Personal branding is defined as the process of people marketing themselves and their careers as a brand, much like a business markets itself, products and services.
At its heart, it is an ongoing process managed by the individual resulting in an impression of that person in the minds of others. Of course, in the case of personal branding regarding a career, you are marketing yourself as the product and recruiters and hiring agents are your potential customers.
In creating a personal brand, you want people to see approximately the same things about you regardless of where they look. This starts by actively managing your social media accounts and even creating a personal website.
Managing social media accounts
You must know what people will find out about you when they search your name – which is what hiring officials do when considering you for a job. The only way to know what they will find out about you is to do what they would do – Google your own name and scroll through the results. You might be surprised at what you find!
The management process begins by tailoring tweets, posts and photos of what you post online, so that regardless of where someone goes, they all see the same picture of you in their mind.
Knowing your online profile is increasingly important for security clearance holders, who are now increasingly under continuous evaluation versus the traditional periodic reinvestigations. That means third party sites are used to assess everything from your dating profiles to your financial records. Knowing what is available online is critical for both landing a job and keeping your clearance.
Building a personal website
Taking personal branding one step further, one way to place higher in a search results for your name is to have your own personal website. For many people just thinking about building a website can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be.
Buy a domain name – your name like JohnDoe.com – add a few pages about yourself and you are ready to go. Domain names are cheap and most of the domain hosts have a simple website building program included, so anybody can build a simple website in a matter minutes and complete it with content in an hour or so. However much like building a resume, you could hire someone instead to build your website for you and you complete the content in each page. Whether you build it yourself or hire it done, it could be the best money you ever spent.
Website Content
Usually posting a brief biography of yourself (which can be your About page), links to your social media platforms and a page about your career goals are all you need to get started.
Consider posting a video about yourself on a Career Goals page. This gives searchers a better idea of your personality, style and voice than just text and a photo of you.
You can always add more content or update what is already there as you go along. As far as a posting a resume, with data mining by scammers the way it is today, just let people know on your Career Goals page that they can get one upon request.
Having an Internet presence in today’s career world is no longer a luxury – it is a must. From finding out more about you, to verifying information on your resume, it is the place recruiters and hiring managers go. Just make sure they see what you want them to see.
