STEP 3

Personal Brand—Enhance Your Online Reputation

Personal brand is the art of becoming knowable, likable, and trustable.

JOHN JANTSCH

As a rising senior in college, Gavin wanted to put himself in a great position to land a full-time job after graduation. He studied in his university’s business program, but there wasn’t one specific job title or industry to which he felt especially called. He worried that because his interests and experiences were so varied, companies wouldn’t understand what skills he had to offer.

In short, Gavin needed to create an effective and cohesive personal brand.

He started by taking stock of the projects and internships he had recently completed. During his four years of college, Gavin had edited videos for an on-campus organization, interned for a data center company, started a podcast interviewing people at his university, written for the school newspaper, and completed a research project in India. He knew that employers would value the critical thinking and communication skills he had built, but he needed to effectively convey the value he could provide.

Through his research, Gavin discovered that many of the people he admired frequently showed their work online. He decided to create a personal website showcasing the projects he had worked on, both in and out of school.

Gavin discovered that the best portfolios don’t just show the final products of a project; they show the process of creating that result. Using photos, screenshots, and stories from his past experiences, Gavin created a simple portfolio website. Although he still didn’t have great clarity about his future career, Gavin’s site showed that he thought deeply about problems, cared about the final products of his work, and could communicate his ideas effectively. The site included a Work page, with links to his projects; an About page, which shared some of Gavin’s story; and a Blog page, which included some of the articles he had written for the newspaper.

As senior year began, Gavin decided to begin his job search by targeting management consulting companies. He thought he would enjoy the ability to quickly learn about a variety of industries and to apply his communication and presentation skills to different challenges that companies faced.

With this goal in mind, Gavin moved on to updating his LinkedIn profile, editing his résumé, and writing a cover letter. He wanted to make sure that the skills and experiences he highlighted were consistent across his website, LinkedIn profile, and application materials. He asked several mentors to review his résumé and cover letter. Gavin also included a link to his website in his LinkedIn profile, résumé, and email signature.

Gavin’s online brand helped him to stand out in a competitive application pool and eventually land a job at the prestigious consulting firm Bain & Company, making him one of the first students from his school that the company had ever hired.

Gavin’s experience demonstrates the potential of a strong personal brand. The term “personal brand” refers to how people perceive you based on your skills, your experience, how you treat people, and other information about you. More specifically, your online brand is comprised of the story you tell about yourself online, through your application materials, social media, and any other online mentions of you and your work.

What makes you different or weird, that’s your strength.

MERYL STREEP

Your online brand is essentially the story you present about yourself online, and it is a key step to address before jumping into career conversations, because it helps to build trust when connecting with people you’ve never met. When you reach out to someone and ask to speak with them, they will naturally want to know who you are. Their first step likely will be to look you up online to ensure that you are a real and genuine person. Even when you are contacting people you already know, these professionals are likely to look at your LinkedIn profile or website to familiarize themselves with you.

If you follow the process laid out in this section, these professionals will be able to easily learn more about you and your work. This will improve your odds of getting a response from your outreach and will build the foundation for a successful career conversation.

Don’t think that you need to perfect every detail of your online brand before moving on to step 4. Similar to my advice in step 1, don’t overanalyze. The action items in this chapter can be completed quickly and will put you in a great position to begin your outreach.

You may feel like you don’t have much to share about yourself and your experiences. You might feel anxious at publishing things online, or frustrated that you haven’t done enough of what you want to be doing. Notice these feelings, but give yourself some grace and compassion. Where you are right now is where you will start your journey. Your goal is to create an online brand that feels representative of not just who you are now but also who you want to become.

And remember: You shouldn’t have to go on this journey alone. Speaking with your career counselors, professors, or professional mentors can be a great starting place for learning how others view you and deciding what story you want to tell through your personal brand.

Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

JEFF BEZOS

KEY TAKEAWAY #1: KNOW YOUR VALUES, GOALS, AND AUDIENCE

You’ve already completed the first step in personal branding: reflecting on your values, story, and vocation, which you did in step 1. These insights will come in handy for this section and will inform what you choose to communicate about yourself.

Consider your strengths and skills—both your competencies, such as collaboration, adaptability, communication, and leadership, as well as any technical skills you have, such as knowledge of software programs, coding, research analytics, writing, a specialty in the arts, data analysis, or design.

What value can you add to an organization? What type of work do you create? Your online brand—including social media, any type of portfolio, and your application materials—can help answer these questions.

Next, you should think about your goals and the type of opportunities you are seeking. The best practices around personal branding vary quite a bit among different industries. For example, if you are pursuing a position in a creative field like performing arts, graphic design. or software engineering, you should definitely be sharing your work online. If you are interested in a research position, then your online brand should feature your research projects. If you are interested in writing, you should publish examples of your writing online. For most business roles, your LinkedIn profile is the most important aspect of your online brand. And creating an online brand is less essential (but can still be useful) for service-based roles such as teaching, customer service, administrative support, or medicine.

