Candidate Assessment Tools for Candidates with Personal Brands

Leveraging Personal Brands in Recruitment Methods and Techniques

If you thought branding was only for businesses, think again. Personal branding is the latest trend in the recruitment space that allows professionals to differentiate themselves from the crowd. How would you like others to know you in the digital space? How do you improve the visibility and reach of your profile? Personal branding is the key to improving visibility of your profile and building an impressive digital story of your skills and capabilities. Prospective hires that flash an impressive personal brand can be evaluated by candidate assessment tools.

What is a Personal Brand?

In today’s competitive job market, recruiters are finding it challenging to find the perfect fit for open job positions from resume submissions alone. Recruiters need to put in double the effort in identifying the right profile and then validating the details provided by the candidates. Living in the digital age, it is impossible to sustain without a strong and impressive personal brand. What is a personal brand?

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is quoted as saying – “Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room”.

The term branding was originally reserved for businesses, but with the advent of social media and the gig economy personal branding has become fundamental for professionals. A personal brand is the unique combination of skills and expertise that establish your digital presence. Personal branding is the practice of marketing people and their careers as brands. It is an ongoing process that involves the development and maintenance of the reputation and impression of an individual, group, or organization. Your personal branding is all about promoting your skills and competencies through digital platforms. Your personal branding includes details on the skills, personality, and experience of the candidate. The impression you gain from an online reputation helps in attracting prospective employers.

Here are a few tips for effective personal branding

Create content with a clear focus – Personal branding must be focused on providing clear insights into your key skills and capabilities. Updating the brand stories must be an ongoing process to ensure that the interest of the followers is maintained. Having a clear and focused content strategy is a must in personal branding. Every piece of content that is created must have a specific goal in mind.
Be consistent, show up, and serve – While you build a personal brand, you need to ensure consistency across various social media platforms. The stories or posts that you share must be visually appealing and reflect your personality accurately. Whatever niche space you choose to be in, you need to stick to it and stay consistent. When discussing social topics in your personal branding space, it is better not to be overly opinionated.
Identify the unique selling proposition – To sell your personal brand and create an online impact, it is important to first identify your unique selling point (USP). Identify the unique factor that sets you apart from the competition and promote that via your brand.

There are many ways of developing your personal brand, the most effective way being the problem-solving approach. Through your personal brand, you should aim at providing answers to a target audience that is searching online for problem-solving information in a niche area. Job seekers must use appropriate keywords in their personal branding space to improve visibility. More the visibility in the online platforms, the easier it is for the profile to get picked up in the recruitment and selection process. Recruiters are no longer satisfied with information provided on resumes, they are more interested in personal brands that reflect the actual capabilities of jobseekers. The information provided by the personal brand is particularly useful in the online recruitment methods that hiring teams are using.

Ways of Establishing Your Personal Brand

In the past, the best way to establish your expertise in a particular area was to publish a notification book in your area of expertise. With digital disruption across industries, establishing your digital presence is the most effective and quick way to reach out to the target audience ( prospective employers). Here are some popular ways (platforms) for developing your personal brand:

Blogs –

Publishing frequent blog articles on trending topics or market trends or industry trends is a great way to strengthen your personal brand. The success of the blog depends on the topic you choose to write about. Frequent publishing of blog articles in your area of expertise/interest shows your command over the subject matter and that you are updated on the latest trends. Including keywords in your blog that are used to search for information in their topic area is a sign of a strong personal brand that can be easily detected by recruiters via a simple Google search.

YouTube Channels –

YouTube has gained popularity among all types of audiences over the past decade. Not just for entertainment purposes, YouTube videos are created for academic and research purposes as well. Professionals that are comfortable in front of the camera and have good verbal communication skills must consider promoting their brand via YouTube. A simple YouTube search for a candidate’s name will throw up any videos that they have created.

Podcasts –

A podcast is a great format for showcasing communication capabilities. Candidates that have a flair for journalism can use podcasts to showcase their interviewing skills. Recruitment teams can use podcasts to see their prospects in action and to find candidates with strong personal brands.

Social Media Channels –

Social media channels are a popular vehicle that professionals can use to develop personal brands. To leverage the power of social media, candidates have to frame a posting strategy that is in sync with social media algorithms. Such a strategy will be effective in gathering a significant number of followers on that platform. A highly focused social media strategy empowers candidates to become social influencers for their target audience. A consistent social media strategy promotes their posts over other people’s news feeds, which in turn improves visibility in the job market.

