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How Can Your Personal Brand Lead to More Applications and Better Candidates?

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Brad Bialy: Matt, let’s chat personal branding.

Matt Lozar: Let’s.

Brad Bialy: For quite some time now I’ve been educating the staffing and recruiting industry on the benefits of personal branding. We’ve created an ebook for that at Haley Marketing Group (Personal Branding: Your Secret to More Applications and Better Candidates). I’ve gone out and I’ve spoken for a few different industry associations and webinar series on the value of personal branding. I wanted to bring that topic to the InSights podcast for our listeners. I think if we can get started here and really paint the picture for why personal branding matters. Matt and I were talking about some statistics and why personal branding matters in 2019. Recent data shows that 62% of recruiters say that it’s tougher to find quality candidates for their companies than it was five years ago. As many as 84% of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising. Add to that the fact that 42% of individuals feel that they aren’t sure which brands or companies they can trust.

Brad Bialy: Now here’s where it shifts. 90% of millennials say that brand authenticity is important, and 62% of millennials say that if a brand engages with them on social networks they’re more likely to become a loyal customer. See it’s important that we engage with individuals on social media, that we develop a personal brand because as we look at the data yes at 3.6% unemployment it’s getting incredibly difficult to find the right candidates. As we learn that more consumers are finding it difficult to trust brands and trust logos, I think there’s an incredible opportunity for individuals in the staffing and recruiting industry to cut through the clutter by developing strong personal brands.

Matt Lozar: To recap what you hit us here with fantastic insights and a lot of data is we have trust issues. We want to trust, so how can we get people to trust us.

Brad Bialy: Correct.

Matt Lozar: That’s the TL, too long didn’t read right there.

Brad Bialy: Correct.

Matt Lozar: But anyway, so how do we do it? I mean Brad has an ebook that we’ve put together at our company. He has presentations. He’s gone out to different associations around the country literally to do virtually and in person. I mean if we really want to get technical, I think it’s just being a person. It’s very interesting to watch how digital and social is evolving. It’s been 10 years that social has been really started and has started to evolve and mature during that last 10 year period. But it was cool in the beginning, then we just blasted the heck out of content to share, and now that everybody’s doing it we’re getting content overload so how can you really engage. It’s becoming one to one.

Brad Bialy: Yeah. For me personal branding comes down to a three step process. It’s developing your profile, it’s joining the conversation, and then it’s starting the conversation. If you don’t have a concrete profile developed and individuals can’t find you, you have no shot to develop that personal brand. From there, we join the conversation and then we start the conversation. Matt, think about any sort of networking event you go to or even party, gathering with friends and family members, if you were just to sit in the corner of the room and start screaming information about yourself, one everyone’s going to look at you like you’re crazy, and two everyone’s going to look at you like you’re crazy. But instead you join the conversation. Social media should be the exact same. We don’t want to just shout into the clutter, shout into the noise that we have blogs and jobs available and opportunities available. We want to join that conversation.

Matt Lozar: And doing that digitally is a lot easier than being at an actual party.

Brad Bialy: Sure.

Matt Lozar: If you have a quiet personality. If you have a nice boisterous personality like my podcast partner here, he would probably be shouting in the middle of the group saying all of his fantastic beliefs and whatnot. But anyway, I think you can do it digitally. You have that profile and Brad laid out a great three step process. Then my next question would be where do you go to join that conversation?

Brad Bialy: To join the conversation, I would recommend starting with the platform that you’re most comfortable with. Matt and I would never encourage you to jump into a platform that you’re not familiar with because it’s going to make you anxious, it’s going to make you a little stressed out, but start with where you’re comfortable. If that’s LinkedIn, join the conversation in groups. If that’s Facebook, maybe it’s starting with your news feed, what are individuals talking about and how can you add value. If it’s Facebook Groups, again how can you add value. Don’t just join Groups and share jobs, but listen to what others are saying and listen to respond, and listen to actually add value to that conversation in that group.

Matt Lozar: Go into that group I think, jumping back to segment two here and something Gary Vaynerchuk talks about is don’t expect anything back. Just add value. You have some expertise. Explain it in a way that can be very helpful to your audience there, but just do it because it’s the right thing to do. It sounds a little Pollyanna, but just share that content where you can help people because that’s literally what the staffing industry is about. We’re helping people put people to work. That’s where you can really join into those conversations, if it’s on Facebook, if it’s whatever electronic or digital format that you’re really comfortable with. Then I think pivoting here, starting the conversation, it’s good as a third step I think because it’s hard. It puts you out there.

Brad Bialy: It absolutely does. You need to understand what you’re comfortable showing. What I would recommend doing is to start by making it personal and share who you are so that individuals can get to know who you are, but only share what you would be comfortable sharing offline online. If you’re at a networking event and you don’t want to talk about how you’re let’s say passionate about Gary V., or you don’t want to talk about your personal life, you don’t want to talk about your family, don’t do that online. In no way should you do anything online that you wouldn’t do offline. Online is just an extension of who you are offline. We’re just continuing that extension somewhere else.

Matt Lozar: And it’s going to be more authentic.

Brad Bialy: Absolutely.

Matt Lozar: If you’re a fake persona behind the keyboard, or even in front of the camera that you do 37 takes to produce a video, when you have to jump into that real life conversation in a networking event, or a business meeting, or whatever, you’re not going to be able to act consistently. You’re going to eventually have to be your own persona. If you’re own personality shines out, your content will be more authentic, you’re going to engage more, and the human brand will come back and our trust issues are eliminated.

Brad Bialy: And people can spot that. We said that right from the beginning that individuals don’t trust brands anymore because brands for the longest time have been fake. People are reading through that now. If we are human, we are authentic, we are ourselves, when we go from being behind a computer to being let’s say in real life, and I throw up finger quotes there almost comically, when we’re offline we just want to be who we are.

Matt Lozar: I think my last point here for segment three is video helps you be yourself authentically digitally and will let you build that trust. I mean everybody’s doing video. I get it. But if your video is good, if your content is good, then it’s going to resonate and connect. Showing that video, we have seen it helps you make that connection with people because I mean it’s a face, it’s a voice, it’s your own personality. You’re not going to connect with everyone just like you’re not going to connect with everyone in the real world, but you will connect with the right audience and the right people for either your career or for your business.

Brad Bialy: Matt I’m going to end with some Dr. Seuss here. “Today you are you. That is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.” When it comes to personal branding, be yourself, be authentic, but most importantly be you. If you would like to download the ebook Personal Branding: Your Secret to More Applications and Better Candidates created by Haley Marketing Group, we’ll put a link to that ebook in the show notes so that you can do so.

Brad Bialy: That’s our show and thank you for listening to another episode of InSights. If you found this episode valuable, we ask that you please share it with just one coworker this week. Have a question for us, you can tweet us @haleymarketing and let us know what you’re thinking, or email [email protected]. Of course, if you need a hand with your marketing or recruitment marketing initiatives, we would love to help. You can check out haleymarketing.com to get in touch with our team of marketing educators. For my podcast partner Matt Lozar, this is Brad Bialy, we’ll see you next time.

 

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