How to Build Your Personal Brand and Why It’s Important

Most people are familiar with the idea of a business establishing a brand to attract customers. However, in today's digital world, it's equally important to consider your personal brand and how it can affect your career. Whether you're starting a company, building a freelance career, or simply looking for a new position, your personal brand will give others an impression of who you are and what value you can bring to their organization. By building your personal brand to present the most qualified version of yourself, you can project who you are and why you have specific skills that bring value to a company.

What is a Personal Brand?

Your personal brand is the information about you that is available to the public. It's important to consider that you likely have a personal brand whether you attempt to build it or not. If you're active online, your actions and what you post create an image that provides information about who you are. Your personal brand is built by the way you communicate online, the pictures and graphics you post, and your social accounts. The resume you submit online to applications is a personal branding document. By taking control of your brand and building it with intention, you can project a professional identity that communicates who you are while showing potential employers, business partners, and professional networks your value in your chosen industry.

How to Build Your Personal Brand

To build your personal brand in a way that shares your value as a professional, you'll need to consider the information you want others to know about you and what makes you great at your chosen profession. Additional things to consider will include how much of your personal life to share and what makes you stand out in a media-saturated market. For both job seekers and company leaders, building your personal brand is an opportunity to share who you are and what you bring to the table.By identifying and sharing specific information about yourself, it's easier to pinpoint the desirable traits that help you stand out from your competition. As a job seeker, interview questions that require authentic answers like why you want to work at a specific company or why you're the best choice for a position can be challenging to answer. Building your personal brand will help you pinpoint these personality traits, skillsets, and strengths, and communicate them to others. The mere process of building your personal brand can help you gain insight into your goals and strengths, and you will be able to better communicate your unique value to potential employers, peers, and colleagues.Use these tips to curate a personal brand that will help others see what you have to offer as a professional in the industry of your choice.

Communicate Your Skills

As technology changes and grows, skilled professionals are realizing that education alone isn't enough to keep up. A McKinsey survey revealed that 87% of companies are either experiencing skills/talent gaps now or expect them within a few years. This leads many employers to seek candidates with soft skills that make them a good fit for the position if they receive upskilling and development opportunities. Use your resume and the testimonials of coworkers to pinpoint your skills and strengths. Then highlight your soft skills and knowledge in the content you produce.Use your resume as a way to communicate both your soft skills and hard skills. Creating a clear, thorough, and well-formatted resume is one way to show off your proficiency, attention to detail, and work ethic. If you present a resume with minor formatting missteps, typos, or improper grammar - an employer will be left to speculate that this is the level of care you will put into your work. Spend the extra time crafting a resume you are proud of. Not sure where to start? There are tons of free templates available on Google Docs or Microsoft Word. These simple resume templates are easy to edit and ATS compatible, meaning you won’t get disqualified because a computer can’t read the text on your resume.

Share Your Personality

Your personality plays a major part in the way you approach challenges and complete tasks. Some of the most noticeable features of your personality are what makes you good at your job. Consider the ways your values, actions, and natural strengths help you lead others or better communicate with customers. Personality traits like attitude, extroversion, introversion, fastidiousness, helpfulness, and kindness build characterizations that can make you more talented in a specific role.If you're applying for a new role, sharing your personality is so important. Sharing who you are puts a person behind your application and makes you more relatable to both your potential employers and future colleagues. By sharing your personal values and beliefs, you can target companies and organizations that share those core pillars and find an even more meaningful career match.When generating content, ensure it shares who you are as an individual and how your beliefs and personality traits make you good at what you do. Share articles to your LinkedIn profile that align with your core beliefs, follow companies that inspire you, or that you are already a customer of, and connect with likeminded peers.

Make Connections to Build a Network

Connecting yourself with other professionals and brands within your industry can help you build recognition and increase potential opportunities. Whether you're content in your current role or seeking a new position, networking can help you find ways to advance your career and get noticed. For business owners and CEOs, networking keeps your company relevant and leads more recruits to your hiring pipeline.Whether you attend in-person events or join online venues and groups, connect with peers and industry thought leaders to grow your professional circle. Seek out the experts who share your values and find opportunities to meet with them in the future. Build a LinkedIn profile that shows who you are in 10 seconds or less, with a friendly and professional photo and a well thought out “About Me” section. Your connections will take a look at your profile to learn what you have in common. Maybe you attended the same University, or share a passion for the environment. LinkedIn is a great tool in building your personal professional brand, and will help you secure a meaningful role.

Decide How Much to Share

To build a professional image, you probably don't want to share every detail of your personal life. 90% of employers find social media important when they evaluate candidates, and 64% of candidates said they research a company online before accepting a job. Ensure that professional connections find what you want them to find online and that what they're viewing is appropriate. By offering purposeful content, professional guest comments, and professional behavior on social media pages, you can promote an image you want to share.

Be Authentic

Building your personal brand means curating an image that shares your value as a professional. While it should be your intention to share a professional image, the personality you project should still be your own. If your brand isn't authentic, it won't reflect who you really are. While you use professional language, it should still match your natural speech patterns and reflect the way you communicate. Creating a personal brand that promotes your professional side offers an authentic view while magnifying your talents and knowledge in a way that makes you appealing to your professional network. Consider the ways creating a personal brand can help you share your professional values and the skills that will make you attractive to prospective employers, customers, and business associates. Your personal brand is your story. By cultivating a professional image, you can use your personal brand to help you advance your career or company brand. Your personal brand is the first step to finding career opportunities tailor-made for you. Our recruiters can give you the inside track to unearth hundreds of professional opportunities. Contact us to learn more or begin the process immediately to hire talent or find work.