Last week I presented at a workshop on personal branding for job seekers with two of the best-in-the-business folks I know: Dan Schawbel, who is probably the most well known personal branding guy these days, and Sheryl Victor Levy, who is not as famous as Dan – but brings many years of deep experience in professional marketing roles as well as being a former HR recruiter (the perfect combo of skills for this topic). The three of us joined together to share insights from our experiences in order to help job seekers and those who help job seekers build relevance and manage their branding. Some of the ideas we shared will help job seekers find jobs. Some will help the jobs find the job seekers. We spoke about what to do, in what sequence, and how to get started.
I blogged about the workshop the day beforehand to give you a sense of what to expect. I’ll tell you that the workshop exceeded my expectations. We had a great crowd and I was pleased to see many familiar faces who came to join in the conversation. We had people of all ages — from an adorable teenager who sells jewelry online, to folks who with a bit of grey hair too. We had experienced marketing experts, social media practitioners, HR recruiters, bloggers, university instructors, networking group professionals, real estate agents, entertainment personalities, and career coaches — and many job seekers too! I was glad to meet the CTO of Brand-Yourself.com, the editor and publisher of Job-Hunt.org, and the social media experts at the Jewish Vocational Services of Boston. I was particularly pleased Dan Spira and Joselin Mane attended. I have learned a lot from both Dan and Joselin, so it was an honor to have them there. Dan is a presentation coach and brilliant entrepreneur. Joselin is a branding and marketing expert who is regularly found at the coolest of all Boston area events; actually he’s the guy who brings the “cool” to the party. Joselin took some photos of the event which you can find here.
The highlight of the gig was getting to work with Dan Schawbel and Sheryl Victor Levy. Dan organized this event with the help of two highly resourceful interns that he has working for him. I predict that this is the first of many such joint events — but the details of that are really up to Dan — so keep up with him at his personal branding blog. The three of us each bring a different perspective to the conversation, and this makes the event all the more powerful and valuable.
I wanted to share some slides about the topic of personal branding for job seekers — I used some of these at the workshop and some of these are from other workshops that I give in the area. This will give you a general sense of some of the topics we covered. But (as you would expect) we covered much more, and at a much greater level of depth at the event itself. So, yes, this is just a tease.
OK, now that you have a taste of the topic, let me invite you to follow up with us if you are interested in more. We are looking for opportunities to help individuals, organizations, associations, universities, career management groups, and companies understand what they need to do, why now, how exactly to start, what specifically to measure, what to avoid, and how to find success in this area. At this very moment in time we face a job crisis that is affecting millions of people — and we need to help each other get through this. We also face an explosion of the use of social media — and we need to understand what this means to us as citizens of the ‘net as well as career-minded professionals.
I think this is one of the more exciting applications of the social media revolutions — not only are we learning about, and participating in the use of social computing (which itself is a satisfying activity), we are helping people understand how to manage the very factors that will help them land their next job. And it is very satisfying to help people — especially those who have been out of work for a while and are not sure what to do next.
Over the next series of posts I’ll talk about some of the factors that job seekers need to focus on in order to land their next job. Specifically I’ll address the contents of this slide below.
What do you think this slide means? Comment below or wait till the next post on this topic.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }