Importance of Personal Branding to Get Best Job Offers

What is the one important thing that will land you an interview call from one of the reputed global brands, besides of course your CV? Good grades listed on your resume or long work tenure and experiences in your career, does this really work? It could be much possible that many people have higher GPA than you or many might have been involved working for more prestigious organisations than you.

How do you know what your future employer seeks in a new recruit? What could be this one key differentiator that will make your candidature stand out from the rest and get noticed? The answer here is: an unique personal brand.

You might have heard a lot about the importance of employer branding to attract best winning talent to the organisations. But how about personal branding?

Doesn’t matter if you are a fresh graduate foraying into the world of work and looking for a best job offer, or a veteran seeking new career opportunities to scale higher up the ranks, job hunting can turn out to be a stressful ordeal costing employers some investments to find the best talent and hire them.  

Established companies generally demand higher level of skills, have higher set of expectations from their future employees to meet the complex business requirements. In today’s competitive marketplace, higher GPA and good track records are not enough to draw employer’s attention to your candidature, and retain their interest beyond the interview rounds.

Hence, it is imperative for job seekers  and ambitious candidates to build a solid personal brand to be able to ‘sell’ yourself  to the future employers. While you might have stated everything in your resume to include qualifications, skills, experiences, passion, career objective and so on, this information is no longer enough for hiring managers to see you as the next best talent to join their winning team.

They are keen on knowing more about you, beyond academics and work experiences to know what you seek in your career journey and what are your learnings from past experiences? They want to know what skills differentiate you from other similarly-qualified candidates? What can you offer to the organisation and why should they choose you as their next hire?

What are your career plans for the next five years and why do you aspire to work for a reputed company brand? Are you a frequent job-hopper? These are some of the questions every hiring manager seeks answers for, from the potential aspirants during job interviews.

Here are several tips on how you can start building your online personal brand or elevate your existing personal brand to new heights, right away:

Define your career and life goals clearly

You cannot begin your journey unless you know where you are headed for. You need to have a sense of articulate purpose and vision in life. Thus, defining your career goals (both short and long term) is crucial to envision a steady stabilised future.

If your goals for life are clear, you can focus better and achieve desired business results in a specific span of time. To make sure your goals are meaningful for personal growth, do have specific reasons on why you want to accomplish certain achievements. This way, you can be more motivated to realise your dream.

Identify your strengths and weaknesses

Before selling yourself to any employer, you need to find out your pluses and minuses. Take time to contemplate and think about your strengths and weaknesses. You can ask for insights from people who know you professionally, too.

This strategy will help you arrive at a more realistic assessment about yourself, so you can quick fix certain key areas that need improvement.

Use social media to establish your online presence

Social media is no longer used to pass time for entertainment purposes only. More than this, social platform is set to transform how media work and showcase your personal branding, your exemplary works in your career span to the world at large.

You can further use mainstream social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to promote yourself to the potential future employers. Be yourself and fill your profile page with positive posts that accurately represent your personality.

Participate in communities and groups

Demonstrating your expertise in the industry is not enough to secure a job offer. Today, networking with who’s who in the industry is more important than ever before. You need to exemplify your engagement efforts with communities and groups, part of your chosen industry network.

Look for groups on social media that meet your interests and expertise standards, while finding out ways and approaches to engage with them for sharing knowledge and building connections with other professionals.  

Harnessing technology platforms by using Internet, individuals/employers can access abundant information available easily, including your personal and professional information. Online personal branding becomes increasingly important for job hunters, who want to increase their personal bargaining power to clinch the best job offers.

While this process takes consistent hard work and strong commitment to work ethics, a solid personal brand online will only help leverage on your experiences to get selected for the perfect job roles, work for reputed brands and get noticed by many other fellow colleagues in the industry network.

Next read: Body Language Analysis: How to Conduct Yourself at Work?