Advice on Personal Branding is NOT Useful
The current popular buzzword of job search personal branding has taken on an almost mythical status. Almost every article and blog in the job search arena talks about personal branding. Yet, almost all the recommendations and suggestions are so generic that the advice on job search personal branding is NOT useful.
Good intentions – not enough concrete step-by-step tactics for your job search!
Where do you start – what process do you use?
Are there forms or templates which organize your creation of a personal brand?
What are the best practices in job search personal branding?
What works and what doesn’t work?
How do you leverage your time to create the most powerful personal brand possible?
Most of the so-called “experts” miss the most important STEP in Job Search Personal Branding:
What do you have to do before creating a personal brand? How do you specifically STEP-BY-STEP build a defining document that leads to the creation of your job search personal brand. Telling you to create a personal brand is what I term a BHAG (pronounced Bee-HAG), which stands for Big-Harry-Audacious-Goal. BHAG objectives and recommendations sound like:
Get more sales
Achieve market share
Improve Quality
Achieve the gross margin goals
Raise the number of inventory turns
Establish a personal brand for yourself
The secret behind creating a powerful job search personal brand:
Start at the execution level INSTEAD of the BHAG level. Don’t worry about having a personal brand until you’ve gone through the rigorous process of defining who you are and what you want.
What is this rigorous process you might ask?
We call it the Personal Success Profile and it is the Number ONE Step of our comprehensive job search system called the Career Success Methodology.
Thousands of job seekers who have read our new job search workbook, This is NOT the Position I Accepted (a step-by-step workbook to use the Career Success Methodology in your job search), have embraced the process of first creating a Personal Success Profile as the starting point in their job search. Every day, Brad and I receive email messages on how candidates conducting a job search have dramatically reduced the time it takes to find a new great job – and it all started with the creation of a Personal Success Profile.
Before you can develop a job search personal brand, you’ve got to go through the creation of a Personal Success Profile (PSP). This exercise in creating a PSP will help you to develop a strong personal brand, a networking plan, a targeted job search plan, and prepare for interviews. It becomes your guiding light that dictates every move you make in your job search, including how you create your personal brand.
Your Job Search Personal Success Profile defines your capability, competency, skills, knowledge, values – all the key elements a prospective employer might want to know about you. It captures the core elements of what differentiates you from your peers – part of which is your personal brand.
The PSP goes a step further in creating a definition of what’s important to you in a new job – from the type of boss for whom you might work to the type of culture in which you might flourish. This Profile identifies what you’re willing to sacrifice in accepting a new job and what items are non-negotiable. The PSP provides the foundation for your entire job search.
Get a copy of our book, This is NOT the Position I Accepted, to learn how to create a Personal Success Profile, listen to our Audio Program on building a PSP, or use the comprehensive Job Search Home Study Kit to get a kick-start on moving your job search into high gear.
Brad and I have also discussed the need to start your job search by creating a Personal Success Profile in our weekly Radio Talk Show. You can listen and download our previous episodes to learn why creating a Personal Success Profile is the number one element of success in your job search.
If you’ve downloaded our FREE Job Search Plan Self-Assessment Scorecard as a tool to improve the effectiveness of your job search, you’ll notice that the first item on the matrix is whether you’ve developed a Personal Success Profile.
Barry
P.S. Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Job Search Discussion Group to participate in learning how to reduce the time it takes to complete your job search, especially the discussions around developing a Personal Success Profile that leads to a powerful Job Search Personal Brand.
Tags: Job Hunting, Job Search eBook, Job Search LinkedIn Discussion Group, Personal Branding Mistakes, Personal Branding Techniques
Job Search Mistakes, Personal Branding | Barry Deutsch September 17, 2009
About the Author
Barry Deutsch is a founding Partner of IMPACT Hiring Solutions, co-author of "You're NOT the Person I Hired", and "This is NOT the Position I Accepted". Barry is an award-winning international speaker, retained executive recruiter, and expert on hiring and retaining top talent, and executive job search.
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By Joni Fisher, September 18, 2009 @ 6:56 am
…so in essence creating your personal Value Proposition?
Joni Fisher
Fisher Search Group