If you want to succeed in today’s job market, you need branding

In today’s job market, the field is more competitive than ever. While digital platforms make it easier to find job opportunities, it can often be harder to nail one. If you are having a difficult time securing a job, moving forward in your career or changing directions, you are not alone; however, you also don’t need to remain stuck. If you want to achieve success in today’s job market, you may be missing out on a key step, personal branding. If you want to learn how to brand yourself and why it’s important, here are a few things to consider.

Highlighting Your Skills and Selling Them

Many people understand the importance of highlighting their skills during a job search; however, there is a key mistake that many people are making. They assume that their skills speak for themselves. The reality is that in an extremely competitive job market, it is your job to highlight your skills and sell them. While you may see the connection of your resume and experience to the job application, the recruiter or hiring manager may not see this. Paint a clear picture with data and metrics and use your sales skills to sell yourself.

Understanding Branding

If you want to be successful in the job search, you need to develop an understanding of how to brand yourself. The best way to describe this is that you should consider yourself the product and the company is the client, and you need to make the sale. You need to develop a clear identity around your skills, knowledge, experience and qualities and determine the best way to market those to potential employers. By building up your narrative of why you are the best candidate for them, you make their search process easy.

Crafting Your Narrative

Knowing how to craft your narrative is the first place to start. Think about the story of your career, how you got to where you are and why you want to make a change now. Just as you would for any product that you are pitching, you need to understand it from top to bottom. With this comprehensive understanding, you can learn how to spin your strengths, weaknesses and tailor your experience to the job.

Getting Recognised

There is an unfortunate reality for many professionals that sometimes getting recognised in a pile of other applicants can be the biggest challenge. There are strategies that you can employ, including developing a presence. If you want to make yourself a commodity worth pursuing, you need to build up your brand recognition. You can achieve this by getting out there and putting your name into the field in a positive way. Everything from writing professional articles or publications to speaking about topics in your field can help you gain notoriety and recognition. By establishing yourself as a reliable source and recognised name, you increase your likelihood of getting past that first step.

Develop a Positive Reputation and Build Your Network

While that first step of the process can feel insurmountable, you have other tactics available to you, networking being one of the most important. By connecting with people in your field and developing a positive relationship with others in your community, you can develop a group of trusted colleagues. By investing time, energy and positivity into this network of professionals, you increase your reputation. This can be crucial to your success as this community can help make introductions to others and help you build additional connections, expanding your network exponentially. The connections that you make could be exactly what you need to make the introduction to your next interview.

With the proliferation of digital platforms where you can easily upload a job application, submitting your resume and cover letter to a hiring manager is no longer cutting it. In a competitive and intimidating job market, you need so much more than knowledge and experience to stand out. Whether you are searching for your first job, looking to pivot careers or looking to progress professionally, branding can be exactly what you need to get to where you want to be.

Featured image courtesy of Unsplash