Personal Branding & Your Job Search (Part One: Your Job-Search Brand Statement) by Liz Ryan © 2009 Liz Ryan

Copyright Ask Liz Ryan LLC 2009 May not be reprinted without permission

Personal Branding & Your Job Search We know that products and services are branded. We know a hundred common brands or more and what they stand for – we’re surrounded by brands and branding messages all day long. We know that a Volvo automobile is known for being safe and that a Jaguar is known for its cachet. We don’t always think about ourselves as having personal brands, but we do! As professionals, we are known by the things we say and do, and the people who know us or come in contact with us experience our personal brands as they interact with us. In a job search, your personal brand is critical. The most important thing to know about your personal brand is that you’ve got one, whether you want it or not! The trick is to understand your personal brand and to manage it effectively. Here’s what marketers say about branding: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Does this apply to your job search? You bet! Since we’re going to have a personal brand whether we want one or not, we may as well examine our brand, spend some time thinking about how we present ourselves to the professional world, and take steps to get our branding message clear (that’s the first step!) and then to make sure it resonates across the various vehicles that we use during a job search. That’s what this E-book is all about. In a job search, your job-seeker brand is manifested in your LinkedIn profile, the recommendations friends and colleagues give you, and in your presentation during phone interviews and face-to-face interviews. Of course, your resume and your cover letters sing your branding song to every person who receives and reads them. Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about our personal brand during a job search. “I’m a full-service Marketing person” is a common expression used to describe a job-seeking Marketer. There’s only one problem: almost every Marketer we know describes him- or herself the same way. “I’m a Marketing Strategist,” some Marketers would say. From a branding standpoint, that’s immensely unhelpful. It’s opaque. We don’t know what sort of Marketer this job-seeker is. . “I do collateral design and production, online marketing and trade show management,” is equally fuzzy. We don’t get much sense of a job-seeker’s brand in these statements, because they’ve very generic. We can do better.

We can be punchier and more specific in describing your job-search brand. Copyright Ask Liz Ryan LLC 2009 May not be reprinted without permission

What Are You After? The first step in honing your job-search branding message is to understand the sorts of jobs you’re pursuing. You can have more than one job-search ‘prong.’ You may be seeking Marketing jobs and Product Management jobs at the same time. That’s fine. You may even have wildly different ‘prongs’ in your job search. One job-seeker I know is looking simultaneously at health-care opportunities (she’s managed a physical therapy department) and Inventory Control management jobs (she’s done that sort of work, too!). She’ll need different branding messages for each job-search ‘prong.’ (Her biggest problem will be her LinkedIn profile, which will limit her to one big branding message.) Once we have a sense of our job-search direction and any ‘prongs’ inside that direction, we can think about our job-search brand. It’s very hard to work on our personal brands until we know where we’d like our job searches to go!

Your Brand Comes Through in Your Resume Language, Your LinkedIn Profile and in You Personal branding, like product and service branding, is all about making choices. Lots of job-seekers don’t want to make choices – they don’t want to give up any job-search ‘territory.’. In other words, a job-seeker will say “I’m an Operations person, but I can do Sales, Finance, Customer Support, or Manufacturing.” There’s no job-search branding message in that statement. It’s all over the map. A great brand says “I am X, and not Y.” It can be hard for job-seekers to ‘walk away’ from job-search directions, but if we decide we’re fish or fowl, we end up being neither. The very least impressive resumes and job-search messages are the ones that say to employers, “I can do anything!” Messages like that are not compelling and they’re not convincing. We all have brands. In a job-search, it’s terribly important to use your resume to reinforce your brand. A wishy-washy resume leaves the reader thinking, “Who is this person? Do I care? What stands out about this person?” If the answer is “Nothing,” the resume screener won’t be inclined to keep reading. When we decide “I am going to focus on Job Search Direction A,” we gain a great deal of power from that decision. Now we can zero in on what makes us a terrific candidate for jobs that fall into Job Search Direction A. In my experience as a corporate HR chief, I noticed a funny thing. When a job candidate has a compelling job-search direction and brand, he or she tends to gain confidence from it. His or her message is no longer “Just give me a job,” but rather “I’d love to talk with you about your [Marketing] issues, because I love to solve problems in that vein.” Something wonderful happens when an employer meets a candidate whose confidence is high. The employer may well consider the candidate for jobs well outside the boundaries of the candidate’s stated job-search direction. It’s the person who is impressive, and the person is all the more impressive because of his or her clarity in direction! Copyright Ask Liz Ryan LLC 2009 May not be reprinted without permission

The first step in building your job-search brand is to identify the sorts of jobs you’re going after. For this reason, you’ll work on one brand statement at a time. In some of your job-search vehicles – notably, LinkedIn – you only get to choose one brand. You only get to create one LinkedIn profile, so you’ve got to find a job-search direction that covers your major ‘prongs’ without making you sound scattered and unfocused.

Let’s say that you settle on an initial career direction like this: “I am looking for Medical Practice Management jobs in the Seattle area.” Fantastic! Now we know what you’re after. The next question becomes: why are you a stellar candidate for those jobs?

