Leveraging Personal Branding for a Successful Job Search

For professionals in many fields, getting hired depends on more than their skills. It also involves how they present themselves — that is, their personal branding.

Personal branding can be valuable in any line of work.

After all, standing out from the crowd is what personal branding is all about, and that’s a plus in any industry So before you begin your next job search, be sure to consider these five pieces of personal branding career advice:

1. Understand what personal branding means

This step is essential for using branding most effectively. Your personal branding starts with your skills, experience and where you've worked. But it also includes your career aspirations and your industry and social involvement.

In other words, personal branding combines your resume and goals and brings them to life for your job search.

2. Know who you want to be

Creating a personal brand is essentially establishing a reputation that you’ll then market. So the first piece of career advice here is to decide who you want to be.

It may help to think in terms of adjectives. Do you want to be known as hardworking? Approachable? Dependable? Inventive? Adaptable? The clearer you are on who you want to be, the stronger your personal brand will be — and the more you’ll impress hiring managers.

3. Look at yourself from the outside

How does your own view of yourself match up with how others see you? Personal branding is the art and science of working to make these two perceptions line up exactly.

So you need a clear understanding of how others view you to help refine and optimize your brand. For example, ask yourself: What do co-workers want your advice on? What positive reinforcement have you received in performance reviews? And where does the feedback you’re getting not quite line up with the self-image you want to present? Then you can adjust and improve your performance until the outside perceptions align more closely with your own.

4. Plan ahead

Keep in mind that your personal branding is part of the ongoing process of achieving your goals. For example, if you want to be a CFO or CEO, you can cultivate a personal brand that presents you as a leader, a visionary — someone who instinctively sees the big picture.

Then, whenever you’re searching for your next job, you can use that personal branding when writing your cover letter and answering interview questions. You’ll come off as the CFO long before it’s time to apply for C-suite jobs.

5. Own your brand online and offline

Once you’ve designed your personal branding, it’s time to make it part of your daily actions. Practice presenting yourself the way you want to be seen. That is, bring your brand to life. And don’t forget to tweak your online presence to match as well — especially on LinkedIn, the top social media site for job searches.

Want to know more about personal branding? Trisha offers a masterclass that will help transform your LinkedIn, which you can access here.

Trisha Chapman

Managing Partner: impressiveCV

Posting on LinkedIn: How It Increases Your Value & Visibility

A LinkedIn account is not enough. If you think that having an active LinkedIn account is all it takes to get noticed in the recruitment pool, think again. You need more than signing up for a LinkedIn account to get connections. You need more than having an extensive profile to get noticed by recruiters. And it would help if you had more than a wordy headliner to stand-out to prospective employers. Think of LinkedIn as your digital personal branding platform that gets recruiters and prospective employers to notice you.

LinkedIn’s algorithm for their newsfeed and posts focuses on personal connections around similar interests. That means that your professional brand and whatever you post on your profile is seen by like-minded users who share the same interest as you. This includes recruiters and business owners. Keeping in mind LinkedIn’s objective in “connecting the world’s professionals”, there are a handful of straightforward ways to increase your visibility on LinkedIn. Keywords are key. There’s a reason why it’s called ‘keywords’ after all. Appropriate, relevant, and strongly-worded keywords help with visibility. How? When we generally know what we’re looking for, but not precisely, we automatically search for it using prompts that relate to what we are looking for. We are creatures of habit, and technology advances by understanding how to bring over our habitual behaviour digitally. For example, when we want to know where to get Thai food within a certain proximity, habit prompts us to type in “Thai food near me” on search engines. Within nanoseconds, we obtain numerous results. These results are a product of brands’ understanding of their market’s online behaviour and carefully curating the right keywords to match it. The same strategy applies to your LinkedIn profile. Curate focused, relevant, and robust keywords to incorporate in your profile to increase your visibility and to enable recruiters to find you based on searchable keywords quickly. Pay attention to your introduction card, which is your headline, cover photo, and headshot or profile image. Your headline should contain a concise yet informative teaser of what makes you a strong and valuable professional; spend time in crafting an intriguing one. Create, post, share Other than accumulating connections, you also want your profile to have value. What makes it valuable is if your audience finds something of use for them on your profile. You are your own professional brand, and your audience is your market.

To have visibility and maintain the audience’s awareness of your brand, you need to market yourself effectively. Posting on LinkedIn: How It Increases Your Value & Visibility Posting relevant and engaging content makes you a reliable figure/profile to refer to for others who share the same views and interest as you do. If you are familiar with content marketing, you can understand why top brands widely use it to date. It does not bluntly promote a specific product, but it sparks the audiences’ interests towards the brand. And this is what LinkedIn encourages its users to. Posts must be relevant to your career to gain the right audience and for your posts to have value. Whether you are creating your own articles on LinkedIn’s publishing platform or sharing others’ posts, make sure its quality is relevant enough to gain your connections’ interest and engagement.

Jump in on threads and most people or audiences nowadays read the comments section on posts more than the post itself. This is due to countless “clickbait” titles and articles that have so much word-count with very little relevance in its content. So, what do people do? They resort to reading the comments first to save themselves the trouble of reading an entire article. Jumping in on threads with a respectful, smart, and helpful comment not only involves you in the conversation, but it also exposes you to other connections and potential recruiters. Activate #OpenToWork feature This feature on LinkedIn is by far the easiest and quickest way to increase your visibility and be more discoverable to a range of recruiters and hiring managers. By activating this feature, your profile photo will adapt to LinkedIn’s #OpenToWork photo frame, which will prompt and signal recruiters that you are actively working for job opportunities. This is a passive way to let recruiters and connections know that you are ready to mingle job-wise. Don’t get too frazzled. We’ve all been there, taking LinkedIn’s features and platforms for granted.

But now we know better, and it really does help with job searches and opportunities when you tweak your profile and online behaviour with the above tips.

Do you need help with your LinkedIn profile?? Let me know!! Happ to help you:

info@impressivecv.com