9 Things Recruiters MUST DO to Build Personal Brand

To succeed in recruitment, you need to go way beyond the basics. With such fierce competition for top-notch talent, differentiating yourself is essential for recruiting success. Your personal branding is a bumper asset. 

So, what is a personal brand in recruitment, how does it differ from business branding, how much should the two align, and how do you build a personal brand that shines?

  

What is personal brand? What’s the point of it?

A personal brand is like a character summary. It includes reputation, values, personality, interests, and passions. Your personal brand is also a statement of intention—it tells people what you stand for. It’s more than education and experience. You can be a strong performer backed up by a business brand, but if people don’t know YOU, your personal brand is lacking.

Personal branding is a professional identity for recruiters that showcases a person’s uniqueness within a business. There are many recruiters, including others within your organization, but your personal brand sets you apart and can make you the go-to recruiter for specific candidate needs.

 

What’s the difference between a personal brand and a business brand?

It’s essential to understand personal versus business branding in recruitment. A business’s branding reflects specific values and focuses on the organization’s products and services. It demonstrates a set of cohesive rules and standards by which a company is presented to the world. 

Personal branding can support business branding, but it’s not the same thing. Personal branding reflects an individual’s personality; it is quirkier and less corporate. Also, personal branding is owned by the individual, whereas the company owns a business’s branding. Personal branding will follow you from job to job. 

 

Should personal brand and business brand align?

Yes. Personal branding should fall under the umbrella of the recruitment firm you represent. It’s all about combining forces so that you and the business achieve great success. A personal brand should fit into the whole branding picture like a jigsaw piece. Aligning personal and business brands should be a strategy but you can give personal brand more leeway regarding quirkiness and sparkle.

 

Personal branding importance in recruitment

Why should a candidate or client choose you over other recruiters? What makes you unique? What makes you better? Recruitment firms can shine in all ways regarding strategy, tools, engagement, and so on, but success falls heavily on the individual when it comes to relationship building. 

Ultimately, in recruitment, people build trust in people, not businesses, so differentiating as a recruiter is essential.

 

How do you build a personal brand?

There are many must-dos when developing recruiter personal branding strategies, which we’ll discuss in the next section. But, for now, let’s focus on the broader picture. 

When you focus on building a personal brand, you’re investing in how others see you. It’s a strategic practice. Your personal brand isn’t just what you say about yourself but also what others say about you.

When building a personal brand in recruitment you must ensure that the narrative created about you is accurate, coherent, compelling, and unique. The fundamental groundwork is defining your purpose.

Think about your long-term vision and mission, both personally and professionally. Decide how you want to showcase the best version of yourself. Consider what makes you a unique recruiter. 

Then, follow our nine steps to build a knock-out personal brand as a recruiter.

 

1. Highlight Your Expertise

Whatever your area of specialization, you should be highlighting recruitment expertise. People need to know where your skills are, e.g., in finance, marketing, tech, or healthcare. There are countless recruiters in the industry, but only one has your exact education, experience, and skill set.

Define your niche and solidify it in the content you share. Share specialized knowledge with others—candidates, clients, and fellow recruiters. This could be presentation decks you’ve made, research you’ve done, or articles you’ve written or contributed to. Get your expertise known via LinkedIn, Twitter, your personal webpage within your company site, or blog posts.

The more specialized you are, the more you’ll stand out from competitors, but you’ll need to get your content to niche places to become a go-to for candidates and clients in your specific industry.
 

2. Growing Presence on Social Media for recruiters

Social media strategies for recruiters are critical these days.

Here’s how:

• Choose the right platforms – select the social media sites where your audience hangs out. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the most common channels for business but don’t rule out other niche platforms.
• Post consistently – regularly share content related to your values and ideals. This could be your achievements, work examples, or ideas. Setting goals and creating a content calendar will help you to maintain consistency in personal branding efforts.
• Vary your content – avoid posting the same old things. No one wants to read in-depth article after in-depth article. Post videos, link to your blog, share infographics, link to podcasts that you find interesting, or share office-appropriate memes.A diverse feed will attract more attention. While you want to position yourself as a thought leader, dry and dull won’t project your personality, so it’s OK to lighten up a little sometimes and share funny thoughts about life as a recruiter.
• Engage with your audience – always reply to comments on your posts, and take the time to like, comment on and share others’ posts. If you read an interesting article, share it and tag others. Fostering connections in recruitment is vital.
• Always stay in the positive zone—don’t leave negative comments. That said, your opinion matters, so if there’s a hot topic in your industry, don’t be afraid to show your expertise and share your opinion, but stay positive.
• Use your audience for advice. Learning and growing are a big part of developing your personal brand, so don’t be afraid to ask for help. It can be a great way to start a conversation.
• Stay current – always use the most relevant hashtags for what’s trending in your field.
• Don’t be too salesy—if your content always involves the hard sell, people will get fed up and ignore you. Of course, pepper in links to your company’s site; they are invaluable. Try to focus on taking a genuine interest in people and the challenges being faced in your industry.
  
