Your Personal Brand
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