Job Search Experiment Episode 3: Creating a Personal Brand

By John Heaney on March 4, 2010 at 1:36 pm
Interviewing, Job Search Experiment, Networking, Social Media, The Search, Video

Day 3 of our real-life, real-time job search with Cleveland sales executive Tim Krenn continues with a focus on how to create and market your personal brand. Over the course of our first couple of days, we instructed Tim how to create his social media identities, how to create a blog focusing on his sales experience and had him actually post his first entries on his blog.

Now, we’re going to focus on exactly how Tim is going to define and present himself to prospective employers. How is he going to stand out from the crowd to gain attention and, ultimately, job offers?

Your job search is marketing. You’re the product, and the employer is the consumer. You need a clear and compelling personal brand enables you to stand out from the pack and helps employers perceive the benefits of your product, giving you an advantage in the job market.

The first rule in developing your personal brand is that it must be founded in authenticity. It should be about who you are, what your work-life purpose is, and what you are committed to causing. As a starting point in developing your brand, brainstorm a list of all the things you’re good at.  Write down the stories of your professional successes. Your favorite memories of work. What really inspires your passions and gets you excited about going to work?

Then examine these stories to see what common elements and themes run through them. It’s not enough to be a great accountant or a terrific programmer, you have to really divine what makes you great at what you do, so you can translate that into a personal branding statement that appeals to employers.

Once you’ve identified your unique area of expertise you need to determine the advantages of that professional skill. For instance, if you are great at relationship building, the advantages to prospective employers might be greater loyalty from clients, more referrals and a more stable revenue base.

If you’re still lost among the crowd, make your brand more specific by fine tuning. With Tim, his positioning as a sales executive, while true, just isn’t powerful or memorable enough, so he’s going through this exact exercise to determine how he’ll position himself with prospective employers.

I’ve told him to focus on developing a Three-Point Marketing Message that conveys his unique strengths. Three things that define who he is, why he’s successful and most importantly, will appeal to prospective employers.

Tim selected:

• Strategic sales and business development
• Relationship development
• Consistent performance and achievement

Once you know what strengths you’re going to focus on, the next step is creating a powerful branding statement that defines who you are, why you’re valuable and why they need to meet you. And that’s what we’ll cover next as our real-life, real-time job search continues on the Job Shopper.