Job Searching – Find A Job By Building Your Personal Brand

Technology is changing, the workforce is changing, traditional career paths are changing, and you need to be constantly changing if you want to succeed in today’s job market. Today is a rough time to be looking for looking for a job or starting a new business. The unemployment rate is over 7%, banks aren’t lending money for small business loans, and employers are tightening up their guidelines for hiring new employees.

To stand out from the crowd and make it easier to find your next job you can start building your personal brand. The goal of personal branding is to communicate your experience and build trust in your abilities and expertise so that when a hiring manager has to make a decision of which candidate to choose, you’re the obvious choice.

Begin with the Interview in Mind

Think about every manager that’s interviewed you for a position on their team or in their company.  They only had 30–60 minutes to find out everything they needed to know about you and why you’d be the one to meet their needs.  They pick the person who they think would be the best fit based on their limited knowledge of the candidates abilities.

If you’ve done a good job building your personal brand then chances are the manager will know alot more about what you can do and will be more likely to choose you over the other “unknown” candidates.  How will they know more about you?  Well a strong personal brand tends to lead to referrals so chances are you may have been recommend by someone the hiring manager knows or trusts.

As part of your brand you’ll also have built a portfolio and have examples of projects and successes you can share.  Concrete examples of problems you’ve faced and overcome can go a long way in building someone’s confidence in your abilities.

You will also have some type of website the manager either already has visited or will visit after the interview that will answer any unanswered questions, clear up any confusion they may have, and give them the chance to learn more about what you know and how you interact with other people.

How to Build a Personal Brand

This all sounds great but how do you go about building a personal brand?  The truth is that building a solid brand is actually a lot of work and it won’t necessarily pay immediate dividends. It takes time to put all the pieces together and create a profile that represents all you have to offer.  Basically, you’re doing all the work ahead of time, before you actually need your next job.

The good news is that it will make the process of finding that job much easier. However, sometimes it’s hard to look ahead to the long term so it’s easy to put off or avoid doing work now, even though it will pay off down the road.  So the simple answer of “how to build a personal brand” is – one day at a time : )

Tools for Building Your Brand

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the technology and tools you can use to demontrate your abilities and spread the word about your talents.

Erik Folgate is a husband and father living in Orlando who's been writing about money online for 6 years. Digging himself out of $20k of debt after college and his former experience in the insurance industry give him some useful insights into personal finance issues.

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