Why do companies invest in employees' personal brands? A new trend in career management and business promotion

Over the past few years, I've given numerous speeches at various companies to company employees, telling them how to shape and develop their personal brands.?Companies’ interest in their employees personal brand development is becoming more and more intense. And this is not by chance. In the early 2000s, Daniel Pink in his book "Free Agent Nation" predicted the world we now live in - where each of us becomes a "self-seller" and is responsible for our career and presentation of ourselves to the outside world. Second trend: employees becoming company ambassadors and help to promote business.

Why is everyone talking about personal branding?

Companies have become increasingly committed to the practice of "career ownership is up to the employees." This doesn't mean that companies have stopped working out career tracks and doing career navigation. But they have begun to give employees even more power to advance and, at the same time, to teach them. This is one of the requests with which I was approached: to teach employees to be "visible", to promote themselves and their achievements within the company, and, through the formation of a personal brand, to simplify the implementation of projects and improve their career track. This approach has become one of the elements of career strategy for companies.?In this respect, a personal brand is one of the most effective tools for "packaging" and promoting a person's personality and competencies. It does not matter what audience - inside or outside the company - will be important for a person.

No less important (especially for companies) is an opportunity to use reputation, personal network and influence of employees on their audience to promote company’s goods and services.?Social Selling as a trend is gaining popularity and companies are actively involved in this trend, making their employees as ambassadors.

In recent years, another interesting trend has appeared in the business world - the talents marketplace. Companies have stopped paying only for time; they have started to pay attention to employee competencies and their acquisition in the first place.?Even special talent marketplaces have appeared.?I first heard about such a project by Unilever at a conference in Istanbul in 2019, and just a year later, Gazpromneft launched the Professionals 4.0 platform.?This approach implies the possibility of forming a pool of competencies required by the company, based on the non-internal and external labor market. For employees, this opens up new prospects for career development, including project or horizontal career development.

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Career development: focus on developing the skill of "employability"

Another important market shift that has created an active interest among companies to the employees personal ?brands has been the change in the paradigm of career management. This was perfectly summarized in an article in the Russian edition of Forbes "Forget the word 'career'".?

The authors emphasized the shortening of the life cycle of companies and realized that it was necessary to delegate responsibility for careers to employees. At the same time, they should rely not only on formal training and a set of different skills but primarily on their social connections and experience.?

In this regard, they emphasize the importance of developing such a career indicator as employability. In this paradigm, it is independence from the employer that will be the criterion of career success (according to the theory of "boundaryless careers" by Michael Arthur, on which there is a theory of "unlimited careers"). Michael Arthur's "unlimited careers" theory, is referenced in the above article). The meaning of this is that when your reputation and name inside and outside the company speak for themselves when you are the bearer of your brand, this is what will ensure the achievement of professional and career goals of the employee.

The development of the project approach in organizations promotes the development of the so-called "portfolio career", through which you can gain skills, get additional expertise, and, most importantly, increase your social and career capital. Colleagues from Skolkovo (Russian business school) are actively promoting changes in training systems that would allow employees to use such opportunities, and at the same time to build their brand.

Similar skills can also be applied so that a person can develop several careers simultaneously. For example, being a financial manager and at the same time having a small wood products business. Or to combine a job in sales with the activity of creating custom websites for companies. This trend is also happening just like combining two careers - hiring and self-employment.

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"Social selling": how employees "promote" their company

Another important factor that leads companies to actively train employees to work with their personal brands is the active trend of "social selling". So-called "social selling" is a phenomenon where trust in the opinion of the average employee is often higher than in the official face of the company. Taking into account the big trend for "new sincerity" and the decrease in the general level of trust in traditional institutions, employee involvement in business support becomes an excellent tool. This involvement can be either in promoting the company's products or services (as Krok or Beeline Kazakhstan do) or in actively promoting the employer's brand. For this to work to the fullest extent, it is important to make employees ambassadors of your business. This is a special technology that includes different aspects - from selection and training to support and training. And one of the important modules here is the technology of working with a personal brand. As part of our course "Employees as Ambassadors", we always hold a session on the "Personal Brand of an Ambassador".?

In my opinion, the topic of ambassadorship will continue to gain popularity and more and more companies will actively use it. Dozens of leading companies have already tried it and continue to use it in their work, getting excellent results.

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How to develop your employees' personal brands?

If the above arguments sound pretty convincing to you, then you should think about your priorities and strategy. Based on this, you will understand which categories of employees you need to implement this approach for first.

Then you can use different formats: from short lectures or large courses ?from marathons to masterminds.?At the same time, you will understand how to integrate this with your strategies for career development of employees or promotion of the company on the external market.

The sooner you understand the possibilities of this approach and can leverage this trend as part of your HR strategy, the more gains you can make in the future.