Is Your Personal Brand Disruptive?

More and more job search experts stress your personal brand as a way to land your dream job. At its core, the way you market your skills must be memorable for you to stand out from a huge crowd of candidates. Otherwise, you're selling your skills short and may never reach your full career potential.

Bring Solutions

Develop your personal brand on the job search by showing potential employers you bring energy and solutions to the position. Tailor your resume to the job by taking into account the listed qualifications. Include relevant keywords to pass by an applicant tracking system, or do the legwork of creating a viable network. You must be willing to do hard work to develop your brand, and you must translate this hard work to a potential employer. Highlight your value and make your personal brand disruptive with three detailed aspects.

1. Maintain Consistency

Your personal brand should remain the same between your online persona and your real-life personality. When a hiring manager or recruiter discovers your profile online, that person should know precisely what to expect when meeting you face-to-face. Your solutions, message and knowledge base remain the same online and offline. This consistent message builds expertise and trust with your potential employer because you don't surprise it by appearing to be someone different from what you presented on paper.

2. Get Creative

Standing out from the crowd means you have to get creative when an opportunity presents itself. You may not know when the next chance will come your way so you should be ready to respond to any possibility of landing a job. For example, you might reply to someone's LinkedIn blog post or Facebook Live video with the most intelligent and creative response compared to anyone else's. That comment you leave could turn into a conversation, and that conversation might become a job opportunity once you get to know the person who created the content.

3. Make Content

Making content brings your consistency and creativity together. Emphasize your personal brand with your message through blogging, social media posts or curating content relevant to your chosen industry. Your content turns you into an expert in your field. This expertise builds trust among people in your network. This trust then builds relationships that could lead to job opportunities at companies that edify your professional career.

Consistent, creative content builds your brand and makes your case for employers to hire you. Finding a job is a competition, and your branding turns you into a memorable candidate. Build your reputation over time through content that shows your expertise on a particular topic that means a lot to you. That passion comes out in your interactions with people who view your content, and could turn into exciting career opportunities when the right people notice your emotional connection to your chosen field of expertise.

Building your personal brand comes down to familiarity. Does the employer know you? Can the company relate to you? You have to develop quality interactions with employers for a branding strategy to work, and that takes some time and effort.

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