It’s March, it’s women’s history month, we just had international women’s day, and we couldn’t have been luckier to get an hour with Keirsten Greggs of TRAP Recruiter LLC to help outline the rules to live by as a recruiter when it comes to your personal brand. You have one either way, so you may as well take the reins and steer your brand to your benefit.
We’ve condensed what transpired in this month’s roundtable into a few rules about building your personal recruitment brand to help you to elevate yourself as you tackle 2022.
1. Find your passion. What are you passionate about, not just in recruitment, but in your life? You need to marry your personal passions with your professional passions, because they both represent you.
2. Establish your expertise. Everyone is an expert at some part of their professional sphere. You may not be the only expert – but you are an expert. Lean into that part of you and share what you know, what you see, and what you learn every day. Remember, not everyone can do what YOU do.
“You can have all the ingredients but you don’t have my sauce.” – Keirsten Greggs
3. Every interaction is part of your brand. That means not just what you tweet or the TikToks you rock, but every email, phone call, and in-person meeting (what is that?) is part of the brand you are building. Be intentional about what you say and how you say it. Perception is almost as important as intent.
4. Your time is finite. You can’t be in all the places and respond to all of the things and still do your job and have your own life. Recognize that building a brand is about consistent engagement on a medium with an audience.
5. Find your medium(s). There are mediums which you must use like email and phone and then mediums you choose to use like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, TikTok, Reddit, etc. Choose the mediums that work for you and for your audience.
6. Be authentic and true to yourself. Write like you speak. This is not the time to create a caricature of a person you are not. Show who you are and what you believe. Draw your lines that you won’t cross and stay true to those.
“People can detect authenticity.” – Sharon Munajj
7. Customize your content for the medium and the audience. Copy and paste is not the answer (with a few exceptions). Blasting the same content out on each medium isn’t helpful to the discussion and will fall on deaf ears. Make content relevant or do not send it out.
8. Be an active participant in your own content. Don’t put something out there and then not engage with the audience who is responding. You need to create a two way conversation. Respond to your audience and create an authentic place to share ideas.
9. Engage in other people’s content. Stop yelling into the void. Building a brand isn’t holding a microphone and yelling into the ether – you need to participate in other people’s conversations and provide insights and opinions. Not only does this build your brand, it also builds your followers.
10. Post and go – don’t post and pray. Social media, in particular, has moved towards the anger generation machine and responses can be highly emotional and charged. Don’t become that person. Give yourself the space to remove charged emotions from your responses and instead provide thoughtful, measured, and insightful content.
11. Write like your parents are watching. What would your mother say if she read what you are writing in your email, social post, or response? It’s not just about language choice. How are you treating the person or people on the other side of the statement?
12. Use imagery to make your point. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, or better, a picture means you don’t need to ask someone to read a thousand words. Gifs and memes work wonders.
“I have found if you post too much, it dilutes your reach in a way…people will just skip over your posts at some point.” – Carrie Darney
13. Share data and stories. Regardless of your expertise and audience, data takes away so much of the emotion of social media. Data helps people understand what you are trying to communicate and stories from your own experiences make you relatable.
14. Do not argue with the internet. If people want to be negative, that is their choice, it doesn’t have to be yours. Nothing good ever comes out of a Twitter argument.
15. Set realistic expectations. Building a brand and building an audience go hand in hand, and they don’t happen overnight. Your goals should be realistic about both. This is an investment you make for the long term – it won’t happen instantaneously.
Follow Keirsten on Twitter @TrapRecruiter and be sure to connect with her on LinkedIn.