This week, we highlighted the importance of personal branding. As we are familiar with the concept of branding in business, personal branding has fairly the same concept, but for people. According to Henderson (2019), personal branding is a continuous process of establishing and sustaining an individual's reputation and image by highlighting their combination of skills, experience, and personality.
Figure 1. Personal Branding (Marrone, 2021)
Like branding in businesses, personal branding is just as important. Building up a personal brand has a ton of benefits, both personally and professionally, and it can help open many doors for you in the future. But nowadays, personal branding has been more important than ever, because according to a CareerBuilder survey (2018), 70% of employers use social media to screen candidates during the hiring process, and 43% of employers use social media to check on current employees. Therefore, if we want to stand out among other candidates when applying for a job, we might also need to create eye-catching personal branding for the employers.
Heitzman (2019) also implies 4 reasons why creating a personal brand is important. These are:
It Helps You Stand out from the Crowd
A personal brand is a great way to highlight your most valuable skills and knowledge about a particular subject or field of your interest.
It Leads to Opportunities
A strong personal brand will lead to opportunities such as job interviews, networking, partnership, etc.
It Inspires Trust in Your Audience
With the right creation of personal branding, you will gain more trust from the audience.
Someone Is Always Going to Be Screening You Online
Just as mentioned before, more employers are doing background checks on their candidates through the candidate’s social media.
There are 3 ways in creating personal branding (Henderson, 2019). These are:
Create Content With A Purpose
It is important to show people the type of content they are interested in, not what you think they want as we will want more people to see and engage with our content.
Be Consistent, Show Up & Serve
When it comes to establishing a personal brand, it's critical that your social media channels be consistent across platforms, visually appealing, and reflect the type of influential person you want to be.
Find A Unique Selling Proposition
You must discover what makes your personal brand distinct and special in order to set yourself out from the competition.
From this week’s material, I learned how important it is to build my own personal branding. Especially in my case, where I am now shifting my career from network engineering to UX. I also learned that I have to be consistent in creating my branding across all of the platforms that I used.
For now, here is the branding that I’m currently building:
As for now, I have created a website about myself (srhsfrnv.com). There, I put all my works and the experiences that I have done along with the links to my social media accounts where I posted my works. For beauty and fashion contents, I posted them on my Instagram and TikTok. Although, I realised that some of my contents at TikTok are inconsistent. Therefore, I might have to delete irrelevant contents and post more contents that are related to beauty and fashion. As for my professional personal branding, I use LinkedIn. Although, I believe I still need to polish my page so that my profile will stand out among the employers when I do the job hunt in the UX field.
Handerson, Gary. (2019). What Is Personal Branding? [online]. Available at: https://www.digitalmarketing.org/blog/what-is-personal-branding (Accessed 28/12/2021)
Heitzman, Adam. (2019). What Is Personal Branding & 4 Reasons Why It’s Important [online]. Available at: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-is-personal-branding-why-important/327367/#close (Accessed: 28/12/2021)
PRNewswire. (2018). More Than Half of Employers Have Found Content on Social Media That Caused Them NOT to Hire a Candidate, According to Recent CareerBuilder Survey [online]. Available at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/more-than-half-of-employers-have-found-content-on-social-media-that-caused-them-not-to-hire-a-candidate-according-to-recent-careerbuilder-survey-300694437.html (Accessed: 28/12/21)
Marrone, Stefanie M. (2021). Personal branding illustration [image]. Available at: https://www.socialmediabutterflyblog.com/2021/03/personal-branding-101-how-to-build-your-personal-brand-while-working-9-to-5/ (Accessed: 28/12/2021)
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Sarah Shafira Novianti
GDO710 Development Practice
MA User Experience Design, Falmouth University