If you work in talent acquisition or recruiting and have ambitions for your career, personal talent acquisition or recruiter brand might benefit you.
A Talent Acquisition or a Recruiter brand is based on your professional self with the icing and a cherry topping coming from your personal self. You can decide how much icing and cherries you want to add.
When you have a professional brand people remember you, trust you, and believe you will be more likely to deliver value for them. You will be an influencer in the field of talent acquisition.
What is a Talent Acquisition or a Recruiter Brand?
A brand is the result of consistent use of marketing, communications and social media to engage with and nurture relationships with the audiences you target professionally.
Just like social selling to find, reach and engage with prospective customers, people working in recruiting and talent acquisition can adopt similar tactics to build awareness and trust in their professional target audiences.
Brands tend to win when there is a lot of competition involved. Brands stand out and are easier to remember because they appear different from the mass.
If you know how skilled you are, but feel you don’t always get the appreciation you believe you deserve, this might help you.
If the talents you source and approach are not returning your calls, replying to your emails or answering your calls, having a personal professional brand is likely to change this.
When you have a recruiter or talent acquisition brand, people will want to speak with you. Do you want to know why?
Because they know it will be valuable for them to be connected with you, to have a chat with you and remain top of your mind.
What you need to know about building your own brand
If you want to build a brand for your professional self, you need to know the following things:
- Professional self-branding involves a regular routine of delivering value for your audience. it doesn’t matter how you do it, but it has to be consistent and service your audience.
- In addition to posting and sharing job posts, you need to help the people you want to invest emotionally on you. Helping your target audiences is important because it builds trust. Trust and professional self-branding go hand in hand.
- All this takes place on social media. You have the largest potential audience and all the “tools” you need available on the four main socials: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. But choose just one media in the beginning. Learn the rut and then repeat on another platform.
- People look for four types of content: informational, educational, inspirational and/or entertaining. Think about how you can help your target audiences bu using this variety of content types. How can you help talents early on their career and the more senior talents? How can you help customers make better decisions about using recruiting services?
Why does professional self-branding requires consistency?
Consistency is critical. It means you post regularly and you post regularly about the same topic. Success means people are able to connect specific keywords to you. This won’t happen if you post about random topics.
You also need to have your own voice. The natural you because you need to keep it up. Having a voice means you have a specific tone of voice. But it also means you have opinions.
When you express your opinions, you will wake up emotions in the audience. Some will agree, some won’t. That’s the point. People who continuously believe in you and what you represent will become your brand audience.
What could it look like if you had a talent acquisition brand?
If you had your own professional brand as a recruiter or a talent acquisition professional, I believe any or all the following will happen:
- People in your target audiences recognize your name. Even if you never met them or spoke with them. They know, because they follow you on socials.
- They know how to position you professionally: Which industry you service and what kind of jobs they may find through you.
- If you work as a consultant, your customers and prospective customers follow you on socials, recommend your services and approach you when they need to hire.
- People refer to you, recommend you and mention you.
- The talents in your industry want to network and connect with you because they know you can help them next time when they need or want a new job.
- When your professional talent (and customer) network is wide, this will be a HUGE benefit for your own career development. Professional networks are worth a lot and your next employer or customer know this.
The accompanying podcast-episode
In this episode #20 of Building a Modern Employer Brand I talk about professional branding and how it can help a person working in recruiting or talent acquisition in their work and career.
Episode-length: 24:13 min
Listen to this episode on Soundcloud >>
Listen to this episode on Spotify >>
Episode content:
- What is a recruiter / talent acquisition brand?
- How can I benefit from a professional brand as a recruiting professional?
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