The “Buy Me” Biography
By Tricia Ryan
If you’re starting a consulting or professional services practice, a bio can help you market yourself by focusing on the qualities and traits most relevant to your “buyers.” For consultants’ biographies, the lead paragraph should emphasize how their expertise and experience can address a specific need for a particular potential client:
To boards, executives and senior management or rapid-growth companies requiring expert assistance with evaluating and managing the forces that drive organizational performance, Steve Hamilton brings the strategic focus and mature business judgment gained during two decades of diverse CEO experience with a variety of entrepreneurial, high-technology and market-making businesses.
The first paragraph also can include areas of particular knowledge or technical expertise. You may want to list three to five of them using bullets, but avoid writing a lengthy laundry list or it may seem that you’re trying to be all things to all people. It’s also important that your “set-up” paragraph describe functional areas of competency in terms that your audience understands, e.g., corporate finance, human-resources development, compliance/risk management, sales and marketing management or entrepreneurial business development.
At all costs, avoid making soft generalities, such as “a real people person,” “a proven problem solver” or “a woman who can get the job done.” Such cliches leave readers grasping and gasping: What people? What kind of problems? What job? Memorable bios describe behaviors and the “deliverables” those behaviors produce. Try to keep self-congratulatory adjectives and adverbs to a minimum. Use action verbs — achieved, built, conceived, developed, engineered, etc. — and the active voice.
The remainder of your biography should demonstrate that your initial “hook” paragraph isn’t just hot air. Subsequent paragraphs should address prospective clients’ predictable questions and concerns:
- Who has trusted you before? Anyone I know or respect (whether a person or a company)?
- What were the stakes? That is, how important, complex or sophisticated were the things you were trusted with?
- What kinds of deliverables and outcomes have you produced in the past?
- What evidence is there that you possess — or can quickly acquire — requisite technical skills for dealing with my needs and priorities? (This will include your educational credentials).
The best way to write a consulting-type bio is to put yourself in the shoes of the potential buyer, then ask yourself the kinds of questions they’d ask to make sure they aren’t hiring an empty suit.
Since it’s assumed that your most recent role or achievement represents your highest level of capability (after all, we’re supposed to get better with age), your second paragraph should include your highest, greatest and/or most recent achievement. Ms. McKay calls this the “wow factor” or the reason the reader might think, “OK, I get it. I’m impressed.”
Later paragraphs — not too many, since it’s best not to overload the bus — can summarize your career progression, breadth and depth of experience and perhaps a few major accomplishments. Don’t go overboard with detail or elaborate too much, though. Strong bios are written succinctly and selectively highlight your strengths. They’re a page long, printed in 12- or 14-point type and include white space, bullets, attractive formats and — selectively — italics for readability.
The “Here-I-Am” Professional Profile
A more restrained, matter-of-fact professional profile highlighting and summarizing the achievements of a long, diverse career is appropriate for executives conducting job searches or seeking election to a board of directors or the leadership of a professional association. Executives at this level are less likely to participate in preliminary screenings designed to narrow down many candidates to a few, a process that lends itself to the more scannable resumes.
Instead you may be introduced by an executive recruiter or recommended by a networking contact. With the preliminaries taken care of, executive bios are excellent presentation tools. They’re ideal in situations where they’re assured thorough consideration by interested readers, perhaps after a positive initial meeting. In this case, the bio is “left behind” for others to read in preparation for future discussions.
When executive search consultants present qualified candidates to clients, they often rewrite the candidates’ resumes into third-person biographies. Job seekers who anticipate this need and provide headhunters with biographies in addition to their resumes may save search consultants time and effort — and win brownie points in the process.
The Introduction Bio
A variation of the biography theme is the “shortie” — the briefest, tightest set of hooks you can throw into the fishpond. Such a bio may be a “product summary” consisting of only a few paragraphs.
These are helpful if you’re being introduced as a convention speaker, recognized authority on “Nightline” or seminar instructor. The point here isn’t to summarize all your many virtues. It’s to hit readers with a few powerful, succinct data points that arouse attention, command respect and get you remembered. This may mean referring to only one or two singular accomplishments:
“With us tonight is Paul Revere, whose midnight ride at life-threatening risk saved the colonies from defeat and set the stage for democracy as we know it.”
Prestigious educational credentials are valuable and should be cited earlier in a short-form bio than in other bios. In a longer form of self-presentation, where you went to school 30 years ago is less relevant than what you accomplished in your career thereafter. In a shortie, however, your education is a shorthand indicator of how smart you are.
Having labored on content, don’t throw your strong impression away on indifferent presentation. Laser-print your document on high-quality watermarked paper stock. Use a professional-looking type face (Times Roman or equivalent is good; sans serif fonts are harder to read). Use wide margins and white space so your presentation has “air.” Don’t forget to include contact information; many executives put this information at the bottom of the page so the document doesn’t resemble a conventional resume.
Author site: Tricia Ryan | View all articles by Tricia Ryan
Topics: Business, Career Advice |
July 29th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
I like your example in the Intro Bio section. I find that probably the hardest part of writing a professional bio is choosing what to put in and what to leave out. Because after all, a bio is
supposed to be short. But most of us have done lots of different things in our work careers. So how do we decide what to focus on?
I tell my clients to focus on what’s going to be most
impressive to your target reader. As you said,
this may mean referring to only one or two singular accomplishments:
“With us tonight is Paul Revere, whose midnight ride at life-threatening risk saved the colonies from defeat and set the stage for democracy as we know it.”
Great example!
For anyone who needs more help, I have bio templates at my website http://www.HowToWriteBio.com
October 12th, 2010 at 9:49 am
Great advice. I would also just emphasis how you solve other people’s problems. Hiring managers and decision maker are under fire and overwhelmed with info, requests, etc. Find a way through the clutter by focusing more on their needs and how you can help them sleep better