If you are looking for work, building a professional and personal brand is a great idea. It gives you the kind of impact you need to be memorable and considered for job roles ahead of your competitors. It could even lead companies to seek you out for job opportunities.
To help you start to create your personal brand, here’s a brief introduction and some tips on making a start:
What Is a Personal Brand?
A personal brand is a way for potential employers, collaborators, or clients to know all about you. What you care about, what you have skills in, what you want to achieve professionally - everything that makes you one fantastic package.
A personal brand differs from a CV because it encompasses so much more than a list of what you have done and what you can do. It is how you demonstrate your personality, the things you care about, the things you can do, and the things you want to achieve both in person and on social media, email, websites, and more.
A CV can form part of it, but realistically, if you’ve branded yourself right, you’ll be recognized for your brand image, message, and purpose far beyond that piece of paper. Your specific talents and strengths will be associated with your name and you’ll be remembered, and even sought out for those things. Your professional branding is an entire package of how you represent your uniqueness.
Key Benefits of Building a Professional and Personal Brand:
How to Build a Professional Brand
There are multiple ways for you to build your professional brand so that you’re ready to network, apply for jobs and get ahead of the competition. The following two steps will help you get started:
It is important to fully understand what you can offer, how you stand out from the crowd, and what you care about before you can present a truly put-together brand. Take a piece of paper and answer these questions:
By understanding your skills, achievements, personal message, and values you know exactly what you have to offer, which is at the core of a great personal brand.
Once you have a strong idea of who you are professionally, you can work out how to share your message. Your message, of course, is being your brand. There are lots of ways for you to do this, but your online message is the most far-reaching and the place that other people can easily access information about you with little effort.
First things first, you have to make sure that your professional brand is separate from your personal online presence. Videos of you on a night out or expressing your opinions on politics may detract from your professional brand.
The best thing to do is to lock personal accounts and then vet professional social media accounts to make sure they align with the image you want to project. It is also a good idea to Google yourself and to check that you are happy with what comes up. If you aren’t, clean up the content within your control and seek to have content you don’t like removed (from friend and family accounts). Once you know what you have online already is OK, you can boost it with focused growth-based personal brand work.
Nurturing your online brand presence is something that you can do for free and it’s extra-important to work on it when you are unemployed. It shows that you continue to stay present in your industry, it keeps you visible to potential employers and it gives you a portfolio to show to potential employers too. Vlogging, blogging, posting relevant images, sharing relevant posts from industry leaders, and even sending out newsletters to a mailing list are all relevant and useful actions to take.
The following resources are helpful if you want to start creating your own brand content:
It takes time to build a brand online so take it step by step and remember that every bit of effort you make boosts your brand and helps it grow.
Many transactions, headhunting, and communications are done online these days as remote working and networking become commonplace. However, there is still so much to be said for real-world networking. Almost 80% of professionals consider professional networking to be a career priority, and 70% of people hired in one study got hired through knowing somebody at the company they received the job offer from. Online networking does matter and with the online brand presence work you’re doing (as recommended above), you have a great personal image online to promote and share.
However, networking in person should not be discounted. In-person chemistry, connections, and the impact of truly interacting with somebody in real life are important. They give you a chance to smile and show humor, intelligence, and professionalism far beyond what you are able to display online. Of course, you can link people to your online branding, but the first step is introducing yourself and getting to know them.
Make eye contact, give a strong handshake and listen to what the person you are engaging with has to say. Whether you meet them at a networking event, after striking up a conversation in a coffee shop, or meeting in person after chatting online - this in-person interaction is a great way to build your brand and make an impression.
With a fantastic personal and professional brand, you can boost your job-seeking efforts and create a strong, well-defined impression of who you are and why you’re ahead of your competitors. It could help you get ahead in the job application process and if you’re lucky, you could even find that the employers seek you out for work. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
