9 Ways to Improve Your Personal Brand as a Recruiter

Whether you’re aware of it or not, we all have a personal brand. Most recruiters claim to have the best talent pool, the best client base, or access to the best software on the market. But your personal brand is the thing that really differentiates you from your peers.

In this article, we outline 9 ways of developing your personal brand to gain you a competitive edge and help you attract the best talent in the life science market.

Define Your Personal Brand

First, understand what it is you want your personal brand to represent by answering these questions:

• What is your USP as a recruiter? What makes you, and your company, different?
• What story do you want to tell?
• What is your expertise?
• What do you value?
• What has your experience taught you?
• What are your goals – both personally and professionally?
• What are your target candidates looking for in a recruiter? What do they value?
• What are your target clients looking for in a recruiter? What do they value?

Once you’ve got a list of all the things you want your personal brand to represent, you can start to integrate these into your work.

Run a Digital Audit

Dive deep into your existing digital footprint to understand your current online presence. Check the visibility and contents of all of your social media profiles and check out any reviews that have been left about you, and even your company. The company you work for, and even the companies they work with, will undoubtedly say something about you. So, knowing what’s being said about your employer is an essential step in developing your personal brand.

Work on Your Social Media Profiles

Identify which social media channels are essential for your hiring, and which aren’t. For the ones that are, complete a full profile that’s in line with your defined personal brand. For the ones that aren’t, either remove them or make them private if you want to keep personal accounts for your friends and family.

All your social media profiles should immediately tell visitors who you are, what you do, and the value you can bring to both candidates and clients, clearly communicating your USP. If you’re using LinkedIn, make the most out of your profile by:

• Choosing a profile photo that’s professional, yet welcoming
• Making the most out of your headline
• Using an engaging cover photo that delivers your USP visually
• Writing a compelling summary that goes beyond your skills, experience, qualifications, and current job responsibilities
• Being selective about what you include, only including information that will be most relevant to your target audience
• Gathering profile recommendations from colleagues, clients, and candidates
• Customising your profile URL to improve your visibility and professionalism
• Using featured posts to demonstrate your achievements, values, thought leadership, and more

Position Yourself as an Industry Expert

You won’t become an expert in Life Science recruitment overnight, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work on becoming a thought leader in your field. If you want candidates and clients to put their trust in you to find them a job/fill a role, you need to prove that you know what you’re talking about.

Immerse yourself in industry news by using trusted sources such as PharmiWeb.com to check the latest opportunities, challenges, and threats to the industry, and use this news to shape your thoughts on how this could impact recruitment.

Share these insights with your growing audience, starting conversations and opening up discussions with your connections. On LinkedIn, you could even create your own newsletter to share tips and advice with your network.

Grow Your Network with Like-Minded People

The people in your network who engage with your posts and whose posts you engage with also say a lot about you. Rather than accepting every connection request you receive, joining every group that sounds relevant, and liking and commenting on posts from people you don’t know, be selective about who you bring into your network.

It’s also important to post relevant and informative content that will reach the people you’re hoping to reach, rather than content that might go viral yet attract the wrong audience.

More tips on how to grow your LinkedIn network can be found here.

Mix Up Your Content and Communication

To engage your target audience and deliver your personal brand, mix up the way you communicate with them, both directly and through your content. With your communication, how will you communicate your brand through a cold call or email? With your content, how will you engage people with your job adverts if you share each one following the same basic template?

The way you share new roles will say a lot about the type of recruiter you are. For example, the benefits you list first in a LinkedIn post sharing the job could say a lot about what you value.

Be Personal

One way to show people who you are and what you value as a recruiter is by being personal. Every LinkedIn post you share doesn’t have to be informative and doesn’t have to include a call to action. Don’t be afraid to show the parts of your personal life that you’re willing to share, whether this is what you did on your annual leave, what book you’re currently reading, or a piece of global news that has impacted you.

Be Consistent

Your personal brand isn’t something you can create overnight. Instead, it’s a culmination over time of your actions both online and offline that build up a picture of who you are. To do this, you need to be consistent with your actions. This doesn’t mean that your brand can’t evolve over time, because it absolutely can.

Analyse Your Results

If you’re putting your time into developing your personal brand as a recruiter, then you want to be sure that your efforts are creating the results that you want. For example, if part of developing your brand has been sharing more original content, track how your engagement changes over time, and how this changes the conversations you’re having with candidates and clients.

For example, if you work for a recruitment agency, use tracking codes to see how many people you’re directing to your company website. You can also monitor your LinkedIn engagement, track the growth of your network, and run regular digital audits to see how your brand is developing over time.