What is branding?
Should you brand yourself? Absolutely!
Let’s first determine what branding really is. Branding is marketing terminology for how a business wants to be perceived by their customers / clients. Your resume / CV, cover letter and LinkedIn profile are all marketing products where you market yourself to potential employers.
Marketing Yourself Starts Long Before You Apply For Your Next Job
The thing is marketing yourself doesn’t start with applying for a new job. It starts way before then. That is why establishing goals is so important, because that will play a definite role in how you market yourself, and how you want to be perceived as the star candidate for your dream role.
Ever heard the saying, “Fail to plan and plan to fail’? Well, it’s so true, especially in today’s over-saturated job market. You are your brand. How people perceive you now is your brand. If you are known to be a loafer, that’s your personal brand.
Taking Control of Your Image
However, this is not the end. Your image can still change if you start working o nit right now. It starts by changing your behavior to what you want to be perceived as.
Let’s go back to the example above. Now to change people’s perception of you, you will have to start serving and helping others more each day, without complaint, and without expecting anything (not even a Thank You!) in return.
When you apply for a new job, and your potential new boss contacts your current boss for a reference, what will your current boss have to say about you?
If you haven’t started working on correcting your image or brand, you have no control over what your current boss will say about you. On the other hand, if you start working on your brand now, and you start changing your behavior, you will have far more control over what is being said about you in that phone call.
To determine where you’re at and what you need to change, is to ask yourself the following questions:
1. How do others perceive me as?
2. What would I like people to see me as?
3. Which changes (small actions) can I make right now to change the way people perceive me?
Your Personal Tagline
Branding yourself can be a lot of fun too! Are you a Swiss army knife who lived 5x years in one? The Go To person that can handle anything that comes their way? (That’s literally a brand of someone who’s had a diverse amount of experience in 5x years)
Here are some more examples of personal branding by jobseekers:
“Developing innovative, evidence-based solutions to complex intersectional problems”
“Health Advocate & Chemist Extraordinaire, optimizing processes and performance for regulatory excellence.”
“Creating disruptive marketing strategies that shake up the education sector.”
“Creating skilling experiences to boost productivity and increase bottom lines.”
“Finding stories in data.”
These examples above are taglines that will immediately make you stand out from everyone else. It connects the dots for hiring managers in less than 6seconds. Use your tagline across your resume, cover letter and LinkedIn profile.
So, what is your tagline?
To your job hunting success!