Online Courses –

Professionals who are interested in teaching can establish a personal brand that focuses on online courses. Posting courses on popular online learning platforms is a great way to build a reputation as a sought-after educator. Recruiters can also reach out to candidates with the most innovative and engaging online course content.

Why is Personal Branding more Important than ever?

Irrespective of whether you are an employee, employer, or an entrepreneur creating a personal brand has become more important than ever. Social media and other online sources are being used more than ever by recruiters to find prospective hires. From the recruiter’s perspective, online sourcing for prospective hires becomes much easier and more effective when they have a personal brand. Once the right candidates are sourced, the next step is to evaluate their skills and competencies. Using recruitment assessment tools like SkillRobo, hiring teams can find the right candidates for open job positions within their organizations.

Here are a few reasons why personal branding is more important than ever:

Recruiters are looking at social media for more information on candidates. They use social media during the interview process. As per a CareerBuilder survey, 70% of employers use social media to screen candidates during the hiring process, and 43% of employers use social media to check on current employees.
Personal branding is important from an employer’s perspective as well. Companies that encourage employees to build their personal brands find it useful for business growth. When employees with strong personal brands represent their company at conferences provide more exposure to their organization. Employees help acquire new customers and retain existing ones when they impress thought leaders through their brand.
The growth of the gig economy is another reason why personal branding is important. The average person switches jobs every 2-3 years. With the number of freelancers and contract workers increasing by the minute, it is very important to have a digital brand that creates a digital space for themselves. Workers need to work differently if they need to stabilize their jobs. A personal brand is a great way to communicate clearly who they are and what they stand for to prospective employers and clients.

How does Personal Branding help in recruitment and selection?

Recruitment methods and techniques should focus beyond just the job skills of the candidates. They must focus on the personality and behavioral traits of the candidate to make sure that they fit well into the work culture.

Here are 5 reasons why having a personal brand helps in recruitment and selection.

Personal branding shows that candidates are invested in their careers – by creating a personal brand candidates show that they are willing to go the extra mile for their career. They also show that job seekers are looking for opportunities to grow and learn. The candidate looks more reliable and committed than other prospects. For example, employees that have cross-functional expertise put it on their branding page. Hiring candidates with cross-functional expertise benefits the company.
Personal branding showcases the candidate’s expertise in their field – listing your skills on your resume is an outdated way of showcasing your skills, and is not an effective way of attracting recruiters. With so many people competing for the same positions, candidates need to find unique ways to showcase their talents. Developing a personal brand through a blog shows the depth of the candidate’s knowledge in their chosen field of work.
Personal branding represents a candidate’s professionalism and excellence – a personal branding page represents the extent of professionalism that the candidate is committed to. By taking the time to develop a personal brand, job seekers can show potential employers that they are willing to put in extra effort to build a successful career. All the effort in developing a personal brand is self-motivated, such candidates can contribute greatly to the company’s growth with appropriate training.
Personal branding helps candidate stand out from the crowd – a well-developed personal brand is not only attractive to recruiters, but it is a great way to differentiate yourself from the crowd. Not many are willing to invest the time and effort to create a brand that is distinct and unique. So, in a situation where multiple candidates qualify for the same position, a personal brand will give the candidate the winning edge.

The information provided on the personal branding space will be useful for later stages of the hiring process. Hiring teams can use candidate evaluation software to further evaluate the depth of the skills and competencies showcased on the branding page. Recruitment process outsourcing agencies also look at personal branding for gathering exclusive information about candidates. Assessment tools for recruitment and selection help hiring teams narrow down the right candidate for the open job position. SkillRobo from Cavintek is among the best candidate assessment tools in the market. Fully customizable tests in SkillRobo enable the hiring team to provide role-based evaluations that give them a complete picture of the candidate’s capabilities. The recruitment assessment software also provides instant reports and analytics that enable data-driven hiring decisions.

Conclusion

Branding is no longer restricted to a business or an organization. Even employees or job seekers or professionals can benefit by creating a personal branding space to showcase their unique skills and capabilities. Whether you are looking for a better job or bringing more sales for your company, personal branding is more important than ever. An engaging and innovative personal branding page has the potential to attract attention in the online recruitment process.

Candidates that have a personal branding space stand out from the crowd. Recruitment assessment tools used by hiring teams can further evaluate the skills that are showcased in the personal branding space. From role-based test customization to reports and analytics to remote proctoring features – SkillRobo has the entire online recruitment process covered.