Personal Branding Really Is The Key to Finding a New Job
If you're tired of hearing about personal branding, the following anecdote will convince you that it's not a passing fad.
Just when I was getting tired of reading about personal branding, I had a conversation with a hiring manager that reminded me why personal branding and marketing through social networking websites is so important if you're looking for a new job. A strong personal brand enables hiring managers who have jobs to fill—jobs that you may not know about—to find you. Marketing yourself allows you to tap into the "hidden job market" and make yourself visible to organizations that may need your expertise. Personal branding truly helps you stand out.
(CIO.com has a ton of articles on personal branding. I recommend Personal Branding: 8 Tips that Will Help You Stand Out, Managing Your Reputation Online, and Mark Cummuta's latest CIO Job Search blog on marketing your expertise.)
Erik Huddleston, the CTO of Inovis, a B2B data exchange, is the hiring manager I interviewed this morning. He explained how he uses social networking websites to recruit people for jobs, and his explanation illustrates the role that personal branding and social networking play in the job search and hiring process.
Huddleston says that when he has a position to fill, he proceeds directly to LinkedIn to identify professionals in key staff members' networks who may be right for the job. He does the same on Facebook. If the people Huddleston identifies are also on Twitter, he checks out their Twitter streams, too.
"Looking at their background, their skill sets and what they're talking about on their Twitter feeds, I can get a pretty good feel for people who sound like they'd work well," he says.
Huddleston isn't the only hiring manager using the "LinkedIn first" approach. David Perry, the author of Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters, says many other recruiters and hiring managers use LinkedIn to pre-screen candidates. (See The Two Websites Every Job Seeker Needs to Join.)
If you have a strong LinkedIn profile that communicates your brand, expertise, accomplishments and unique value, you increase your chances of getting contacted about jobs that you don't even know exist because you stand out to hiring managers. By contrast, if you're not on LinkedIn or your profile is weak or out-dated, you're probably getting passed up for consideration by hiring managers and recruiters. (Find out if hiring managers are checking you out online.)
For advice on creating an irresistible LinkedIn profile, see How to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile, Stand Out to Employers, Recruiters and LinkedIn Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts.
Print
(CIO.com has a ton of articles on personal branding. I recommend Personal Branding: 8 Tips that Will Help You Stand Out, Managing Your Reputation Online, and Mark Cummuta's latest CIO Job Search blog on marketing your expertise.)
Erik Huddleston, the CTO of Inovis, a B2B data exchange, is the hiring manager I interviewed this morning. He explained how he uses social networking websites to recruit people for jobs, and his explanation illustrates the role that personal branding and social networking play in the job search and hiring process.
Huddleston says that when he has a position to fill, he proceeds directly to LinkedIn to identify professionals in key staff members' networks who may be right for the job. He does the same on Facebook. If the people Huddleston identifies are also on Twitter, he checks out their Twitter streams, too.
"Looking at their background, their skill sets and what they're talking about on their Twitter feeds, I can get a pretty good feel for people who sound like they'd work well," he says.
Huddleston isn't the only hiring manager using the "LinkedIn first" approach. David Perry, the author of Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters, says many other recruiters and hiring managers use LinkedIn to pre-screen candidates. (See The Two Websites Every Job Seeker Needs to Join.)
If you have a strong LinkedIn profile that communicates your brand, expertise, accomplishments and unique value, you increase your chances of getting contacted about jobs that you don't even know exist because you stand out to hiring managers. By contrast, if you're not on LinkedIn or your profile is weak or out-dated, you're probably getting passed up for consideration by hiring managers and recruiters. (Find out if hiring managers are checking you out online.)
For advice on creating an irresistible LinkedIn profile, see How to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile, Stand Out to Employers, Recruiters and LinkedIn Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts.
Previous Post: Work-Related Suicide: Not Just France Telecom's TragedyNext Post: Home Depot vs. Trevor Keezer and The God Squad
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
