Personal branding for freshers
- 1. SO THAT YOU KNOW: PERSONAL BRANDING FOR FRESHERS What Is Personal Branding? Unlike what most of people think, personal branding is not just lim- ited to self-promotion. It is the management of your skill set, your reputation, your public rela- tions, and your attitude in a way to indicate your brand identity that is the emotional response you want to establish about yourself with your network, audience, and potential recruiters. This accounts for the definition of who you are, what you do, and whom you serve. It is the process that ena- bles individuals to mark their ca- reers as a brand throughout a pro- fessional presence in social me- dias and Internet in general such as LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, and Facebook. The personal branding is a way to indicate and demonstrate your uniqueness as well as articulate your distinctiveness with those who will engage your services. This promise of values relate to your strengths, added values, and passions and they should align with what you will accomplish for whatever company hires you. Your online presence and communication with your target audience is thus a way to increase your credibility, to enhance your chances to find a job, to expose your state of mind and feelings, and what is most important for talent recruiters, to showcase your long-term goals. Why Is It Important To Have a Personal Brand? A personal brand will allow you to build a positive reputation about yourself. This is of prime importance as Internet today shaped the hiring process to en- gage more in social media. This means that recruiters are no more only limited to looking at your curriculum vitae and cover letter, but furthermore, they check your online presence. Personal brand- ing is a method to show your knowledge, to demonstrate your acquired skills, and to show your commitment and patience about your field of expertize. Personal branding does not only serve to market and project your- self to the world, but what is more important is that it will put a pres- sure on you to be updated in your field, to create or share content, to read other people’s work, and to interact with your network. What Is the Perfect Time To Start Your Personal Branding? If you can go back in time, it will be AMAZING. Else, the perfect timing is right NOW! Many of students or fresh graduates either lack confidence, or think that their professional portfolios are still empty. The great news is that
- 2. personal branding is not only about what you did previously. How To Build The Personal Brand: “YOU”? Personal branding is easier said than done. The process of creat- ing an online presence with a good reputation might be demanding at its early stages. For this, the initial phase should ra- ther focus on brainstorming rather than just starting your brand. There is no single company, prod- uct, or service that starts immedi- ately operating, if it is the case, I can ensure you that either it will fail or it will waste lots or money, energy, and resources. In order to avoid this waste, entrepreneurs always make business plans, and you will need a plan as well. The following are steps to start your personal brand. Step 1: Research and Brainstorm Before starting your personal brand, you should first read different approaches that other individuals has been through in order to take shortcuts and learn from their mistakes. It is intuitive, but your personal brand requires YOU knowing more about yourself beforehand and more than anyone else. For this, you should first define your brand goals, and what you want to accomplish. Answering a set of questions can help you better communicate your brand infor- mation: • What do you want people to think of or feel once they hear your name? • Do you want people to link you to a specific field like when you hear “Mark Zuckerberg” or “Bill Gates”? • What is the job that you want to have? • What do you want to be known for? You should also brainstorm about your skills set, your uniqueness, your strengths, and your weak- nesses: • What do you want to communicate to your audience? • What could you teach? • What can you influence? • What skills you think you perform best? • What are your strengths? • What are your weaknesses? • Can you overcome your weaknesses by turning them into strengths? • What distinguishes you from the others? • What are you passionate about? • In what environment you function most effectively? In addition to answering these questions, you can also use tools of personal career success such as personal SWOT (Strengths,
- 3. Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis and others. After you brainstorm these self- reflective questions, you should stay focused on ideas that are ca- reer oriented. At this stage, you will have a clearer definition about your personal brand. Step 2: Mark Your Online Presence The second step in personal branding is to mark your online existence. To start with, open a LinkedIn account and fill all the personal information. There are many video tutorials and a course on how to use LinkedIn that help to fill your information taking into account optimizing reaching recruiters. Try to view these vid- eos because they have lot of tips that are helpful. In addition to a LinkedIn profile, make use of other social media platforms such as Twitter, Google+, personal website, and blogs. The mistake to avoid is to open accounts on these platforms without writing any content. I would rather prefer not to have an account than to have an empty one. Why is that? Because when someone will use a search engine to find results that corresponds to your name, it is not professional to find a blog under your name that has no content. You should also consider changing the set- tings of the social media you use just for friends and family into non-public. I advise you to include a value proposition, which is by defini- tion the value you can deliver, and a brief professional summary or an elevator pitch, which not only summarizes your values, but also your attitude, skills and work style. These two latters are often communicated orally during inter- views. Step 3: Plan For Communicating With Your Network Once you have a social presence, the aim is to increase your audi- ence and visibility to others. This part of the personal branding pro- cess requires writing content such as small articles, reflection about some news, a book summary, a conference or an event that you attended, or just sharing other people’s work while giving them full credit. But why do you need to have a plan to communicate with your network? The reason is that you need to keep your audience. It makes no sense for sharing 10 articles in one day and share noth- ing for the coming 9 days. You should rather share each of these 10 articles every day even if you have them ready in order to keep your readers satisfied. If you are a student, you can take more time in working on a project or case study, edit your spelling and grammar mistakes, work on the page layout and presentation and
- 4. share the solutions with your net- work. Be aware that it is important to share good quality materials ra- ther than just share for the sake of sharing. Is Personal Branding Enough To Get A Job? You should perceive your per- sonal brand as a way to enhance your chances to attract recruiters or get a job. But in order to fur- ther increase your changes, there are additional steps that you should take: 1. Keep your résumé all the time updated: Your résumé should not be fully detailed. It should contain just enough information about the skills and the experience you have so far, just enough information to attract the recruiters. 2. Have personalized cover or motivational letter and have personalized emails: The mistake that most of people make is the use of general words such as “To whom it is con- cerned”. Try to make some re- search about the work place and establish the first impression of interest by citing the names of the concerned parties if you can. For the cover or motivational let- ter, it is not smart to talk about yourself. Instead of that, try to talk about how your values will contribute to the company and its culture in general. 3. Update your skills regularly: The update of skills can be throughout taking online courses, reading books, or even watching documentaries. Make references to the skills you learned by shar- ing them using social media. 4. Don’t be afraid to apply for certain job positions, or to talk to managers and CEOs: You should constantly keep applying to different job positions that relate to your expertise. If possible and you have the change to get some contacts’ emails within this company, try to com- municate with them and establish a first conversation. Still, don’t be pushy. 5. Follow the company you are applying to: Try to follow the company by lik- ing their pages in LinkedIn. This is beneficial to establish a first impression of interest. Tahar Harkat t.harkat@gmail.com