Does your on-line image convey exactly the type of person a potential employer would want to hire?
Do your communications – blog commenting, tweets, linkedin updates, flickr comments, facebook postings on your wall or your friend’s walls – convey the communication, writing, spelling, grammar, language a potential employer might evaluate.
Could you get away with the public email address, nickname, avatar, photo streams if you were employed by your ideal employer vs. what you’re doing now on the social media sites.
From an employer perspective – your image or “personal brand” is a conglomeration of all these on-line/public activities. We’ve discussed in a number of our Internet Radio Talk show the issue of personal branding in your job search. Feel free to listen or download the audio from our past shows by clicking here.
Social media has taken what a few years ago was very private between friends and made it transparent for the world to see. First impressions play an important role in helping hiring managers decide whether to call or meet you. We’ve got an active discussion group on LinkedIn discussing this and many other topics related to your job search. Join us on the LinkedIn Discussion Group by clicking here.
Would your Mother be ashamed or proud of you? How about your next boss? The HR department at your next company? What would your co-workers think?
What would your most respected friends offer you as advice about your current on-line image or personal brand? Would they be comfortable telling you to clean it up.
Is it time to apply a little detergent to your on-line image, activities, and personal brand?
It might make the difference between taking months off your job search, add thousands to your annual compensation, and lead to a job that provides a lot of personal satisfaction vs. drudgery.
Barry
photo credit barkdog
Having a personal brand that differentiates you from the 100’s of resumes is critical to your search. Especially during this economy.
So how do you make yourself different? By establishing your unique competencies, why you are relevant to the person reading your resume and how you have consistently demonstrated these competencies. These must be aligned with and relevant to the company or person.
For example, if you brand yourself as a “Sales person with exceptional negotiating skills dealing with multi-million dollar and multi-year contracts.” then you become relevant to those types of companies and industries. However, you become irrelevant to high volume low dollar companies.
Too many candidates see this as a negative because this eliminates these companies. In fact, you would be eliminated anyway because your expertise isn’t aligned. On the other hand, you become more valuable to those companies that do align with your brand. The more valuable you become the more the company is willing to pay.
A strong brand is always beneficial to a candidate. Every candidate has a brand. Most don’t take the time, reflection, and in-depth research to identify what their brand is. We aren’t suggesting that your brand will eliminate every other person conducting a similar search, but it can move you to the “A” stack of resumes. We have a free complete audio presentation on personal branding. Click here to download it is free.
Try these practical steps as you develop your unique brand:
- Conduct a brainstorming exercise with yourself. List out all the things that make your experiences, values, passions, etc unique to you. Unique doesn’t mean exclusive. It is just what you bring to the party that some others won’t.
- How other perceive you is the most critical. So start asking co-workers, past employees, ex-bosses, friends, networking connections to describe how they see your unique experiences, values, passions, etc.
- Consolidate these and develop a branding statement.
- You may have more than one statement depending on circumstances.
For more on personal branding CLICK HERE
Leave a comment with your personal brand. We may even be conducting an active search for your brand.
Brad
Using social media sites such as Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook to find customers, new employees or a job is new to most people. Today’s show is all about how you can leverage these sites to get what you are looking for. My partner Barry Deutsch and I discuss all the reasons to begin using these sites but most importantly how to use these sites to accomplish your objectives.
Social media sites are all the rage but few know how to use them to drive business, sales or sourcing for people or a job. Most become overwhelmed and just give up. We will show you how to start, which sites are best suited for your needs, how to engage people and the real purpose of these sites. Social media may be right for some and a waste of time for others. Find out which category you fall into to most effectively leverage your job search.
You can listen to or download our Career and Job Search Radio Show in our FREE Audio Library.
STOP NETWORKING TO FIND A JOB. Instead learn how to develop relationships so you have people marketing and selling you. Interview with Dave Elliott. Learn how to convert networking contacts that forget about you, into a relationships that become advocates for you. The key to successful networking is getting a 100 or 200 people that know you to become your sales team. Dave Elliot will show you how he does it and how you too can take networking contacts and turn them into relationships.
Every Monday from 11 – noon Pacific time, on www.latalkradio.com you can listen live as we discuss every aspect of your job search.
To download and listen to this show and all our radio shows just go to our audio library. CLICK HERE
Networking is one of the most important first steps in a job search. However, the manner in which most candidates approach job search networking is horrific. It’s useful, ineffective, and frustrating to watch. STOP conducting traditional job search networking — it is a complete waste of time.
In our LIVE Interent Radio Talk Show, we’ll show you how to build a powerful job search network that quickly begins to yield an abundance of job search leads, referrals, and opportunities. If you missed our LIVE Internet Radio Talk Show which we conduct every Monday 11-Noon PST on LATALKRADIO.com, you can still listen to the audio recording. We post all our Job Search and Career Management Radio Broadcasts within 24-48 hours after the LIVE show in our FREE Job Search Audio Library.
Job Search Preparation | Barry Deutsch May 7, 2009 | 
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