Create and Manage Your Professional Brand in the Job Market

Donn LeVie — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:21:07 +0000

Part of my experience as a hiring manager in marketing and communications functions in the high-technology sector included participating in test marketing of various product-branding campaigns with potential consumers. As the Apple iPhone and iPad have taught us, the right branding campaign for a highly desirable product the consumer needs or wants (or is told they need it) can create favorable associations that lead to a larger mindshare and marketshare. All other wannabes usually are competing for the “catch-up crumbs.” Working with consumers in different target markets has taught me that building brand value involves two important components: making others aware of the brand in question, and creating a brand image that generates positive associations.

The same principle applies in the employment arena, whether you are looking for a permanent or contract position, or whether you are seeking additional clients for your business. This subject of relating product branding to personal/professional branding is too big and important for just several blog posts (in fact, it’s the subject of my next book), but over the next few posts, I’ll give you the three high-level ideas that you can use immediately about developing your professional brand: Brand awareness, brand image, and brand attitudes…but first, a word about brand equity.

How Brand Equity is Created

How and why people buy things is fundamentally an exercise in behavioral psychology involving consumer memory. Radio, TV, print, Internet, and WiFi ads are all aimed at burrowing into your memory for future recall when you have a need for some particular product or service. Advertising and marketing experts know that memory structure in the brain involves the creation of associative models, which consist of a network of nodes and links. Basically, these nodes are sites of stored information (logos, tag lines, jingle, etc.) that are connected by links of varying intensities. The intensity of the association between stored information locations reconciles which sites (and how many of them) are triggered for recall.

This same process occurs in the employment arena hiring cycle, and how businesses want their products and services to be perceived in the marketplace. If you’re looking for permanent or contract employment, or promoting your own business, your task is to create positive associations between your quantified accomplishments first, followed by your professional skills, knowledge, and experience—however you package them—and the people with a need for that expertise. Your “brand” is the single conceptual association others create based on your real and perceived professional (and personal) reputation in your specific profession or field.

Building Brand Equity through Brand Awareness

Building personal/professional brand equity first involves making others aware of your brand, and upon this foundation building a prominent image composed of positive associations about your brand. Regardless of whether you’re looking for a position in your field, promoting your own business, or wanting to build your own professional brand in the company for which you work, you must get your name embedded in the “associative models” of others. Here are a few ways, when properly managed, to build brand awareness (which could also be called “name recognition”):

Writing articles for peer-reviewed journal
Giving presentations or workshops at professional association meetings and conferences
Networking with other professionals in your particular field
Using social media (blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) to expand your circle of potential influence (be sure you have something of value to say; the virtual world is already overflowing with mindless blither)
Write a book on a particular issue in your profession or field

In Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0, I discuss in detail the “Continuous Promotion Approach” as a post-intervew strategy that reinforces your brand equity to the hiring manager and/or the hiring team. A job interview demonstrates that people are aware of your “brand” through your cover letter, resume, and the interview. The Continuous Promotion Approach builds on the awareness you have created by reinforcing the value and equity that is associated with your demonstrated accomplishments, skills, knowledge, and experience.

The most critical aspect of brand awareness is the formation of information in the memory in the first place. A “brand awareness memory node” must first be in place before people can make any brand associations. Without that established brand node in the memory, it is impossible to build a brand image, which will be the subject of my next post.

What can be said for a personal/professional brand was said about baseball diamonds in the middle of cornfields: if you build it they will come. Get in people’s minds first; the opportunities will follow.

What are you doing to build awareness of your personal/professional brand?

Your Attitude–and not Your Technical Abilities–Define Your On-the-Job Success

Donn LeVie — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:31:26 +0000

In my book, 50 Things You Can Do NOW to Help Keep Your Job (May 2011, Kings Crown Publishing), I relate how just about every one of the fifty individual items mentioned in the book can be placed into one of two buckets. One of those buckets is labeled “Communication skills” and the other is labeled “People skills.” The underlying factor common to both is how well you manage your attitude. There’s a near limitless supply of technically qualified candidates for just about every kind of job (some of those jobs are filled quicker than others, though), but not every technically qualified candidate has the right attitudes to ensure success.

Leadership IQ tracked 20,000 new hires over a three-year period and discovered that when new hires fail, it’s not because of any lack of technical proficiency–it’s because they failed to display the necessary attitudes for success. Leadership IQ reports that 46% (that’s 9,200 people) got fired, received poor performance reviews, or had letters of reprimand placed in their personnel file within their first eighteen months on the job.

Here are the top 5 reasons why new hires failed*:

26% failed for lack of coachability
23% failed for lack of emotional intelligence
17% failed for lack of motivation
15% failed for wrong temperament for the organization
11% failed for lack of technical competence

Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, lists in his book, Hiring for Attitude, the differences between high and low performers (which parallels my assessment in 50 Things):

High performers are highly collaborative, assist others without being asked without seeking recognition or reward
Low performers routinely seek out individual recognition and focus on personal reward
High performers provide constructive, respectful feedback to colleagues
Low performers often provide feedback that angers or belittles colleagues
High performers take personal responsibility for quality and timeliness of project work without excuses or blame
Low performers blame others consistently for errors, delays and poor quality of project work
High performers are self-directed learners, and are self-motivated to acquire new skills and knowledge they need for the job
Low performers have a negative disposition and often provide excuses for why a process or task won’t work instead of determining how to make it work

Thomas Jefferson once wrote “Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”

The evidence speaks for itself.

*as published in The Journal of the American Management Association Vo. 10, No. 4 Winter 2011-2012, p. 22.

Confessions of a Hiring Manager for 2012

Create and Manage Your Professional Brand in the Job Market

Your Attitude–and not Your Technical Abilities–Define Your On-the-Job Success