Manage My Professional Brand

In this class, we're gonna talk about how to manage your professional brand. And that's going to really help you think about how you put your identity out in the world and how it grows your career. The agenda for this class is gonna cover a little bit of our approach and how we think about it and Teal’s way.

And then we're gonna talk about achievements. At the end of the day are the proof that you've got abilities and we feel strongly that abilities are the currency of careers. We get hired for our abilities. And achievements is how we prove we've got those abilities. Then there's your blurb.

Your blurb is your pitch. What is your concise way of talking about who you are and what you want to do then LinkedIn, probably the most powerful career building tool out there and talking about how to manage that online presence. And then we'll wrap up with a summary on how we think about managing your brand more broadly and maybe some of the other things you can do outside of teal.

So with that, let's go ahead and get started. In this section, we're gonna talk about Teal's approach to building and managing your personal brand. And the way we define personal brand is it's the perception of an individual based on their experience skills and achievement within a career field, or industry.

And this is your brand. Think about brands like comp the way companies have brands, right? It's what people say about us when we're not there, that person was great to work with. That person builds great teams. That person is highly operational. That person's a great ideas person. and they've done a lot.

And so that's what we wanna start to think about. And it doesn't happen automatically. It happens by what we put out there and we can take an active role in shaping that brand. And when it comes to your career and your identity and how people talk about you, it's really important that you be proactive in your approach to doing that.

And core to that is how you see yourself. and then how others see you, that intersection of those two things is your personal brand and the closer you can bring them together, the better, right? What are people saying about you out in the market? How are people sharing the content you're producing? How are people passing along your resume?

How are people making introductions? That is all part of your personal brand. And we really want to focus on the way you curate that and that you get the most out. And so we see there being three core components that we're gonna cover in this class on how to curate and manage your personal brand. It's your achievements and the things you've done and how you articulate them in a way that provide proof that you've done them.

Then your pitch, your blurb, right? Oftentimes when you're gonna ask for an introduction or make a reference or a referral, it's what people are gonna see. It's your elevator pitch for yourself. And that shows up in your LinkedIn, it shows up in your resume. It shows up when you email it to somebody. So we really wanna get that tight.

And then your LinkedIn profile, like we said, is one of the most important things in building out your personal brand and your career identity. So we're gonna go deep on some of the things that you should think about as you're building out your LinkedIn profile. So with that, we'll jump into the next section.

In this section, we're gonna talk about achievements and achievements are proof that you've got an. And abilities are the currency of careers. At the end of the day, we get hired for our abilities, maybe who we know got us there, but what we know keeps us there. So it's really important that we focus on achievements and we continually document them in the way that prove what we know how to do.

So let's go ahead and dive in. An achievement is empirical proof that shows you have an ability. Again, it's really important that we think about that. It's empirical proof that shows you have an ability, right? Cause oftentimes it's your word against there. So you need to make a convincing case that you know how to do these things that you are saying, how to do, and achievements are the way to do that.

Most people forget to re include results in their LinkedIn profile and their career materials. Resumes oftentimes are very descriptive or done in narrative form and we need the results. We need to show the impact of our work. On the business. How did the company grow? How did the company prosper?

How did the company do better as a result of the work that we did, and we need to show that empirically. And so it's really important that we think about the results. And a lot of times we'll hear people say the work I did, wasn't measurable. Everything is measurable. Now that said not everything needs to be talked about in a measurable way, but everything's measurable.

And even. The act of showing that you were able to talk about it in empirical ways helps you stand out from the crowd. Cuz most people will just default to saying, ah, it's not measurable and then they won't do it, but it can be done. And it shows that you think in a business centric way when you're able to do it, here's an example of what not to do and what you'll see oftentimes on resumes or when people describe their work, worked with the tech team to increase web traffic.

okay. What was your involvement in it? What did you do? How much did you increase it? Was it nominal? Was it pretty big? And it just doesn't say much in it. It just a lazy way to talk about it where it's just not gonna work. No, one's gonna believe you did it. Anyone can say this it's incredibly generic.

Now, what if you include measurable metrics and you talk about the results, so you can talk about the value that you brought to the business. So something like that could say grew engagement by 200%, which led to double the revenue in three months. Okay. I wanna hire that person. That is a person that knows how to think about engagement.

