My advice
to job seekers is always, “Instead of looking for jobs, be found by one!”.
To stand out in the crowd, is not that difficult. All you need is a strong
personal brand but, to possess a personal brand that commands attention is the
challenge. It requires you to align all your professional activities with your
personality, the personality you would like to showcase before the headhunters
and talent finders.
Aligning
professional activities with your personality
To raise
your career to the next level, one needs to constantly plan and align their
professional activities with their personality. What does that mean? It means
that when you are involving yourself in a professional activity like
participating in an event or leading a project or working with a team, it has
speak about your traits that make you a better fit in the market for a given
job.
While
planning our career we work on multiple aspects but we fail to showcase them.
On an informal note, we help many people and we get help from many of them.
These interactions may seem mundane but when aligned with your career
aspirations, they are the real things you are good at. It could be as simple as
finding new talent for someone, helping in fundraising for a cause, networking
with people or bringing in a sponsor. These need to be highlighted in your
abilities and skills section because they truly are going to add value to the
organization you choose to work with.
After
choosing what to showcase and what not to, the next step would be to position
them in the right channels. Are you someone still sitting down preparing
lengthy resumes and expecting people to read through them completely. Then, you
are expecting too much. People have very little time to make decisions and are
getting social!
Here, is
how we can leverage on little time and getting social.
Build a
social brand
Resumes
are being replaced by Linkedin profiles. Background checks are done on
your Facebook profile. Your knowledge is scrutinized over your Twitter
handles and followers. Your expert advice can be tracked on Quora
discussions. Your next interview call would be over Skype or Facetime.
What is this all about? You are living in an era where social recruiting has
replaced traditional recruitment methods.
Social
recruiters focus on how you are positioned across all these channels. Such
positioning translates into your personal brand. Here branding can be subtly
coined to messaging. What is the message being shared by your social profiles?
Being social is not as easy as it sounds because it requires commitment and a
genuine interest to network and know people.
It is a
long journey to evolve from an entry level candidate to someone who has a brand
of his own. Someone, whose brand represents his skills and whose skills are
recognized by his brand. To build a personal brand, a person does not have to
participate across all social media channels. Some of them are good enough to
communicate about one’s persona. Someone who participates in tumblr may not
feel comfortable to be in Pinterest and some others involved in flickr may not
want to stumbleupon.
Your
social brand is built across the channels you choose to stay active in. Each of
the channels chosen communicate one quality about yourself after studying the
activity you are involved in. This just explains why social recruiters are
emerging and why they prefer people with social presence working towards
creating a personal brand.
Today,
these channels help as recruiting tools and tomorrow it could be something
else. What remains as a critical criterion in the recruiter’s checklist is the
effort made by a prospect to shine out with a personal brand.
2 comments:
Totally agree with your views! Social media is the key to success. I have seen many leaders hiring top notch people through twitter. Truly amazing way of connecting with people and creating your own Brand. I think social media has definitely made life much easier for us.
Nice Article. Specially Build a Social Brand part is good one. Still now I have no LinkedIn and Twitter account. Thinking to create now.
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