with that, you will be able to demonstrate to your ideal employers exactly what you can do. Roll up your sleeves! Your personal brand is waiting …
Chapter 3
Audience
Job-Seeker Personal Brand
Positioning Element #1
It’s up to the Audience. It always has been.
— Kate Smith, Singer
If you’re unemployed or in a job that you don’t like, let’s face it: It’s hard not to focus on yourself. All you want is to be gainfully employed with a steady paycheck and fulfilled by productive work.
But the surprising truth about using personal branding in your job search is this:
The best way to land the job you want the most is to focus on your Audience.
After all, potential employers (your Audience) are interested in what you can do for them. How are you going to make their jobs easier? What advantages are you going to bring to their company? Showing them what you can offer the company is how you get the job.
One of the most widespread myths about personal branding is that “personal branding is all about you.” But think about it: If your brand exists in the minds of your Audience, how can it be all about you? It can’t, and it isn’t. So, the more you learn about your Audience, the more connected you will feel to the interviewer, the more you’ll anticipate the needs of the company, and the faster you’ll get the great job you really want.
How do you do that? Well, the key is to get as much information about the company as possible. In fact, one of the recruiters I interviewed said: “You want to stick out in an interview? Be knowledgeable about the company. You wouldn’t believe how many people know virtually nothing about the company they’re interviewing with. It’s a big mistake.”
If you learn about your Audience, you will have a head start on the interview process because you will already know more about the company than the majority of interviewees. A top pet peeve of many an interviewer is the applicant who doesn’t do enough research prior to the interview. For example, one of the human resources pros I spoke with said: “It isn’t enough in an interview to simply say, ‘You have an opening in my field, and I know this is a good company.’ But you’d be surprised how many people do exactly that.” As you can imagine, that isn’t enough. You need to have a very specific reason for wanting a particular position at a particular company. And the only way you can determine if a company is right for you is to learn about that company. Then, you will be prepared to tell your interviewer that reason.
Your interviewers will remember you if you can give them a detailed reason why you want to work there, if you’ve taken the time to read about the company’s background, and if you’ve learned about the company’s recent dealings.
Who is Your Audience?
So, how do you go about getting that information in order to connect with your interviewer? Let’s assume you’re a top-notch marketer. You are the newly-promoted Brand Manager of YOU™. You’re in charge, and it’s your job to see that your brand reaches the top.
If YOU™ were a product, your Audience would be called the “Target Market,” and you would find out all you could about your target through surveys and questionnaires aimed at finding out who they really are. You would want to know provable facts about the people in your Target Market, like their age, sex, income, education, etc. How much do they earn? Do most of them live in the city or in the suburbs? In marketing, these provable facts are called “demographics.” That’s the kind of information you would start with.
An average marketer might stop there, but provable facts are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to learning about the Target Market. Think about it for a moment: If you really want to get to know someone, is it enough only to know his or her age, how much that person earns, or where he or she was born and lives? It wouldn’t really tell you much
about that person, would it? You would only have scratched the surface, and you would need to base all of your assumptions about that person on little more than what you could read in a census form.
That’s why top-notch marketers take the time to go deeper. They want to know much more about their Target Market. They want to get into the heads of the people who are buying their brands and understand their behavior. In marketing, this information is called “psychographics,” which sounds pretty heavy, but basically means personal information that tells you what makes a person tick.
How does this apply to personal branding? Well, in general, your Audience is anyone or any company you want to influence with your personal brand. In your job search process, this includes the people who could hire you for the great new position you’d love to have. Your Audience might simply be the person who interviews you, but you may not know at first who your interviewer will be or even your potential immediate supervisor. So, in the beginning of your job search, your job-seeker personal brand Audience might be the entire company or a group of people within the company, such as the division or department where you’d like to work.
Now, you’re probably thinking: “But how can I know so much about an Audience that I haven’t even met yet? I don’t know anyone at most of the companies where I will be applying for a job. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I don’t even know which companies I’m interested in yet!”
Yes, it’s true that when you’re looking for a new job, learning about your Audience may seem challenging at first, and even choosing companies to target can be confusing. But learning about your Audience before you land the job is definitely doable, and all it takes is some smart investigating, which can actually be fun if you let it. With a little bit of sleuthing, you can find out which companies are the best fit for YOU™. In fact, you may be surprised how much you can learn about a company and its people with just a little bit of ingenuity and effort.
Getting Ready to Get Ready
When you’re at the very beginning of your job search, you’re in more of a company search than anything else. There are literally thousands of companies out there, so choosing the right ones to target may feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. But as the determined Brand Manager of YOU™, it’s your task to decide which companies should receive your resume — the ones that will truly turn into an Audience for your job-seeker personal brand.
How do you do that? Start by asking yourself some questions about the “type” of companies you would be interested in. What is most important to you?
•Location?
•Size of the company?
•Culture of the company?
•Learning and training opportunities?
•Opportunities for advancement?
•Whether the company gives back to the community?
You might even rate these elements from 1 to 6 — with 1 as your highest priority and 6 as your lowest priority. Once you’ve decided what aspects of a company matter most to you, it will be easier to dive deeper and find out more about the companies that fit the bill. You’ll then learn what you need to know to determine if a company is truly a good fit for you.
If you don’t know which companies in your field are out there, do an Internet search and begin to gather names. Then, you can look through their websites and see how they measure up on your rating scale. As you begin to see which companies have the qualities and opportunities you’re looking for, you can narrow down your choices.
Become a Creative Detective
Once you’ve selected your top companies, it will be time to get out your detective’s magnifying glass. At this point, the Audience for your jobseeker personal brand