They know what part of the website traffic mattered. And they had a clear understanding of what the outcome was to the business and what they were working towards. This person lines up goals, achieves them and can talk about them in an empirical way and their impact to the business. That's what we're talking about.

When we talk about achievements and proof that you've done this and that you've got these abilities, this person knows how to manage engagement. This person knows how to think about revenue. This person helps the business do better. Therefore, I want them in the company and they're gonna grow within this company.

And there's a simple formula. There's a lot of different formats out there. And you don't need to stick semantically too, purely to this formula, but the idea is that you want that success verb. You don't want just generic verbs that don't say anything like managed or was part of, what did you do?

You increased it, you grew it, you reduced expenses. What was that active success verb then? What was the thing? The noun that you affect? what was the metric that you were measuring and then what was that outcome? And you wanna make sure that you include these in your achievements. So what that could look like when we go back to the achievement that we used before grew, that's our success verb engagement.

That's what we were working on. The what? Buy metric 200%. That's substantial. Now you wanna be thoughtful about your metrics. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but you can frame metrics in a different way. So going from one to three is 200% grew up by two. Not that impressive. So you wanna be thoughtful in your storytelling and how you use the right metrics that paint the best light, which then led to double the revenue in three months, right?

That's the outcome that's impress. What was the outcome and in what time it wasn't indefinite. I read this and I say, okay, this person understood what they were doing. This is a clear and concise achievement. This feels to me like they really did this. This gives me proof that they did this. This gives me confidence to hire this.

I am. De-risking the hiring of me by speaking confidently and empirically about the things I've done. And that's what you wanna do. You wanna get into the mind of thinking? I need to convince people that I've done this. They're not just gonna trust me or believe me because I'm kind or I deliver it.

I need to give them proof. And so when you talk about your achievements this way, it helps build the proof that you've got these a. So why to include metrics because they help you build that proof. I just cannot stress it enough. The purpose of including metrics is to build proof that you have those abilities.

We also remember numbers better. Those things are the things that stick with us. And that's why you see numbers used so much they're impactful. But at the end of the day, the why is because we wanna build proof and we wanna be Memor. So here's some examples, right? Oftentimes we'll hear my category of work was not measurable and I don't know how to talk about it.

So here's some examples you can look at, say you're an event planner, you organized and sold out a charity event for 300 people and raised half a million dollars. Okay. That's substantial. If I was hiring for someone to run events, especially if it had to do with fund. That is relevant to me. I will then bridge the gaps on all the things that you needed to do to be able to achieve that.

I will then start TOFI your skills and abilities because you're showing me the outcome, right? How about someone who's in marketing, producing email campaigns, and a generic one might be manage the email newsletter for my. Okay what does that tell me? How impactful are you at it?

How good are you at it? I produced 90 emails, campaigns that generated over 2 million new subscribers within three months. Okay. I want that person on my team. They're thinking about how to do this work and they've proven that they've done it before now. That's a meaningful conversation I can have in an interview.

Tell me about that time you did this and how did you do this? This excites me. This gets me curious. okay. Something that's more internal like training, right? Why do we do training? My training wasn't measurable. We just did it. Not true companies, train people, so they either retain them or they can reduce costs because they're more knowledgeable.

So talk about the business impact conducted compliance training for a hundred plus managers virtually across five locations that reduce company costs by 50%. There you go. Why do we do training to save money? And we. And you show how you did it again, a meaningful conversation. How about saving money?

Right in, in business, we're saving money or making money at the end of the day. So implemented a new payroll and tax accounting system that saved the firm $2 million in costs over five years. If I'm applying to be in a finance department, that is core. If I'm applying to be in a procurement department that is critical.

So here's some examples of how you could talk AR how you could articulate your achievements in an empirical way. All right, we've built a tool to help you do this again the, the semantics you can play with, but sometimes we just need a little bit of a boost to figure out how to do it. So as part of the teal platform, you get what we call the resume builder.

It's really more focused on your achievement builder because formatting. And the way you wanna present your resume is really something that is highly personalized. So at the moment, we don't have technology to do that, but we really want you to document all your achievements in one place as exhaustively as possible.

So we've built a tool that we call the resume builder or the master resume. And let me go ahead and show you how it works. If you go over to the teal platform and look in the tools, you will see the master resume. You can either search for it, or you can go right to the page. It also happens to be in the picker.

