Career Narratives with Doug Lester Doug Lester

Words and phrases you think you need in your resume and LinkedIn profile can unintentionally dilute your personal narrative. As a hiring manager, executive recruiter and coach, host Doug Lester shares the prime suspects and makes a case for avoiding them. He also explains how using them may even work against you by raising unneeded questions in your readers' minds. 
🎧 Take control of your narrative and advance your career — subscribe to the podcast!

🤔 Need a thought partner with experience as a Fortune 100 hiring manager, an executive recruiter at a top firm, and a coach at Harvard Business School? Schedule a Career Strategy Session with Doug

❎ Avoid making 3 common mistakes with executive recruiters

📸 Improve your executive presence on Zoom

When you're negotiating a salary and other compensation for a job, do you say (or think) that you're negotiating with a company? If you do, then you're making a critical mindset mistake that could cost you a lot. As a hiring manager at a Fortune 100 company and an executive recruiter at a top firm, Doug Lester saw how the wrong approach to negotiation can stand in the way of getting what you want. He shares a simple, no-cost way of improving your chances of negotiating an advantageous job offer. 
🎧 Take control of your narrative and advance your career — subscribe to the podcast!

🤔 Need a thought partner with experience as a Fortune 100 hiring manager, an executive recruiter at a top firm, and a coach at Harvard Business School? Schedule a Career Strategy Session with Doug

❎ Avoid making 3 common mistakes with executive recruiters

📸 Improve your executive presence on Zoom

Based on his experience as an executive recruiter at a top firm, Doug Lester offers a strategic perspective focused on crafting a concise, helpful LinkedIn Experience entry. Emphasizing an intended reader's requirements, Doug offers a straightforward approach to writing a LinkedIn Experience entry that focuses on answering the three key questions that executive recruiters (and hiring managers) need the answers to. 
This episode is the third in a series focused on writing an effective LinkedIn profile that clearly conveys your personal narrative. If you haven't already listened to the first two episodes, you can find them here.


8: How to Communicate Your Narrative in Your LinkedIn Headline


9: How to Write a LinkedIn About Section That Supports Your Narrative


And here are the three key questions mentioned in the episode that you need to answer in a LinkedIn Experience entry:
What is, or was, the scale and scope of your responsibilities?What is, or was, the impact of your work? (include a story of a challenge overcome, if you can)What are, or were, your people and/or stakeholder management responsibilities? (think creatively, this doesn't just have to be direct reports) 🎧 Take control of your narrative and advance your career — subscribe to the podcast!

🤔 Need a thought partner with experience as a Fortune 100 hiring manager, an executive recruiter at a top firm, and a coach at Harvard Business School? Schedule a Career Strategy Session with Doug

❎ Avoid making 3 common mistakes with executive recruiters

📸 Improve your executive presence on Zoom

Is your LinkedIn profile actually written to connect with your reader? Do you have a LinkedIn Headline that communicates what you do, the context you do it in, and the impact of your work? 
If not, give Episode 8 a quick listen 
Then listen to this episode and find out how to write an engaging LinkedIn About section that will give your reader confidence that the claims you're making about yourself in your Headline are true. After all, your reader could be a potential hiring manager or an executive recruiter holding the keys to your career advancement. Are you really going to serve them up a list of repurposed resume bullets? Or worse, a generic list of skills? You can do better.
🎧 Take control of your narrative and advance your career — subscribe to the podcast!

🤔 Need a thought partner with experience as a Fortune 100 hiring manager, an executive recruiter at a top firm, and a coach at Harvard Business School? Schedule a Career Strategy Session with Doug

❎ Avoid making 3 common mistakes with executive recruiters

📸 Improve your executive presence on Zoom

If you don't define your narrative, then someone else might do it for you. Why take that chance? Doug Lester shares a simple, three-part framework he picked up as an executive recruiter that you can apply to your LinkedIn headline. You'll help the people who find you on LinkedIn make sense of your experience and, more importantly, understand where you're headed. 
🎧 Take control of your narrative and advance your career — subscribe to the podcast!

🤔 Need a thought partner with experience as a Fortune 100 hiring manager, an executive recruiter at a top firm, and a coach at Harvard Business School? Schedule a Career Strategy Session with Doug

❎ Avoid making 3 common mistakes with executive recruiters

📸 Improve your executive presence on Zoom

Making direct eye contact or what feels like direct eye contact on Zoom is hard. Beyond looking back and forth between a person's image and your camera lens, which is less than ideal, you need a teleprompter to make it work. With a teleprompter, you can look directly at your camera lens and the eyes of the person on the other side of the camera. But teleprompter setups are expensive and are relatively complicated to set up. Elgato's new Prompter is an affordable option. Host Doug Lester tests it out and compares it to the higher-priced teleprompter setup he's been using for his coaching sessions for years.

Blog Post - How to Make Eye Contact on Zoom for Better Rapport and Less Fatigue

Blog Post - The Ultimate Zoom Setup for Direct Eye Contact and Less Zoom Fatigue

Elgato Prompter

Elgato Facecam Pro

Setting up the Elgato Prompter and avoiding the blank screen problem

An in-depth tech review of the Elgato Prompter (one of many)
🎧 Take control of your narrative and advance your career — subscribe to the podcast!

🤔 Need a thought partner with experience as a Fortune 100 hiring manager, an executive recruiter at a top firm, and a coach at Harvard Business School? Schedule a Career Strategy Session with Doug

❎ Avoid making 3 common mistakes with executive recruiters

📸 Improve your executive presence on Zoom