Your goals and desired industry will lead you to reflect on your audience of potential employers and what they value. For most students, the audience for your online brand will be professionals and recruiters in the industry or industries in which you are interested. Which of your strengths would a hiring manager find valuable? What accomplishments and experiences would people in your desired industry value? Thinking through each of these questions will help you decide which information to share about yourself and what themes of content you may want to share online.

Let me share a few final thoughts on how to think about your personal brand. First, it’s completely fine if you are considering multiple types of work and have diverse interests. You don’t need to pigeonhole yourself into one career field; even having a general idea of your audience will be helpful in completing the actions in the next section.

Second, your personal brand should strike a balance between authenticity and professionalism. On one hand, you should try to be as authentic as possible, because people will appreciate your humanity and personality. However, you shouldn’t share anything you would be uncomfortable with a supervisor seeing. This is a personal decision, and you can choose how much information you want to share online. With everything you share about yourself, of course, you want to put your best foot forward to position yourself to land an internship or job.

Start by knowing what you want and who you are, build credibility around it, and deliver it online in a compelling way.

KRISTA NEHER

KEY TAKEAWAY #2: CREATE YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE, LINKEDIN PROFILE, AND PORTFOLIO

Entire books have been written about personal branding, but in this section, I’m going to focus on three simple actions you can take that will set you apart from the competition and communicate your value to professionals: an email signature, a LinkedIn profile, and a portfolio. Creating an email signature is essential before beginning outreach, as is creating a basic LinkedIn profile. But it isn’t necessary to build a more advanced LinkedIn profile or to make a portfolio before beginning step 4.

1. Email Signature

To maximize your success during your outreach efforts, you need to create a professional email signature for your school email account. You can also do the same for your personal email. Providing your audience with relevant information about you is an important way to bolster your credibility and to get professionals to say yes to your outreach for career conversations.

At the very least, include your name, a head shot photo, major or program of study, school, and a link to your LinkedIn profile. (We’ll cover LinkedIn next.) Including a head shot in your email signature can make the professional you’re emailing more comfortable by providing a face to go with your name. For consistency, it’s best practice to use the same head shot in your email signature and your LinkedIn profile. Enabling professionals to learn more about you by clicking on your LinkedIn link after receiving your emails is an easy way to increase your odds of getting a response to your outreach requests.

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FIGURE 2. Email signatures.

I have more than ten years of student data that suggests that you need these elements in your email signature to optimize your chances of a professional agreeing to meet with you. For more information on how to create an email signature, or to use one of our templates, visit www.careerlaunch.academy/resources. Figure 2 presents several examples of excellent email signatures. Some information is kept confidential here, but you get the idea.

2. LinkedIn Profile

Most professionals who receive a message from you will look you up before responding. If you are reaching out in a professional context, they will most likely look at your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is the world’s biggest professional network, with more than 722 million users all over the world in 2021. This professional networking website has more than 20 million job postings and pages for 50 million companies.1 Creating a complete LinkedIn profile will help showcase your experience and skills to future employers and to the professionals you contact for career conversations, making you more trustworthy and credible.

If you have followed the first step of creating an email signature that includes your LinkedIn URL, you make it especially easy for anyone you email to learn more about you. Here are a few tips to strengthen your LinkedIn profile:

Add a professional profile photo. A high-quality profile photo makes your profile more credible, unique, and authentic. It doesn’t have to be a professional photo. A picture from a camera phone is fine. Try to get a picture where your head takes up about half the frame. Your profile photo should be well lit and have a relatively simple background.

Edit your headline. A headline is automatically created based on your current position, but you may want to edit your headline. A generic headline like “Student at XYZ College” is okay, but you may want to include multiple phrases separated by the vertical dash character, like this: “Administrative Assistant at Local Art Gallery | History Major at XYZ College | Aspiring Teacher.” Try to think about what high-level overview of you would be both accurate and eye-catching.

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FIGURE 3. An effective LinkedIn “About” section.

Add a summary. This overview of yourself should be at least one paragraph but no more than three paragraphs in length. You can tell a short backstory about what you are interested in and why. This section is a great place to show some of your personality, too.

The final paragraph can say what you are currently looking for, such as “I am currently looking for a summer internship in health care. If you know of an open position or would like to chat about ______, email me at _______.”

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FIGURE 4. LinkedIn “Experience” sections.

Work experience. Like your résumé, your LinkedIn profile should highlight your relevant jobs, internships, and volunteer experiences. Fill out each section of the Work Experience form on your LinkedIn profile. In the description section, explain how you have added value to that organization. Make sure you’re highlighting your biggest accomplishments, using quantitative measurements when possible. Figure 4 shows two examples, one using bullet points, as in a résumé, and the other using a paragraph-style description.