So if you click over here and see resume builder, that'll take you over to your resume builder. And here we're using our resident teal member, Tina Miller. as her profile to see, but you can see she's built out all her achievements. And again, this isn't gonna be what she use. To apply to jobs. It is her career archive and her log of all of her successes.

And you can start to build them out. So you click here and add a roll. You can just type it out. You can copy and paste it from your resume, but really what we're trying to add value with here is this achievement assistant. So if you click this here, we can use a little wizard to help us construct these achievement statements.

So we'll start by picking the category and this is a metric improve. so what did you do? So these are these success verbs we talked about. All right. And we're gonna give you a list to pick from you can use your own, but these are a bunch to get you started so improved. All right. And what did I improve?

So given that Tina Miller's a marketer, she improved revenue right now. What was the metric? And by when did you do it? So did it buy that gives me that nice little simple percentage that I can just change here. Let's say 150%. And how long did I do it? It's important that you give it that time. So did it in six months.

Let's just go ahead and fix that then. Connected to the action and the strategy. So what was the outcome? So what did I do? How did I do it? So I did it by and here it's by BLE mending a feral platform. And so here you go, improved revenue by 150% and six months by implementing a referral. I'll add that achievement.

And there it is on my master resume. Again, this isn't formatted to the document, but you start to build these out and think of every achievement you've had here. You can be incredibly exhaustive cuz later in another class, we're gonna talk about how you're gonna want to pick specific achievements that are relative to a job.

So here you wanna be as exhaustive as possible and write. All the achievements that you've done. And if it's a little redundant or if it was a little, duplicative that's okay here. Cause what you're gonna do is you're gonna edit these down later on a job by job basis. All right. So that's the master resume tool that we've got there to help you build your achievements and to push you along with a format.

But again, feel free to change these there's other formats that you can use online. But the main thing is to think about those action, positive verbs, those things that you affected and what the outcome. in this section, we're gonna talk about LinkedIn. LinkedIn, love it. Or hate it is one of the most powerful career management.

Everybody is on there. They have hundreds of millions of people, and it is absolutely paramount to managing your career that you be on LinkedIn. So we're gonna talk about the best ways to manage your LinkedIn cuz we see it as one of the ways to manage your online identity and create inbound. You want a machine that's just out there always generating inbound in people coming to you. Cause those are the best kind of career opportunities. So let's go ahead and talk about how to do that. So LinkedIn is your virtual billboard to the. Is a massive platform. Recruiters use it extensively on how to find.

And what we talk about is it's one of the best ways to be found if you're not familiar with the term S E O it's search engine optimization, and it's oftentimes referred to Google and different search engines, but at the end of the day, linked in as a search engine for people. And there are a lot of people looking to hire looking to acquire talent on LinkedIn and how do they.

They search. They either search directly in LinkedIn or they use a tool called LinkedIn recruiter that specifically build to find talent. And so it's your job to optimize your profile. So you get found, and the way, how do you get found through words, people put in words. And so if your. LinkedIn profile is sparse and not descriptive of who you are when someone searches for a particular ability or title, you're not gonna show up.

And so that's really what you wanna do. You wanna make sure that you're showing up and we think of LinkedIn as a wonderful inbound tool. You want hiring managers, you want recruiters, you want CEOs, you want investors finding. When they search for people. And now there's a whole another level of engagement in content production, but we're gonna focus on your profile and making sure that your profile has all the things it needs to really stand out.

So the anatomy of a LinkedIn profile, we're not gonna go deep on every single little section, but we're gonna talk about the key areas that you need to focus on the header the about, and the experience. All right. You wanna make sure that those are tailored right? And. You can focus on the other areas, but if you only got time to focus on these three, it's really important that you do it.

So the header the header is the most important part of your LinkedIn page without a doubt, a hundred percent of the people that go to your LinkedIn page will see the header. You cannot say that for the rest of your LinkedIn, because they have to require they have to scroll it's called above the fold, right?

When the page loads, they will see the header, all the parts below. They have to scroll and some percentage less than a hundred will not go down. They will leave right there. So this is where you really have to hook people with your header. And so let's talk about a few key components here. The banner visually catches people.

