What's the most common interview question? It's about strengths and weaknesses! In fact, your ability to demonstrate your value and differentiate yourself from your competition can land you a job. That's why, you should really start branding yourself. Here are some tips on how to create and manage your personal brand during your job search.
Personal brand is a marketing term and refers to what people think of you when they hear your name. You can't change people's thoughts, but you can shape their perception of you, by bringing to the table something unique and positive. What you need is to carry out a short research on your own strengths applied to your job search.
1. Uncover Your Strengths
Job seekers usually have difficulties in identifying their strengths. If it's your case, then we recommend you read "Strengths Finder 2.0" assessment book. It's designed to help people uncover their strong sides and talents. By doing this assessment, you will get a clearer vision of what natural strengths you have. Then you will be able to incorporate them in your personal branding strategy. Plus, this #1 Business Week best-seller contains a personalized Strengths Discovery and Action-Planning Guide, which can change the way you look at yourself-forever.
2. Identify Your Job Niche
Start shaping your strategy by identifying your niche and your place in that niche. There's a great method that can help you with this task, called a "Blue Ocean Strategy", originally described in the book of W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. This method is frequently used in modern marketing to elaborate a differentiation strategy for a competitive market. The goal is to change the rules and creating a new value to offer to the market.
The bleu ocean strategy can be also applied to a job search, as described by Joshua Waldman in an extract of his book called Identify Your Job Niche with the Blue Ocean Strategy. If you go through all the research stages, you will obtain a comprehensive chart showing factors that differentiate you are from your competition. You can use them in everything you do with your brand.
3. Network anywhere and everywhere!
To start with, try the "Give Before Receive" strategy: providing people with useful information, giving a piece of advice, participating in a conference or leaving a comment on someone's article can help you in promoting your personal brand. If you are looking for a short memo, you can refer to "The complete A to Z guide to personal branding". You will find there some useful branding tips in form of infographic you must know about:
- - Identify your audience
- - Blog and create interesting content
- - Be the first to connect with people
- - Reread Dale Carnegie's book on how to influence people and win friends
- - Find ways to be helpful and propose them your help
- - Join professional communities or groups
- - Ask questions! People love good listeners.
- - Understand Triggers and Emotions
- - Develop a unique and genuine Tone of Voice
- - Be determined and enthusiastic!
Do you know any other tips on how to promote your personal brand? Please share below.
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