What’s In a Name?

Here at Chaloner, we’re concluding a yearlong rebranding process in which we’re transitioning from Chaloner Associates Inc., our corporate name for more than three decades, to Chaloner, a bold identity that reflects our brand for the future.

If you’d worked here and listed Chaloner on your resume, most people could figure out that the Chaloner Associates of old is the Chaloner of today. However, if we’d changed our name from Chaloner Associates to just “Associates”, a bit more explanation might be helpful.

So that got us thinking. What’s in a name, and what’s the best way to present less familiar brand names on your resume? Here are 5 tips to help use a corporate brand to your advantage.

1. A short description of your employer: If it’s not a name that everyone knows such as Stonyfield Farm or Heinz or Goldman Sachs, you can add a line about the company, its products, services or market. Or tell the reader why it’s significant.  For example: OTG, a leading travel, technology and design company; or Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit that hosts one of the most visited websites on earth with over 100 million unique views a day.

2. Links: You should know how to embed links everywhere.   You can link your company name to their website or to an article about them that might highlight why it’s relevant to the reader.

3. Name Changes: If your company used to have a different name you can add the old one in parentheses. Or if there’s been a merger, acquisition or buy out, you can use both names. For example: Bank of America (Bank Boston) or CHT Group (Bell Pottinger USA).

4. Location: Most everyone puts a location with their company name, but it might make sense to add other locations to your company description to show that you are familiar with other geographies, especially if that includes international contacts.

5. Target the description to the audience. Since you can create a resume specific to each job application, if your research has shown that your past employers have a technology or client base or the like that is particularly relevant to the organization you’re contacting, add it. For example, if your target is a chemical company, and you’ve worked at Verenium, you might add “Verenium Corporation, an industrial biotechnology company soon to be acquired by BASF, a leader in the chemicals industry.”

Chaloner

Chaloner, founded in 1979 as Chaloner Associates, is a national executive search firm that focuses on recruiting mid- to senior-level communications, public relations, marketing and investor relations professionals.