Building a personal brand on LinkedIn is vital for any recruiter. Whilst it can be easy to fall into the same trap of being repetitive in your style and content, it’s important that you are consciously trying to build a brand that appeals to candidates.Building a personal brand on LinkedIn is vital for any recruiter. Whilst it can be easy to fall into the same trap of being repetitive in your style and content, it’s important that you are consciously trying to build a brand that appeals to candidates.With more power going to the candidates than ever before, recruiters need to be selling themselves as much as their services to stand the best chance of attracting and gaining candidate trust.
Below are our top tips for building a personal brand on LinkedIn, however, whilst all of these things are a good way to improve your branding, the most important way to improve your branding is through consistency.
You’ll already have some form of personal brand from how you portray yourself on LinkedIn, and it’s worth asking the people around you how they would describe your profile currently.
1). Have an opinion
Whilst it might seem obvious, rather than just using your LinkedIn profile to post jobs, provide your opinion on industry new and write longer pieces of content.
By building your own voice on your LinkedIn profile, you’re able to show that you’re passionate and are much more likely to generate connections with relevant candidates & industry voices.
2). Use Video
Video is by far the most popular form of content, with its importance across all social platforms increasingly generating strong levels of engagement. With this only set to increase, video is certainly something that LinkedIn favours.
With modern smartphone capabilities, recording and editing a quick video is easier than ever before. You shouldn’t be too picky about how this looks, as long as you come across approachable and friendly. If you decide not to produce videos about job vacancies or videos which feature you, try to share interesting videos that are relevant and interesting to your connections.
3). Create an eBook
If you already produce blog content, you can easily produce a downloadable eBook by combining blogs about similar topics. Once you have done this, you can offer this out on LinkedIn as well as your website as a free value-add.
If you don’t have a marketing department or someone in your organisation who could create this content, begin to build this up by writing longer pieces of content as LinkedIn articles. You can use this space to write about industry news as well as to give advice to potential candidates.
4). Engage With Experts
You should begin doing this by making sure that you follow/are connected with the top thought leaders from your industry. Check your industry connections & who appears frequently on your feed as well as popular bloggers & business people.
Once you follow the right people, you can begin to share their content, offer your opinion and comment. This is a very simple way to build a voice within your industry and may potentially lead to further interaction and connections on LinkedIn.
5). Share & Comment on Relevant News
Whilst it’s good to avoid offering your opinion on contentious issues if you’re reliant on your LinkedIn profile as part of your work, you should always be looking to add your thoughts to what’s happening in the jobs market & industries you recruit in.
6). Start a Podcast
As well as a rise in video content, podcasts have become increasingly popular. Whilst you might be tempted to start one, it’s important to be aware that they are incredibly time-consuming. Before you take the step to start one, be sure that what you have to say is both relevant and unique.
If you think it is relevant and unique, then you should map out your content, list potential collaborators & start recording. There are plenty of online guides to show you how to set up your podcast and publish it, but ultimately, this is potentially a very good option to develop more connections and contribute to the industry.
7). Personalise Messages – Don’t Copy and Paste
It’s easy to spot a message which has been copied and pasted, regardless of how careful you think you’ve been. Instead, try to personalise each message & give something valuable to the candidate. If you’ve committed to writing blogs or sharing articles, offer some free advice and try to build an awareness of your personal brand before you send a message to the candidate; this is far more likely to generate a response.
8). Celebrate Your Past Successes
To add even more of a personality to your own brand, you should be sharing your past achievements, endorsements and success stories with your followers. These can come in the form of longer LinkedIn posts, videos or LinkedIn articles.
To increase engagement, you should space this out well, include relevant images, tag people you think would be interested and ask for people to share their own stories with you.
9). Write in the First Person
To ensure that you are coming across as personable as possible, always make sure that you are writing in the first person. Whilst you might be tempted to write as the company you represent, it’s important to build your own voice, as this will increase your engagement with candidates.
10). Get Recommendations
You should always be actively seeking recommendations on LinkedIn, as well as likes and interaction on your content from your peers. Your co-workers can be a good place to start to build up some early engagement.
Also, you should actively try to receive endorsements for your skills and recommendations. You can start by getting these from your colleagues but you should always be looking to receive these from your most important audience; the candidates.
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