How A Good Personal Brand Can Improve Your Billings
Darren Westall
June 15, 2021
Recruitment
Have you been thinking about possible ways to improve your billings through a personal brand, but you’re unsure where to start or what will be a waste of time? We’ve all seen countless polls on LinkedIn recently about the best way to improve sales post-COVID, or if cold calling is still relevant and so on. However, one thing that isn’t been talked about enough in the recruitment space (still, unbelievably!) is personal branding.
Is personal brand just the latest buzzword in recruitment?
Definitely not. The benefits of personal branding in any professional space are endless, but particularly in a sales-focused environment. Your personal brand is the best way to sell yourself – it’s a mixture of skills, experience, knowledge and personality that you want your audience to engage with and relate to. As soon as someone views your latest video or blog on LinkedIn, you want them to be able to recognise that it has come from you.
Building credibility online is always about being authentic, genuine and approachable. You are far more likely to get a response to an email, phone call or LinkedIn InMail if a potential candidate recognises you from content you share that is relevant to their field. If they’ve never heard of you before, there’s a much smaller chance they’ll be willing to respond to you – particularly given that it’s such a candidate-driven market.
How do I build my personal brand and increase billings?
You need to have your own strategy in place to be able to increase your billings by maximising your personal brand. Although it might seem like a lot to add to your daily to-do list at first, when you’re used to it it’ll be the easiest part of your morning work routine before you’ve even finished your first coffee.
1. Share your own content
Depending on the size of the recruitment company you work for, hopefully you’ll have some company-branded content you can share throughout the week on social media. That’s great, and we encourage you to do that – but that’s not all you should be sharing. Your own content, with your own opinions and your own face attached to the content itself, will help people to see the person behind the profile. LinkedIn is a particularly great tool to use for personal branding in recruitment. Updating your status every couple of days with an industry-relevant topic to increase engagement, or a quick video of yourself talking about new roles you are recruiting for, is the perfect place to start. Get conversations started.
2. Engage with your audience
This is one of the most important parts of personal branding, and should not be brushed to one side as a lesser priority. Increasing engagement takes consistency – you can’t expect to leave the odd comment or like a few posts, and all of a sudden have a flooded inbox with potential candidates and clients. You need to engage in genuine conversations with people. Expand your network far and wide on LinkedIn by connecting with people you have an interaction with, and don’t forget to always follow it up with a message introducing yourself.
3. Be consistent
Even if you don’t have the time to be posting on LinkedIn every day, set aside particular times and days each week to share content, and block out time in your diary to start conversations with people online. For example, if you know you get particularly high engagement when you post on Tuesday mornings, make sure you do it every week. Whether it’s a weekly video update, a short blog, or even a poll asking candidates or clients about if they’d be interested in a webinar (related to your industry, of course) – consistency is what will help your network recognise you. Building trust with your audience all starts with your connections feeling like they know you.
Increasing your billings will all come as a result of developing, monitoring and improving your personal brand over time. As you become used to what works for you and what doesn’t – for example, the content formats that work best with your audience, or the platforms where you get the highest engagement – you will start to connect with people who want to work with you.
Whether it’s candidates or clients engaging with you online, or both, ideally – this will, over time, help you to build working relationships with these people. Of course, we’re not saying that every person you connect with on LinkedIn or talk to in a comments section is going to become a client or a candidate. However, there is more potential for this to happen when you are consistent with your audience, and always follow up with an introductory message to start a new conversation with that person. Never forget to follow up, and by doing so, you’ll be able to increase your billings outside of your company database or job board, applicants.
Happy branding!
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