How And Why You Should Encourage Your Team To Have A Strong Personal Brand
Leo Nathan
September 14, 2022
Marketing
Whether you’ve worked in recruitment for two weeks or 10 years, it’s highly likely that you’ve heard people mention the term ‘personal brand’ – or at least come across blogs or LinkedIn posts about it.
If not, we suggest you come out from underneath your rock and enter the world of personal branding 2023. Why? Because you’ll start to fall behind your competitors if you don’t, first and foremost!
Encouraging your employees to have a strong personal brand as recruitment consultants is essential. For a few lucky recruitment business owners or team leaders, you’ll surely have a few team members who already know the importance of a personal brand and spend time investing in their network on LinkedIn.
These are your existing personal branding ambassadors – more on this below.
For the team members struggling to find the time to invest in their personal brand, or they simply don’t see the value in it, the key is to educate them on why it’s such an essential part of their role as a recruiter.
How to encourage recruiters to invest in their personal brand
If you keep reminding your team members to spend time on LinkedIn engaging with their networks or posting content, but they only do so every once in a while, try the below:
- Find people on LinkedIn who invest in their personal brands as an example (someone in the recruitment industry ideally, but any sector will do - personal branding works in all industries). Demonstrate how what this person is doing will bring them more business, because people recognise them and trust their views and opinions based on the content and industry knowledge they share on LinkedIn.
- Show what your competitors are doing in terms of personal branding. We all know that a bit of healthy competition goes a long way, particularly in recruitment - so if your employees can see that other recruiters are reaping the benefits of big networks and plenty of client and candidate conversations on LinkedIn, they’ll likely want to do the same (but better).
- Demonstrate how easy it is to invest in a recruiter's personal brand. It can take as little as 10 minutes a day to share a piece of content on LinkedIn, or comment on a few posts to engage with people in your network. Even if they want to push the boat out a little further and start creating their own content to share, this doesn’t need to take up hours of their time. A quick video of themselves chatting about their latest roles can last as little as 20 seconds, and all they need to do is record it, upload it and respond to any feedback.
- Incentivise personal brand KPIs if needs be. If you feel like your team just isn’t seeing the value in making the time for consultant personal branding, add small incentives for number of posts per week, or number of conversations on LinkedIn that have led to an enquiry from a candidate or client.
- Introduce personal branding ambassadors - there’s sure to be a few key people in your recruitment company who have absolutely nailed their personal brand already. If so, talk to these people about how they can help their colleagues with their own personal brands - tips and tricks from their work mates will surely help your team see that it can be fun, as well as rewarding.
Why you should encourage recruiters to invest in their personal brand
If you are unsure about why your team members need to spend time on LinkedIn engaging with their networks or posting content, make note of the below:
- Recruiters having a strong personal brand, particularly on LinkedIn, helps them to build trust with their networks. If people are seeing your employees regularly post jobs, content, news, interesting articles and engaging in conversations with people in their industry, they will subconsciously know this person’s name and face as a known and trusted recruiter in their field.
- Personal branding in recruitment has a lot to do with credibility. A potential client, for example, is far more likely to contact a recruitment consultant on LinkedIn that they have seen posting about their industry on a regular basis, than they are with someone they are unfamiliar with. Why? Because the content you share and the knowledge you demonstrate directly impacts your credibility.
- It helps your recruiters build their confidence. You’ll have seen countless trainee recruiters in your time who have been nervous or apprehensive about making their first cold calls to clients or candidates on the telephone at the start of their careers - this isn’t dissimilar. Someone who isn’t used to posting a video of themselves talking, or a photo with commentary, isn’t going to be confident in doing so until they’ve done it a few times and got the hang of it. When they notice that it sparks conversation with relevant people in their sectors, they’ll get more into the swing of things.
Get in touch
Getting your team to build their own personal brands on social media is key to building the company brand, but also to keep them visible, build their networks, show off their expertise, and remain competitive.
It can often be useful to invest in a tool to make building a personal brand quicker and easier, particularly when it comes to auto job posting, curating industry-relevant content, and scheduling posts to go out on LinkedIn ahead of time.
Book a demo with Paiger to find out more.
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