Personal branding is becoming more and more important to make yourself stand out from the crowd during the recruitment process. It's important to realise that whether you have worked on your brand is irrelevant: \a brand is just the impressions you make combined with the reputation you've set for yourself. As such, It's important to make that brand work for you. If you're new to designing a personal brand, here are three tips to help you on your way.
Authenticity
People want to know that you are real: so avoid trying to fool others into seeing you in a different light. The goal of a personal brand is not to hide who you are, but to highlight your best qualities. Lying about this may work in the short term, but given enough time the truth of your character will always come to the surface. Therefore, your brand has to be truthful, and authentic to yourself. It must revolve arounf you core values, the skills you've gained, and your background. Your ability to look at yourself critically helps a lot here. Think to yourself, what can I use to describe me? How would others describe me? What kind of varience is there between my description of myself, and how others have described me?
Finding out how others view you will help you locate common descriptors, and will show you how differently you see yourself compared to your friends and others around you. From this, you can adapt your behaviour to better fit with the image you are trying to create, all the while remaining truthful about who you are.
Consistency
There's nothing wrong with being unpredicable, but when that unpredictability starts interfering with how others can depend on you, then there's a problem. Your brand suffers when you lack consistency. If you discuss issues of punctuality, but you have recurring incedents of being late, than people get frustrated at that, and could see you as a hypocrite. We're trying to be intentional with your branded image, so it's important to take your core values, and make the effort to practice these in your actions and interactions. Remember, we're not trying to lie here: if you already have high standards, but find it difficult to keep them, than change those standards to be more accommodating and understanding of others with similar views.
Harmony
Some see chaos as a ladder, and live in a constant state of disarray. Generally, the people in their life don't match with their goals. In some cases, they engage in activities that actively work against what you thought they were going for. If you're such a person who thrives on chaos; take note. This is how others see you as well, and they'll project that brand on to you.
People with strong personal brands make deliberate decisions about their time, activities, and the people around them. Choose to surround yourself with people who celebrate and enhance your life. By carefully managing your time and resources, you'll be able to support the reputation and lifestyle that will result in your preferred future.
There are many ways to use your personalised image to promote relevant features about yourself while undergoing recruitment. A brand will help you gain respect, and can open up many opportunities. However, it's important to make sure you keep consistent with the image you're curating, and that you promote a harmonious environment while remaining authentic to you who are. It's a long journey to creating the brand which best suits you, and it'll take many revisions to get it down perfectly. However, once that's achieved, the pay off is well worth it.