It's a time for you to say something about yourself without needing to use words. And so be mindful of it not being too busy too distracting and not really being too polarizing, but have it reveal a layer about you. And it shows that you care and that you've taken the time to to customize your profile.

Next would be your headshot. You'd be surprised how many people either don't put a headshot or just put in some random headshot. Remember that LinkedIn is a professional network and people are very quickly making judgements on whether to hire you. Very fast, right? Recruiters are skimming spending seconds on a page.

So convey your best professional self. Be mindful. If you don't have a professional headshot, you can make one yourself with a mobile phone. They're getting incredibly good. Just set it up, or, look for a photo that you've done in the past where you're dressed professionally and you look professional.

Don't use one of like you in a crowd of people where I can't tell if it's you or somebody else be mindful of it. It's important. Put your best foot. Next is your name? Think about how people would look for you, in this case, I like to say if Christina, if Tina's full name was Christina. She may in parentheses put Christina and then have Tina Miller.

Think about the ways that people might search for you. So if you've got a maiden name and people know you by that name, put it in parentheses because otherwise there's no way the system's gonna know. So think about findability with your name when people search for you by name that any combination can be there.

Then your headline is by far one of the most important, and by default it uses your title and the company that you were at last or currently. And that's not enough, right? Because it's really your opportunity to project the title that you want. Now, you don't wanna flat out lie, but it is heavily valued.

In the search engine and when people are seeing search results, it's one of the things that shows up. So aspiring VP or future marketing director. You can do things like that, but be mindful of the language. Don't do things like. Hire like looking to be hired or open to work because people don't search for those terms.

There are other ways in LinkedIn recruiter that they can do that by just checking a box if you have that on. So use that as an opportunity to put in words that people would be looking for title ability company. Have those in there and then location, right now there is clearly an upward trend in remote work and your ability to be anywhere, but we still tend to hire geographically.

So be mindful about how you use your geography. We generally recommend that specificity is better, cause as an example, if someone just said greater New York area, if my location was Brooklyn, I'd show up. And if someone searched for Brooklyn, I'd still show up. So specificity is good, cuz there's a way for it to get caught in the broader search terms.

Okay. Probably next to the header, the most important part. You're about section. This is where you hook people. This is your pitch. And this is where we bring back the blurb. Now, this is, this advice is driven for a web experience and a lot of recruiters look at LinkedIn on the web, cuz they're doing it in the office.

So they're not doing it on mobile. It might be slightly different advice, but on the web you get about three lines before you have to click that little C more button. If you have two, three paragraphs in your about section, what you wanna be mindful of is what are those first three sentences?

That's where you really wanna hook people. And that's why we put those numbers right at the beginning and those names and logos of companies. At the beginning, when I say logos, the word not graphically, right? So I can catch people, Google, Facebook. Okay. I okay. That, that, that says something to me, someone who worked at those companies, those are great companies.

I wanna talk to them, let me click see more and learn more about this person. So just be mindful that those first three sentences or lines let's call it because it doesn't obviously break at the period, but that those first three lines are really important. And that's where you hook somebody. So be mindful about what's in the first three lines of your LinkedIn about section cuz then that'll get people to scroll down and read the rest.

when you click the about, that it grows longer. So try not to make it too long, also be mindful of some of these things that could be a little bit off putting that, speak in the first person. Sometimes if you're at an executive level or like board level, you could potentially write about yourself in the third person, but it's a little less common, use a little bit of personality.

Keep it short and to the point and think about those keywords again, put in some skills, some abilities, a lot of this stuff should be in your blurb already, but if you haven't gotten to your blurb and you're going straight to focusing on your, about section on your LinkedIn, think about those things.

Okay. Experience. And a lot of people think we like, oh wouldn't this just be the same as my resume, because your resume, you tailor on a per job application basis. You're linked. Is there and it needs to serve many purposes. Now we do recommend that you iterate on your LinkedIn profile and you don't just set it and forget it.

Maybe it's every week, every two weeks to see that you're getting more inbound traffic, but let's talk about the experience. Section titles are super important, right? Cause that's what people search for. I want to hire a marketing director. I am going to look for people that have been marketing director.

that said, some companies get a little fun and cute with their titles, and it's not understood as the normative title. And you don't want your company's efforts to build brand and be unique to affect your ability to get hired. So you can put in the normative title, like in parentheses and make sure it's in the copy.