Education. Fill out the education section on LinkedIn and include any relevant details that could differentiate you, such as a high GPA, leadership in a student organization, participation in athletics or performing arts, or any honors or awards. If your GPA is below 3.5, do not include it, since it likely won’t set you apart.

In addition, there are some advanced LinkedIn tips that you may wish to employ. Visit www.careerlaunch.academy/resources to find short tutorials on the suggestions given here.

Custom URL. Creating a custom URL based on your name can make it easy for recruiters and hiring managers to find you. Ideally, your custom URL should be the same as your name, perhaps with a dash or underscore in the middle or a number at the end if necessary, such as www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe. Be sure to add your custom LinkedIn URL to your résumé, in addition to your email signature.

Add media. If there are any websites or articles that show the work you’ve done, or reference an accomplishment, you can link the website or upload an image or PDF.

Ask for a recommendation. If you don’t already have a LinkedIn recommendation or two, consider contacting a former supervisor, coach, or professor to ask them for a recommendation. This greatly enhances your credibility. But do not use LinkedIn’s built-in function to initially ask for a recommendation. This is an important request and it’s relationship-oriented so you should first ask on the phone, via video chat, or in person. Once you receive a verbal confirmation, then send the request via LinkedIn.

If you have a letter of recommendation on paper but not on LinkedIn, I suggest that you ask the recommender to add their recommendation on LinkedIn. Some professionals may not have a LinkedIn account. If that is the case, you might upload a letter of recommendation on LinkedIn using the “Add Media” option.

Regardless of the format of your recommendation, however, it can be a valuable tool in your job search as a source of credibility.

3. Portfolio

Creating a portfolio will differentiate you and can provide a competitive advantage over other students when applying to any job or contacting any professional. In the story at the beginning of this chapter, Gavin created his portfolio on a personal website. There are many free website builders that allow you to create a simple website without coding. This will require a time investment up front to get the design and content just like you want it, but it can pay dividends down the line.

However, there are simpler ways to create a portfolio. Check with your school to see if it has an online portfolio tool for you to use. Another simple option is to create a Google Slides presentation. You can create a portfolio using this method, regardless of whether you have ever had an internship or formal work experience. Class projects and volunteer experiences will work just fine. If you have worked in a job you feel is unrelated to your career goals (such as fast food, yard work, or retail), you still can use these experiences in a portfolio. Which experiences you show matters less than the skills you display and the process of your thinking.

Here’s how to make a Google Slides portfolio: If you have a nonschool Google account, create your portfolio from there so that you can create a public link (set the sharing settings to “anyone with the link can view”). If you use your school Google account, you may need to download the presentation as a PDF and then email it because your school may have sharing restrictions.

Begin building the presentation based on your goals, values, and résumé. Include one or two introduction slides with your photo and a brief explanation of who you are, what you study, and what you are interested in. Next, create several slides for each project or experience you want to highlight. For each experience, give some context about the situation, the organization, and the challenge you helped to solve. Talk about your work process and your contribution to the project. If you have images or videos that show your work or make the slideshow visually interesting, be sure to include them.

Make sure to send your portfolio to several professional mentors to edit—you want your portfolio to be polished and visually pleasing. Once you finish, you can hyperlink the presentation in your email signature (if using a nonschool account) or send a PDF version along with your résumé when applying for a job.

REVIEW AND REFLECT

Your online personal brand is the story that your online presence communicates to people who don’t know you. Think about what story you want to share with professionals and employers.

Remember that you don’t need to be an expert in anything; it can be just as powerful to show your process and interests.

The most essential elements of your personal brand to continue forward in the Career Launch Method are a professional email signature and a basic LinkedIn profile. When you have time, build a more advanced LinkedIn profile and create a portfolio, but don’t let these steps prevent you from moving forward to step 4.

ACTION ITEMS

1. Think about the following questions, which will inform your personal brand: What skills do you want to display? What experiences would employers find valuable? How can you communicate these skills and experiences in your online brand?

2. Create an email signature with your name, photo, school, major or program of study, and LinkedIn profile link.

3. Spend time working on your LinkedIn profile. Make sure you have completed all the basics (photo, headline, and education). Then consider more advanced ways to highlight yourself—for example, by adding media to the work experience section or asking professionals to write you a recommendation.

4. If you are actively applying for internships or jobs, make sure that your résumé and cover letter effectively communicate your personal brand story. Gain feedback from résumé software your career center may provide, as well as your professors, career counselors/coaches, or mentors to help you best present yourself.

5. When you have time, create a portfolio using Google Slides, your school’s portfolio tool (if available), or if you, or if you want, a personal website. Showcase your interests, skills, and experiences, then get feedback from others. Link this portfolio to your email signature, download it as a PDF to send with your résumé, and/or use it in job applications.

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