Photograph: Pexels
Text: Luke Hannon
Building a personal brand is the most important action you can undertake to land your dream job.
I should know - it's the reason I have the job I do now. Before I started consciously building my personal brand, my career was going nowhere. Like it or not, everyone has a personal brand of some kind. You have a personal brand. It's inescapable. Still, very few people know how to actively and consciously craft their brand to lead them to success and their dream job.
I will teach you.
What is a personal brand?
Personal branding is defining and promoting what you stand for as an individual.
In a crowded job market, it's a way of making yourself stand out from the crowd. It includes everything from your experience, your expertise and values. It's the image that you create around yourself that colours how people perceive you. In short, it's what people think about and say about you when you're not there.
It's always good to have a few weapons in your job-seeking arsenal. A solid personal brand is like having a nuclear weapon.
The power of a personal brand
Creating a personal brand is, without question, the best thing you can do to find a new job.
Building a strong personal brand opens up so many avenues to you that it's astounding. Instead of desperately trying to catch the recruiter's attention at your target company, it will mean that they're the ones contacting YOU.
In short, it increases:
Your visibility
Your network
Your credibility
Your control of your image
It can have the power of a force nine hurricane if you know how to use it to find a new job.
"It's always good to have a few weapons in your job-seeking arsenal."
How to build a personal brand
Always remember your personal brand is exactly that: personal.
So, the first step is to evaluate your skills, experience, expertise and values. You need to clearly define what makes you, you. Now, armed with this information, you need to find a platform. With over 1 billion users and a reputation as the professional network, the best place to begin building your personal brand is Linkedin.
It's now time to start writing.
Posting often on Linkedin is the most surefire way to increase both your visibility and build your credibility. Use the self-evaluation of your skills, experience, expertise and values to guide you when writing. Always write about what you know. If you're a software engineer, write about the challenges you can solve with your technical knowledge. If you're a student, write about your experiences in Denmark and the lessons you learned. Pick 3-5 topics that you know about well and then start writing and iterating on what performs best,
The key here is to make it authentic - make it your voice.
As famous playwright Oscar Wilde said, "Be yourself - everyone else is already taken."
A common mistake people make is that they think they can build a personal brand in a vacuum. What do I mean by this? I mean that you can't just post and pray that someone will see it and instantly want to hire you.
Can it work? Yes. Is it likely? Not at all.
LinkedIn is a social network. The key word here is "social". The next step to build your brand and find the job of your dreams is to start networking with recruiters, hiring managers and the company page for your target companies. By strategically building your network like this, you will be able to get on the radar of the decision-makers at your target company and
enable you to show them your skills, knowledge and experience.
Do this, and you will massively increase your chances of landing your dream job.
So start building your personal brand today and watch your career prospects blossom.
Stay tuned for next month!