CHAPTER THREE

PUT YOUR BRAND ONLINE

Employers pay a lot of attention to the “cultural fit” of candidates; they want to know if your personality will fit in well with their ethos and existing team. Letting your personality shine through in your social media profiles can help employers to assess this fit even before they meet you in person. It might be the photos you share of yourself doing a charity run or taking part in a debate competition that cause you to catch the eye of an employer. Sharing a mixture of great content by others, alongside your own thoughts, photographs or blog posts, will show your online network where your interests lie. For example, if you’re aiming for a career in photography, build a website to showcase your work, and use other platforms to like and share pages, posts, graphics and videos that reflect your aesthetic. Or if you’re interested in a career in software development, create a blog to showcase any projects you have worked on, and share articles about other people’s work that you find interesting in relevant LinkedIn groups or on your Twitter feed. YOUR PERSONALITY YOUR INTERESTS

YOUR VALUES Your values can be quite tied to your personality traits, and you can showcase them in a similar way. For example, if you are someone who strongly values teamwork, make sure to highlight your work with teams in your LinkedIn profile, or tweet about group activities you’ve really enjoyed. If you’re engaged in any sport or volunteering with a team, you could share photographs from work that you do which feature the team you work with. If you’re someone who values making a difference in society, post updates about causes that interest you, and follow and interact with organisations that have a social mission, or share links to the corporate social responsibility initiatives of companies you want to join.

YOUR SKILLS Your soft skills can be more challenging to highlight than some other elements of your brand. The best way to outline all of your skills is to have a detailed LinkedIn profile where you clearly highlight your skill set with evidence of where you’ve demonstrated these skills. If you have “hard” skills, these can be easier to showcase in different ways. If you speak a foreign language, consider creating a LinkedIn profile in your second language, blogging in a different language or creating a video CV where you speak your native tongue and your acquired language. If you are a graphic designer, make a blog where you post your design projects, and share links to any work you have done for societies, companies or friends. The list really is endless, so now that you know your skills, you need to give serious thought not only to outlining them but to demonstrating them online where possible.

The easiest way to include your keywords on social media is to use them in the profiles that you build. The greater the number of times you’ve included a keyword in your profile, the higher it will rank in search results for those terms. Copy all of the text in your profile and paste it into a word cloud generator. These are available for free on websites such as or and will list words in the cloud according to how many times they are used in the text. These sites will display the words which occur most frequently in the text in a larger font size so that you have a better idea of what terms you are using the most. YOUR KEYWORDS

If you prefer NOT TO have social media take up too much of your time, but you would still like to use social media in your job search: Set up a GREAT LinkedIn profile so that employers will see it when they look you up, and you could leave it at that without getting involved in groups and networking. Set up a Twitter account and find and FOLLOW other accounts that share helpful information for your job search, and you don’t have to tweet at all. Set up a Pinterest or Instagram account and FOLLOW OTHERS, without posting anything on your own accounts. Find and bookmark some useful blogs and check them regularly without commenting on posts or creating your own blog. There are all ways to take advantage of the wealth of information available on social media without having to worry about “creating content”

Employers are human, and they want to hire people who are EASY TO WORK WITH and who will fit in well with their existing team. If the predominant tone of your Twitter feed or blog is negative, you run the risk of alienating employers. Never, ever post anything negative online about an employer. Other employers who see this will be concerned that you might post negatively about them, and no business wants that kind of bad publicity NO NEGATIVITY