In the fast-moving world of recruitment, your agency’s brand name is only half the battle – your own behaviour and reputation will ultimately make or break your business relationships. That’s where your personal brand could help.
But it’s one thing to get a style guide and some new brand ideas for your business, what about yourself? We all know how hard it is to even write our own bios, let alone design an entire brand.
Let’s take a look at how to define your personal recruitment brand, and where to start.
What is a personal recruitment brand?
A personal recruitment brand is the conscious attempt to elevate your name, status and reputation in your recruitment niche by strategically defining and expressing your values. It is constructed out of a mixture of your personal ethics, rewards and qualifications, word of mouth (i.e. what people say about you), and how you conduct and promote yourself.
After you’ve built the components of your personal brand – tips for which we’ll cover below – you would deploy it in everything that you do, the same way you would infuse your company branding within all of its activities. Your personal brand might influence the stories you tell, what you post on social media, the interviews you take part in, what you choose to learn, the events you attend and so on.
The benefits of having a strong personal recruitment brand
The primary benefit of having a strong personal brand is that it increases your reputation for trustworthiness and quality in the industry, effectively ‘warming up’ cold leads before you’ve ever met them.
1. Increased credibility
As a recruiter, trust is critical to any successful client relationship.
People want to know that they’re handing their hiring process over to someone with the knowledge and authority to do the job well – in fact, 73% of people are more likely to trust someone with an established personal brand than someone without (Brand Builders).
A good personal brand helps you hone in on your personal successes and gives you the tools to amplify them.
2. Get more clients
Strong personal branding builds your authority – and clients will take notice.
To quote the study above a second time, it found that 67% of all respondents (regardless of age, demographic or job title), were more willing to spend money on a business if they believed that the personal values of the company’s founder aligned with their own. You may or may not be the founder of your own agency, but it shows you the power of shared values.
3. Differentiate yourself
Recruitment is competitive at the best of times, but a personal brand can help you cut through the noise.
Establishing your value proposition starts long before you shake someone’s hand, or post a job ad, or attend an event, or any number of other activities. It starts with your reputation, and if you’ve already increased your credibility and established yourself as a trustworthy authority in your niche, it helps to sell you over competitors before you’ve even walked in the door.
Steps to build your personal recruitment brand
1. Identify your core values
What makes you ... you? What do you stand for? What’s important?
In these early stages, you need to dig deep and really dwell on what difference you bring to the recruitment market, or other people’s lives. You might write down what your personal mission is, or your values. You can also think about how you’ve impacted other people so far, to get a sense for the character traits, competencies and interest which have so far defined you.
2. Figure out where you are today
What is the ‘as is’ state of your personal brand right now? What do people say about you? What do clients think of when they see your name?
In this part of the process, note down all the platforms and places where you have reach, in addition to the things you have achieved and the expertise you have developed (both inside and outside of work – hobbies are valuable too!). Consider your education, skills, social groups, memberships, online reviews, social followings and relationship status with all the important people/groups in your circle.
Bonus point: You might also look into those you perceive as your ‘competition’, to determine what they do differently (and how people talk about them), as this may form the basis of how you differentiate yourself later.
3. Hone your message
When were your best moments? When did you stand out? When did you achieve high?
Write down some of these stories and craft them into compelling narratives. You may call upon some of these stories later, when people ask you about your successes, your background or your life in general.
They don’t all have to be work-related. A strong personal brand, and key differentiating factors, can come from outside the office too. Imagine meeting someone at a networking event and they tell you that they are a race car driver in their spare time, or volunteer for charity, or have paintings displayed in a nearby art gallery – does that affect their brand in your eyes? Most likely!
4. Start to embodying who you want to be
Who do you want to be? What value do you want to offer the world? And who do you want to be known as?
Your personal brand isn’t a lie that you carefully build over your regular personality, it’s a chance to drill into who you are, and who you want to become, and make that a reality.
Try to live your brand, using all of the research and strategy steps you’ve taken so far to guide you on how to carry yourself. Each conversation, every meeting, email or DM, are all opportunities to further your brand in someone else’s eyes.
Bonus point: We just want to reiterate again that this is not a strategy of acting or lying. This is about becoming aware of who you are already and where you want to go, and becoming more mindful (and confident) in portraying these elements.
5. Leverage your personal brand
Finally, it’s time to start communicating your personal brand to your network.
Simply living your brand is already a great step, but there are more things you can do. For example:
Utilise digital platforms to communicate your brand message more widely. Optimise your social media profiles and start engaging more actively in online spaces.
Leverage your brand and expertise to create useful and insightful content. Post on your recruitment website, to LinkedIn or to other content platforms – blogs, industry magazines and so on. Great content is highly shareable, and can build your brand into a trusted authority.
Network with and engage your audience. Stay active online and offline, replying to people, networking, attending events, hosting webinars, etc. Staying top of mind means your name is on everyone’s lips when they need hiring help.
6. Reassess over time
Every so often, perhaps once a year or two (unless you have the time and energy to do it more frequently), come back to this process and repeat it.
The world is always changing, and recruitment doesn’t stay still. Quite frankly, neither will you! It’s always worth coming back to these points and going through them again to see if you still agree, and you’re still on the right track for who you are and where you want to be.
Need help promoting your recruitment brand?
Here at Three Sixty Digital, we’re experts in recruitment and digital marketing both. We know what it takes to sell a recruiter brand and spread the message far and wide.
We can help you promote your agency brand and your personal one too. Contact us today for a no-obligations discovery call and let’s see what we can do for you.
