Building brand me
With lots of candidates chasing the same roles, how do you raise your chance of success – and of getting the best of the roles on offer?
We’ve looked previously at how you can use LinkedIn to raise your profile online – essential for business professionals. But when you’re chasing some of the best roles on offer (or want potential employers chasing you) then even a great CV can only go so far. That’s when you need to be thinking about building ‘brand me’.
Which candidate would you choose?
Let’s imagine you’re an employer. You have two CVs on your desk - they’re broadly equal in terms of experience, but you recognise one of the names. So, you pay the CV a little more attention – then realise where you’ve seen the candidate’s name before. You came across it online – he/she authored an article on a specialist industry website. So, you do a little Googling – sure enough, that person is mentioned all over the Internet; the other’s nowhere to be seen. Which candidate do you give the most consideration to? Which one are you more likely to hire?
Brand awareness creates familiarity
It’s not really much of a contest – but that’s how advertising works. You’re more likely to buy a bar of chocolate you’ve heard of than one you haven’t. The brand creates a predisposition to buy, engage, hire.
It’s no different with job candidates. If you’ve been hired before and did a good job, the company knows you and hopefully likes you – giving you an advantage. But how can you enable companies to get to know you, before they – well, get to know you?
The answer is to build ‘brand me’. To try to make them aware of you before they hire, or, at the least, give them far greater evidence of your specialism and skills than your CV alone can provide. LinkedIn is one way of doing this – but it’s limited. You can build up a CV and make connections – but everyone else is doing that. What can you do to elevate yourself above the competition?
Part of the solution is to be found in more places – places which are similar to LinkedIn, though perhaps not quite so well featured. It’s the work of moments to add your details to a website such as about.me – creating a virtual business card in the process. But it’s not really a job clincher.
Google Profiles are becoming more interesting, since your profile is linked to your other Google online activities – most obviously your Google+ page, if you have one, and pages where you’ve pressed the +1 button to show the world you like it. Over time, Google is likely to put social interaction at the heart of everything it does.
Build your specialism
What you can do is to build up your status as a specialist. If you work in a high-demand industry, or have a specific skill, you’re almost certainly a specialist – after all, what are employers paying for, if not your knowledge? The goal is to make them aware of your knowledge in advance, or provide better, stronger evidence of it when you’re up for a role. A good, low cost (or even free) way to do this is to start a blog, based around your specialism. Websites such as blogger.com and wordpress.com let you do this for free, or you can invest just a little more in yourself and opt for a website design and URL which better promote your brand. Did anyone think Martin Lewis was a money-saving expert before he told people he was, on his website moneysavingexpert.com? (Although we’d shy away from the word ‘expert’ sticking with specialist – unless you’re really sure you lead the field in which you’re in!)
A little knowledge goes a long way
Using your blog, you can publish articles about your specialism - or even videos, should you feel so inclined. Such articles don’t have to be in-depth, thousands of words long. It’s often better to opt for a small topic and address it thoroughly – perhaps common problems people have or areas where received wisdom is out of touch with reality. It’s this kind of website content which tends to perform well in Google, so, over time, your blog can start to become a specialist voice.
Getting the word out
Clearly, if you start a blog, get publishing articles – but don’t tell anyone, you’re hardly likely to set the world on fire. So how do you spread the word? Step one is to publicise each new article as a status update on LinkedIn, where your network can see it. Step two is to establish yourself on social media – especially Twitter. Using Twitter, you can follow and build relationships with others in your field, gradually building your profile and credibility. And, each time you write a new blog, you can send out one or more status updates to your (hopefully) growing list of followers. Twitter can then become a great place to converse - about your blogs, the blogs of others, industry issues, you name it.
Monitoring your reputation
All of this work isn’t for nothing – but it’s sometimes hard to see how successful your progress is. Fortunately, there are tools to help. You can set up Google Alerts very easily to monitor the Web for new content. This could be your name (to track whether people are chatting about you and your blog) or for industry terms, so you can quickly jump on trends – blogging and tweeting about them while they are fresh. The alerts are delivered right to your inbox, making short work of keeping up-to-date.
You can also use a reputation-monitoring website, such as klout.com, to assess how effective your Internet footprint is. Klout scores you for your amount of activity and for its reach - how many people comment on what you do, or forward it, for example.
And finally – don’t forget…
You need to add details of your blog and other activity to your CV, so, if they’ve not already stumbled across you online, you can encourage potential employers to discover more about you, what you have to say, your knowledge and skill.
After all, which person would you employ or headhunt? The one you’ve never heard of – or the one with a strong online reputation?