You know that you have tons of experience (work experience and life experience) along with battle scars, insights, and amazing personal traits and characteristics that will qualify you for the jobs you’re seeking. You know what you bring. How do we bring out to prospective employers what you know in your head and heart, without sounding like everyone else on the block?

Copyright Ask Liz Ryan LLC 2009 May not be reprinted without permission

You can begin to zero in on your personal jobsearch brand statement by listing what you do better than anyone you know. Don’t be shy. We’re not going to brag in your resume and your LinkedIn profile – don’t worry. This exercise is meant to help you get in touch with the elements that make you so beautifully qualified for the jobs you’re pursuing.

When you write a plain-vanilla list of the things you’re incredibly good at – not in dusty ‘resumespeak’ but in regular human language – you’ll begin to home in on what makes you so good at what you do. Your list is unlikely to say boring corporate things like “I excel at cross-functional team management.” That’s boilerplate. Your actual list in your actual handwriting (or typing) might say “I help people get to the root of financial problems and solve them.” Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere.

When you list eight or ten reasons you’re superbly qualified to pursue the jobs you’re pursuing, you can begin to work on the language that you’ll use in your job-search personal branding statement. I am not talking about “Versatile marketing professional skilled in traditional and online tools.” That’s dreck. I am talking about vivid, personal statements about why you do what you do so well. Copyright Ask Liz Ryan LLC 2009 May not be reprinted without permission

Here’s an example. Let’s say that you have decided that your ability to soothe angry customers is one of your huge advantages over other Medical Practice Managers. You really like to defuse customer situations, although we all might wish they’d never come up in the first place. You suspect that not every Medical Practice Manager is as strong as you are in this area.

Part of your job-search branding statement may be “I love to sort out thorny customer service and billing issues.” Notice that you’re not praising yourself as you say that. You’re telling the reader (of your resume or LinkedIn profile, or perhaps a cover letter) what you love to do. If you love to do something, are you likely to be good at it? We would tend to think so.

The more specific your job-search brand becomes, the stronger and more compelling it will be. The more we can avoid generic language, the better.

Copyright Ask Liz Ryan LLC 2009 May not be reprinted without permission

If your job-search branding statement becomes “Keith is a Medical Practice Manager who keeps the office infrastructure humming so that patients get great care and careful attention, doctors get the support they need, everyone gets paid and everyone gets healthier” then we’d have a sense of how you approach your job. Some Medical Practice Managers are very process-focused but not very people-focused at all. Keith doesn’t sound like that type of Manager. He’s a different type entirely. That comes through in Keith’s language – in his resume, cover letters and LinkedIn profile.

Here is a wonderful Job-Search Personal Branding advantage. Once you zero in on your job-search brand and put strong words behind it, your confidence in your job search will increase! At least, that has been my experience advising job-seekers in this area. Once they zoom in on their strengths in the job-search direction they choose, their feeling of control over their job search changes. They feel more control of the process. Just as they’ve chosen certain branding characteristics and rejected others, they will choose certain organizations and cultures, and reject others that wouldn’t be a good fit for them. Personal branding messages exude and promote confidence because they say “I’m not the best candidate for every organization. I wouldn’t want to be. In the organizations where I’d thrive, I may be a great candidate. I’m not for every employer, and every employer is not for me.” Boo-ya!

Copyright Ask Liz Ryan LLC 2009 May not be reprinted without permission

As we said before, product and service branding is all about choices. Job search personal branding is all about choices, too. If our branding message is “I’m a hard-working HR person,” we share virtually nothing that an employer could use to make a hiring decision. Our failure to go right or left, to make a strong statement about what we love and where we’re most effective, hurts us. If we say, instead, “I’m the type of HR person who believes that smart employees, well led and well compensated, are an employer’s greatest competitive advantage” we’ve made a choice. Some companies would look at that message and say “Heck no! This is not the HR person for us.” Good! If we settled on this branding statement, we don’t want to work for companies like that, anyway. About Liz Ryan Liz Ryan is an expert on the new-millennium workplace, a former Fortune 500 Human Resources executive and the author of Happy About Online Networking: The Virtual-ly Simple Way to Build Professional Relationships. As a keynote speaker, Liz travels throughout the United States and abroad, speaking to groups ranging from Human Resources executives and entrepreneurs to the United Nations. As an advisor to corporations on workplace and leadership issues, she has worked with Omnicom, Tyson Foods, General Electric, NBCi and a long list of global employers. Liz's workplace-advice, job-advice and networking columns reach millions of readers in print and online. Liz's sharp, edgy, humorous and very current observations on the new-millennium workplace, the role of corporate leaders, entrepreneurism and networking have been featured by TIME magazine, Fortune magazine, The New York Times, USA Today and on CNN, CNBC and more. Liz writes a weekly career column and a Q & A for Business Week Online and is the Yahoo! HotJobs Networking Expert. She is a commentator for NPR's "Morning Edition" and for BBC Radio, and a syndicated columnist on careers and the workplace. Liz lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and five small children, and is a professional opera singer.

Copyright Ask Liz Ryan LLC 2009 May not be reprinted without permission