did. For example, if you owned a keyboard sanitizing service, you would buy something like KeyboardSanitizing.com.

Without any extra work, you could occupy a top 5 ranking on Google, easy peasy, thanks to the Exact Match Domain (EMD) loophole in the Google search algorithm.

Well, the presidential campaign is over—finally! It was a long, winding, sometimes torturous road for the two “finalists” for the job, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, both excellent candidates. But still, in the end, only ONE of the candidates was ultimately selected for the position, the President of the United States. It is ever thus for most “job searches.”

When you think about it (as I have done!), there are more than just a few parallels between how this, the most important of “job searches,” unfolded and how the typical, admittedly far more mundane, job search unfolds in the current job market.