Whether you’re in the market for a new role or you want to secure your current position by impressing the boss, you’ll need to concentrate on your ‘personal brand’. How you are perceived by employers, both existing and prospective, can have a significant impact on your future.
In this guide we look at ten things you can do to position yourself as an attractive proposition to employers and enhance your personal brand.
1 Make yourself indispensible
To boost your value to an employer you need to get yourself noticed for the right reasons. You will need to look at ways of improving your skills, knowledge and attitude while also building on your relationships, both internal and external. Understand your business and have a business-like attitude. Get under the skin of your customers, their challenges, drivers and goals. Look at ways of up-skilling – it will evidence your commitment to your development and to the organisation. Always look to be proactive, offering practical solutions to challenges.
Most important, and not to be underestimated, is your profile. Build on the relationships you currently have, expand your network and get involved in new projects. And don’t forget your external profile – essential if you are customer-facing.
It’s not a time for a scattergun approach though. Be targeted – engage with projects that will provide the opportunity to build on the skills related to your current role and those relevant to your career path. Select projects that allow you to get in front of key business stakeholders and always look to add value. Showcasing your knowledge and skills to these people will place you in a powerful position of influence.
But take heed – the more relationships you have the more you have to nurture. Damage one and it could be detrimental to your profile and career. Take the right approach and you will be in prime position to influence business decisions and protect your position.
2 Demonstrate, not assert
Any hiring, pay and promotion decisions are primarily based on individual performance.
Meeting targets, motivating a team, making good on development plans, being positive, loyal, being reliable and determined to succeed is what being a classic high performer is about. Many organisations make use of competency systems to support recruitment and promotion decisions. So, as well as being able to demonstrate your proven capability on the job, being able to put the secrets of your success into words is dynamite.
Whether or not you are actively job seeking, keeping your CV up to date and relevant is a sensible thing to do, especially if you make it competency based. Producing and documenting examples isn’t as easy as it sounds. After all, how many of us naturally file our organisational experiences under competency headings? Instead, we are more likely to move from task to task, rarely pausing long enough to capture behavioural evidence from our daily working life. And that can be a problem when we are changing jobs. But when you do, it is worth finding the time to consider your skills in this way.
Write and talk in terms of action – having established the context, describe what you actually did to achieve certain results. Consider what happened as a direct result of your actions. Competency interviewers are very wary of answers that always refer to ‘we’. A potential new boss wants to discover what you bring to the party, not how great the team is that you are planning to leave behind.
Get used to talking – even boasting a bit – about what you do. The great thing about a competency based approach is that it ignores job titles and takes no notice of how you might behave in a hypothetical situation, so if you’ve spent time re-filing your work life experiences in this way, you’ll be ahead of the pack in any interview situation.
3 Do your research
As obvious as it may sound, doing your research for a role is crucial if you want to stand out.
Too many employers complain of ill-prepared interviewees who don’t know anything about the sector, the position or even the company they are being interviewed for. To secure a new position, you need to have a CV that clearly reflects your skills and experience, and you also need to come across in interview as knowledgeable, enthusiastic and competent. Not only will it demonstrate your understanding but it will also show the employer that you’re serious about the position and that you haven’t just applied to hundreds of different jobs.
The more research you can do, the better you will come across in interview. Increase your market knowledge by reading the sector trade press and business news (and Badenoch & Clark Insight), and find out what the main issues are within the industry. If you can make reference to any market information in the interview, you will help to increase your credibility, and potentially raise your profile above the other interviewees.
Likewise, Google the company and its main competitors and the sector – you need to know what is going on, what people are talking about and what the latest news reports are on the company. Again, by demonstrating that you have a full knowledge and understanding of the company, you will give the impression that you are genuinely interested in its future and want to be a part of it.
4 Raise your profile
They say it’s who you know that counts, not what you know. But generally one will lead to the other. Network and get to know as many of your peers as possible through corporate social events, industry networks and professional forums. A strong corporate profile, within your organisation and across your industry, will position you as a popular and therefore favourite person to know.
Having a prominent reputation will also ensure that your name springs to mind when career-enhancing opportunities arise. Contacts are often a great source of opportunity, from putting new experiences your way to giving you access to useful resources. Through them you might gain access to industry reports, topical events or practical solutions that will impress your boss or interviewer. Colleagues in other business units, sectors or regions might even involve you in projects that will further develop your competencies, skills and experience. But to become known you have to first invest effort in getting to know your peers. So start by giving them your support where you can, to receive a leg up in return.
5 Carefully manage your ‘NetRep’
With a new generation of web sites and services, such as free blogging tools, wikis and social networks at an all time high your Internet reputation, or ‘NetRep’ as it’s more commonly known, has never been so important.
People are leaving significant footprints of personal information across the Internet and many are unaware of the impact this may have on their employability. More and more employers are using online sites to check the truth behind people’s claims and what they find may often present a very different picture to that which the candidate would like them to see.
And it’s not just those seeking employment that need to be cautious. Employers are checking up on their employees in a bid to better understand their people and potentially separate the ‘wheat from the chaff’.
Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s only the web savvy among us who could come across your profile. It’s easy – all someone needs to do is Google the individual’s name. Try it and see what you find. It might make you think otherwise about the information you upload.
And remember, your friends can upload details about you so carefully monitor their activities. It doesn’t mean removing yourself from the web – your ‘NetRep’ can also work positively for you. Including examples of achievements, demonstrating values that mirror your employers’ and linking to well known influential people can all work towards a positive ‘NetRep’ and ultimately an attractive proposition for an employer.
