Personal brand is as important as a good CV......discuss?

Are you looking to further your career? It's not hard to do, you just update your CV and put it on a few job boards, and tell them your looking. Maybe update your LinkedIn and say "open to new opportunities". Right? ……. Wrong!!

Nowadays it’s all a lot more complex, with employers and recruiters using more and more channels to engage, select, shortlist, and ultimately decide who joins their organisation. The humble resume still has its place, but it’s now more a summary - or a talking piece for interviews - than the full picture. Every organisation has different ways of recruiting, and different approaches to selection, but what they all have in common is a desire to find the best employees to become part of their team.

If you’re serious about looking for a new career in the modern online world, your Personal Brand can be very important to making you stand out so you are noticed in the first place, and then a key differentiator that recruiters and employers use to evaluate candidates from a technical and personality front. Everywhere you look there is mention of "unconscious bias" and "name blind recruitment", but the reality is its never completely anonymous, and never completely "unbiased", so you need to do your best to present a "best foot forward" image, whilst staying true to yourself.

So how do you build a brand that works for you, allows you to stand out in the marketplace and be noticed by recruiters and employers?

Get Involved on Multiple Platforms

Your personal brand extends to every platform you use, be that LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or any of the many other specialist platforms out there. It’s important to ensure that your brand extends across multiple platforms, but equally important to show consistency and continuity across your chosen networks.

Being the professional on LinkedIn, but a die-hard party animal on Facebook and twitter isn’t going to do you any favours. In fact, it might just call into question just how true your professional image is.

By all means, have fun and enjoy life, but think about what you choose to share with the rest of the world and how it might reflect on you in the future.

Be Yourself, but Use Good Judgment

Just like with professional branding, personal branding requires a set of identity standards that has to be strictly followed. That level of consistency is the only way to make your followers familiar with and appreciative of your brand. You need to have a unique, identifiable personality to stand out from the crowd, being professional is definitely good, but being a personality-less robot will make you invisible to the audience whose attention you are trying to grab.

Ground your brand personality with a foundation in professionalism, but it's important to show off the traits and habits that make you unique. Do you have a hobby? Tell people about it.

Show Off Your Accomplishments

Remember, your personal brand is essentially serving as an extension to your resume, and you need to do everything you can to make sure your potential future employers can see your achievements and what you can bring to their business. Any time you complete a big project or start a new initiative, share your achievement across your network. LinkedIn makes it easy to add projects to your profile, making it easy to share your accomplishments and even tag in your fellow colleagues who were involved.

Take the time to make updates across the board whenever you deserve recognition. This isn’t about being arrogant and self-serving, it's simple marketing of your skills and abilities.

Reach Out to Potential Connections

Start reaching out to other professionals in your space to open new opportunities and conversations. Follow or connect with as many of these professionals as you can. Most of them will connect back with you, and this all helps to increase the following for your social media profiles.

A large following will help largely with two things: First, you'll expand your range of influence, and you'll have more potential opportunities to meet recruiters while looking for a job. Second, you'll improve the reputation of your personal brand. New connections will see your following and think, "He/she must be popular for a reason."

Be open about what you want

Don't be hesitant to announce the fact that you're looking for a job. Seeing this type of message can trigger your contacts to start brainstorming on your behalf, thinking about possible connections they have that might be looking for such a candidate. It's a way of instantly expanding your network, and if you're consistent with your messaging, you could attract the attention of recruiters who are searching for similar candidates.

LinkedIn has a feature that makes it easy for users to signal to recruiters and in-house recruitment professionals to see that you are looking, without signalling to your wider network something that you’d rather wasn’t public knowledge.

Be Patient

Lastly, it's important to remember that building a brand, be it for a business or your Personal Band, takes time.  You can't expect to start seeing results the next, and it's very important not give up just because instant results aren’t noticeable. Most successful personal brands are the result of a lot of effort, so it pays to be proactive. Even if you are currently happy where you are, start building your brand anyway as it could be just as important in building your career in your current employer, as it would be in a new company, highlighting to current managers your potential, and things they may have previously taken for granted.