Why You Need a Personal Brand

"Your personal brand is what people are saying about you when you're not in the room." - Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, you have a personal brand. When you google yourself, what do you see? Is it what you want people to see? Is it consistent across social media platforms, from LinkedIn to TikTok? The truth is, companies (just like dates) will google you before meeting you. According to a 2018 Career Builder Survey 70% of employers use social media to screen candidates during the hiring process, and half of the employers have found content on social media that led them not to hire a candidate.

Why Personal Branding is so Important

In today’s globalized job-market, being able to stand out is more and more important. Employers are moving away from hiring full-time employees only, quickly adopting a more flexible ‘project based’ vendor-model. This trend is called the "gig economy" and will change the way we work. Hiring vendors from around the globe has become easier than ever before, and this trend just seems to have accelerated during the recent pandemic, when even more conservative companies started to get used to people working from home, or from virtually anywhere.

What is a personal brand?

The term ‘branding’ used to be associated with companies, now it’s becoming more and more essential for individuals to be able to position themselves clearly, to build trust with potential employers or clients. A personal brand is a combination of your achievements, your strengths, and how you present yourself to the world.

Building your brand requires you to know your strengths, your goals, and the value you can bring to the table. Creating a personal brand is not only important because there’s competition in the market. Going through this process is helping a lot of people open their eyes and follow more fulfilling career paths, be it as an employee in a company or as an entrepreneur.

Start building your brand now

If you’re currently employed but haven’t thought much about your personal brand yet, then now is a really good time go get started. Use your current position to broaden your network (e.g. on LinkedIn), get feedback from manager and co-workers, stakeholders, and start reflecting about your strengths, achievements, and long term goals. Goals are not so much about being achieved as about giving you some direction. What do you want to be known for? What do you want people to know about you? How would your communication style need to ‘look like’ in order to convey that message?

Firstly, be honest with yourself is imperative, letting go of some ideas that might not fulfil you can be a relief. Maybe you think you need to do a certain job because it brings you more money or status, but if it drains your energy, you’re trading time of your life against money, which on the long run will result in frustration or even depression. Second, be honest and authentic when sharing yourself with the world. Be real, so you will resonate with the people that are on a similar wavelength with you. Trying to be someone that you’re actually not, will resonate with people who are taking you for who you’re not...

You don’t have to be a Richard Branson or Elon Musk to create an authentic and unique personal brand.

Or as Oscar Wilde famously put it: “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”