Personal branding is the concept of perceiving yourself as a brand, that is, to associate your name with your field of expertise or others. The following document describes the definition as well as some basic steps in order to establish your personal brand.

1. SO THAT YOU KNOW:
PERSONAL BRANDING FOR
FRESHERS
What Is Personal Branding?
Unlike what most of people think,
personal branding is not just lim-
ited to self-promotion. It is the
management of your skill set,
your reputation, your public rela-
tions, and your attitude in a way
to indicate your brand identity
that is the emotional response you
want to establish about yourself
with your network, audience, and
potential recruiters. This accounts
for the definition of who you are,
what you do, and whom you
serve. It is the process that ena-
bles individuals to mark their ca-
reers as a brand throughout a pro-
fessional presence in social me-
dias and Internet in general such
as LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, and
Facebook.
The personal branding is a way to
indicate and demonstrate your
uniqueness as well as articulate
your distinctiveness with those
who will engage your services.
This promise of values relate to
your strengths, added values, and
passions and they should align
with what you will accomplish for
whatever company hires you.
Your online presence and
communication with your target
audience is thus a way to increase
your credibility, to enhance your
chances to find a job, to expose
your state of mind and feelings,
and what is most important for
talent recruiters, to showcase your
long-term goals.
Why Is It Important To Have a
Personal Brand?
A personal brand will allow you
to build a positive reputation
about yourself. This is of prime
importance as Internet today
shaped the hiring process to en-
gage more in social media. This
means that recruiters are no more
only limited to looking at your
curriculum vitae and cover letter,
but furthermore, they check your
online presence. Personal brand-
ing is a method to show your
knowledge, to demonstrate your
acquired skills, and to show your
commitment and patience about
your field of expertize.
Personal branding does not only
serve to market and project your-
self to the world, but what is more
important is that it will put a pres-
sure on you to be updated in your
field, to create or share content, to
read other people’s work, and to
interact with your network.
What Is the Perfect Time To
Start Your Personal Branding?
If you can go back in time, it will
be AMAZING. Else, the perfect
timing is right NOW! Many of
students or fresh graduates either
lack confidence, or think that
their professional portfolios are
still empty. The great news is that

2. personal branding is not only
about what you did previously.
How To Build The Personal
Brand: “YOU”?
Personal branding is easier said
than done. The process of creat-
ing an online presence with a
good reputation might be
demanding at its early stages. For
this, the initial phase should ra-
ther focus on brainstorming rather
than just starting your brand.
There is no single company, prod-
uct, or service that starts immedi-
ately operating, if it is the case, I
can ensure you that either it will
fail or it will waste lots or money,
energy, and resources. In order to
avoid this waste, entrepreneurs
always make business plans, and
you will need a plan as well. The
following are steps to start your
personal brand.
Step 1: Research and
Brainstorm
Before starting your personal
brand, you should first read
different approaches that other
individuals has been through in
order to take shortcuts and learn
from their mistakes.
It is intuitive, but your personal
brand requires YOU knowing
more about yourself beforehand
and more than anyone else. For
this, you should first define your
brand goals, and what you want to
accomplish. Answering a set of
questions can help you better
communicate your brand infor-
mation:
• What do you want people
to think of or feel once they
hear your name?
• Do you want people to link
you to a specific field like
when you hear “Mark
Zuckerberg” or “Bill
Gates”?
• What is the job that you
want to have?
• What do you want to be
known for?
You should also brainstorm about
your skills set, your uniqueness,
your strengths, and your weak-
nesses:
• What do you want to
communicate to your
audience?
• What could you teach?
• What can you influence?
• What skills you think you
perform best?
• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?
• Can you overcome your
weaknesses by turning
them into strengths?
• What distinguishes you
from the others?
• What are you passionate
about?
• In what environment you
function most effectively?
In addition to answering these
questions, you can also use tools
of personal career success such as
personal SWOT (Strengths,

3. Weaknesses, Opportunities, and
Threats) analysis and others.
After you brainstorm these self-
reflective questions, you should
stay focused on ideas that are ca-
reer oriented. At this stage, you
will have a clearer definition
about your personal brand.
Step 2: Mark Your Online
Presence
The second step in personal
branding is to mark your online
existence. To start with, open a
LinkedIn account and fill all the
personal information. There are
many video tutorials and a course
on how to use LinkedIn that help
to fill your information taking
into account optimizing reaching
recruiters. Try to view these vid-
eos because they have lot of tips
that are helpful.
In addition to a LinkedIn profile,
make use of other social media
platforms such as Twitter,
Google+, personal website, and
blogs. The mistake to avoid is to
open accounts on these platforms
without writing any content. I
would rather prefer not to have an
account than to have an empty
one. Why is that? Because when
someone will use a search engine
to find results that corresponds to
your name, it is not professional
to find a blog under your name
that has no content. You should
also consider changing the set-
tings of the social media you use
just for friends and family into
non-public.
I advise you to include a value
proposition, which is by defini-
tion the value you can deliver,
and a brief professional summary
or an elevator pitch, which not
only summarizes your values, but
also your attitude, skills and work
style. These two latters are often
communicated orally during inter-
views.
Step 3: Plan For
Communicating With Your
Network
Once you have a social presence,
the aim is to increase your audi-
ence and visibility to others. This
part of the personal branding pro-
cess requires writing content such
as small articles, reflection about
some news, a book summary, a
conference or an event that you
attended, or just sharing other
people’s work while giving them
full credit.
But why do you need to have a
plan to communicate with your
network? The reason is that you
need to keep your audience. It
makes no sense for sharing 10
articles in one day and share noth-
ing for the coming 9 days. You
should rather share each of these
10 articles every day even if you
have them ready in order to keep
your readers satisfied. If you are a
student, you can take more time
in working on a project or case
study, edit your spelling and
grammar mistakes, work on the
page layout and presentation and

4. share the solutions with your net-
work.
Be aware that it is important to
share good quality materials ra-
ther than just share for the sake of
sharing.
Is Personal Branding Enough
To Get A Job?
You should perceive your per-
sonal brand as a way to enhance
your chances to attract recruiters
or get a job. But in order to fur-
ther increase your changes, there
are additional steps that you
should take:
1. Keep your résumé all the
time updated:
Your résumé should not be fully
detailed. It should contain just
enough information about the
skills and the experience you have
so far, just enough information to
attract the recruiters.
2. Have personalized cover or
motivational letter and have
personalized emails:
The mistake that most of people
make is the use of general words
such as “To whom it is con-
cerned”. Try to make some re-
search about the work place and
establish the first impression of
interest by citing the names of the
concerned parties if you can.
For the cover or motivational let-
ter, it is not smart to talk about
yourself. Instead of that, try to
talk about how your values will
contribute to the company and its
culture in general.
3. Update your skills
regularly:
The update of skills can be
throughout taking online courses,
reading books, or even watching
documentaries. Make references
to the skills you learned by shar-
ing them using social media.
4. Don’t be afraid to apply for
certain job positions, or to
talk to managers and
CEOs:
You should constantly keep
applying to different job positions
that relate to your expertise. If
possible and you have the change
to get some contacts’ emails
within this company, try to com-
municate with them and establish
a first conversation. Still, don’t be
pushy.
5. Follow the company you
are applying to:
Try to follow the company by lik-
ing their pages in LinkedIn. This
is beneficial to establish a first
impression of interest.
Tahar Harkat
t.harkat@gmail.com