  Remember, the more sociable and optimistic you are on social media, the stronger your brand becomes. Set up a content calendar for personal branding and try to mesh your social strategy with that of your firm.

 

3. Live by a Content Calendar

To build a credible personal brand, you need compelling, organized, and consistent content. Content creation for recruitment professionals is essential to your personal branding strategy as it reinforces credibility and shows people what you are all about.

Create your own regular content, like a writer might have a column online. Use social media as your sounding board. If you’re not a writer, post links and ask questions of your audience. The important thing is to say something! Whatever you create, ask yourself how you can share it widely to get the most value from your efforts.

If you’re silent, you’ll be quickly overlooked in favor of competitors with a stronger voice.

Putting content out rarely and at random intervals will act like tumbleweed in the ether. 

Create a strategy, build a calendar of what you’ll post and when, and commit to it. Your firm might have a content procedure in place, or you might create your own—either way, content marketing is not an optional practice when it comes to building a personal brand.

 

4. Get Out and About

Sitting behind a desk is a necessity sometimes, but it doesn’t do much to facilitate people getting to know the real you. If you hide away at your desk, no one will know you exist.

Networking for recruiters is critical. Attending conferences, meetups, training certification courses, or self-improvement classes, like public speaking, is vital to building a personal brand. You can also get out and about digitally by attending webinars, vlogs, or live industry events online.

Getting out and about will enable you to showcase the face behind your name. 

 

5. Foster Connections

Connections are much more than a list of candidates or favorite clients. Your connections are your “tribe” – the people you work with, collaborate with, and share core values with.

People won’t magically come to you. The way to establish meaningful connections with the people who are important to you is by reaching out and maintaining contact with your recruitment network.

Emails, coffee meetings, personalized content, or tagged social media posts are all great ways of interacting and touching base. Reaching out always feels more genuine to the recipient when you’re just touching base and not asking for something.

 

6. Offer Something Extra

It’s not enough to have a carefully crafted niche that you’re an expert in – working with you also needs to be a remarkable experience.

Find ways to create a unique experience that candidates and clients get from working with you so you can stand apart from other recruiters. Take extra time to get to know people and build up personal information about each of your candidates and clients that shows you remember them.

There are lots of ways of showcasing recruitment expertise. Bring extra research and analytics to the table, or show you are a thought leader who can draw killer brainstorming sessions out of meeting attendees.  

Find what can make you unique in your interactions with clients and candidates, like always being able to provide exciting reference articles or being so well connected that you can share new contacts and introduce anyone in your local industry.

 

 7. Be Authentic

Authenticity in personal branding is crucial. Trying to be something you can’t live up to is fooling no one and undercuts your voice in the market.

So, what does being authentic in recruitment practices involve?

Being honest and having meaningful connections is worth far more than an endless roster of phony interactions. Candidates and clients can tell a blagger within seconds. Acting fake to get ahead will leave you behind in an industry that’s all about connecting. Authentic personal branding practices, on the other hand, are far more likely to cut through.

 

8.Perform Routine Maintenance on Recruitment Contacts

Networking isn’t a connect-and-forget game. Your goal should never be to gather as many contacts as you can for the sake of it. Genuine connections take time and effort.

Instead, connect with successful placements and new candidates regularly. Get a sense of who’s doing what and where they’re going, and try to offer meaningful conversation and support.

You never know where your next candidate will come from, so keeping in touch with as many people as possible broadens possibilities. Simply reaching out with an email or a mention on social media goes a long way in staying connected. You can actually end up strengthening recruitment practices through personal branding.

 

9. Give Back

There’s much more to a recruiter than their placements. With the support of your firm, why not add some community service to your personal branding process? The case for corporate social responsibility in recruitment is huge and helps in personal and business branding. 

In keeping with your role as a recruiter, are there outreach opportunities for mentoring young HR professionals, offering pro bono consulting for underprivileged job seekers, or offering resume training for high school students? Or doing something completely different can add an exciting edge.

With just a small portion of your time and resources going back into the community, you’ll create a habit of demonstrating your values through your actions. Work with your CEO to facilitate these opportunities. It showcases the best version of yourself and enhances how others see you and your firm. 

It might feel like a lot of extra effort, but the sparkle in personal branding happens when you make a conscious effort to go above and beyond.

 

About Tracker

Continuous personal branding efforts can pay huge dividends. But you need the right tools.

Tracker’s industry-leading recruitment software helps recruiters create meaningful connections with colleagues, candidates and clients. Our advanced software technology enables you to recruit faster and more efficiently, providing clients and candidates with a stellar experience and giving you more time to focus on the human side of relationship building. 

Why not book a demo now?