Leander Howard II believes in helping real people obtain real results as the founder and CEO of Spark Your Resume, a full-service career advancement agency. His mission is to enhance and develop one’s professional career through individual guidance and coaching and to help professionals transition into new roles in 60 days or less.
Howard spoke with rolling out about Spark Your Resume and what people should know about conducting a job search.
What inspired you to create Spark Your Resume?
I was at Georgia State University volunteering at the Robinson College of Business, and a lot of students were coming up to me asking “How did you get an internship at Wells Fargo? How did you get an internship at the Arthur Blank Foundation? How did you land your job at Adobe?” They were asking for interview prep, résumé enhancement, how to optimize LinkedIn, and how to work with professionals, and I was doing that for the public good at that point. I didn’t have a business at all, I was just doing it because I liked it. I enjoyed it and wanted to see people succeed in their careers. Doing that, man, spun the idea of just launching an actual business to help even more people outside of the Georgia State environment, and that’s how I really got started.
What should people know when building their résumé?
I feel like everything relates to business in some form or fashion. When it comes to the job searching process, and getting recruiters and hiring managers to understand who you are, what you do, and how you can help the organization grow by fulfilling this role, that’s marketing. You have to position yourself in the market to where people know who you are, and what you do by reading a piece of paper. If I go to your LinkedIn profile and it’s optimized, it’s saying all the right things, and you have the skill set and previous work experience, it’s going to intrigue me to reach out to want to learn more about you. That’s where the interview process comes in, but before we even get there, you have to have a personal and professional brand to entice people to want to learn more about who you are at the end of the day. When I see résumés, man, it’s about crafting that story to pretty much paint a clearer picture to the hiring manager and why that person should be a qualified candidate for the role that they’re applying to.