So if a company calls it, experience director, but really what you were doing was market. Go ahead and put it in there in parentheses, right? Cause you wanna be sh you wanna show up in those search results. When someone looks for the title, at least the normative version of the title that you had.

Okay. Then your achievements, right? You want those to be like, we talked about achievements in the achievements section of this class. Empirical successful. There may be some things that you can't reveal publicly that you're more comfortable saying in a resume because it's just going to one company, but try to get those to be punchy, use a similar bulleted format and make it easy to read.

Next is be thoughtful of the order. I understand that there's a lot of concern around what's there, especially if you might not currently be employed, but you only have five experienced spots until someone needs to click. See. and then they can see the rest of your resume, whether it's like 10, 15, 20 jobs, it doesn't matter.

They're all there. But just remember that some percentage. Will only click that. It's only a small percentage, right? Most people are just gonna do those top five and it's the job of those top five to hook them, to click. See more. So be mindful about that top job. Put the most effort into that top job and then work your way down.

P like the further you go down the page, the less likelihood is that the people are gonna scroll. So be mindful of. And then try not to make them too long, right? So that people doesn't have to keep scrolling. So really focus on those top three lines of the experience, cuz again, see more right that see more is really what you wanna be mindful of.

That means a person has to take an explicit action to see the rest and a large percentage of the people are not gonna do that. All right. Skills and endorsements. These are really good for metadata. A lot of people will ask us, should I fill that? I'm not sure how much like a recruiter or a hiring manager looks at these because they know that, people can ask for them and things like that.

But in terms of adding more metadata to your profile so that you show up in those results. They're very important and LinkedIn values them. It shows that you're engaged, that you're using the platform that you've got these abilities and that you've got third party endorsements that you have these abilities.

So we highly recommend that you get them. And we've got some templates in the template library to ask your colleagues to do it, that you could use, but it's definitely worthwhile, don't just do it one time, tend to it, keep adding them, make sure that you're adding those skills and abilities for jobs you want in the future.

Because they will help you show up better in the search results of LinkedIn. All right. If you are actively job seeking, and this is an important feature you could use, right? You might wanna signal to the LinkedIn network that you're actively job seeking. Now, if you're employ. Just may not be something you want to tell the world.

You're not exactly excited about your hiring manager, knowing that you're open to opportunities. So there's ways to control that. We highly recommend that if you're not employed at the moment or you're very comfortable with the world, knowing that you're seeking that you use this feature.

Cause if the world doesn't know the world, won't send you introductions and think of you for positions. So in your profile, you go to these settings and there's two things you could do. You could. Signal to recruiters that you are open to positions or you can signal to the entire network.

So when you go into these settings, you'll get something like. where you can change some of these things. And the other cool thing you can do is that you can add data that doesn't show up directly. So job titles here is where you can list all the job titles you're excited about and interested in, and they don't necessarily need to show up.

So you can be even a little bit more forward about roles that you're looking for, even though you're not a VP, but you want to be a VP, you can put that. That's a really cool thing about this then locations also, they're searching by location. If you wanna add multiple locations, multiple cities, if you're open to relocating, this is a place to do that.

And then information like start date, and job type. Again, we, the more information you put into LinkedIn, the more you're gonna get out of it. And the next is the open for work, right? , you can either tell the whole network, which will put that green sash on your avatar. Or you can have it just show recruiters.

That'll be up to you, be mindful of how you do that. Again, you may, for anonymity reasons or not want that out there. If you're concerned about your current employer or colleagues knowing so be mindful of that, but if you are, you. Unemployed and able to tell the world, we highly recommend that you turn this on.

We feel like really no bad can come of it. Don't love the green sash and aesthetically, and the big stamp that it puts on our face, but it is a thing in LinkedIn recruiter. So if someone's looking to hire fast, right? Think about this when someone's currently employed. a potential employer knows that's gonna be a long hiring process, which is great.

And they might be ready to do that in a strategic role, but some positions they wanna hire right away. So it actually could be seen as advantageous. So be mindful of it, use it. We actually recommend it. We see very little bad coming of it. But ultimately your all right. And. there's other things you can do in your settings.

LinkedIn has a very robust like settings interface on notifications, and there's been a lot of concerns about if I change my status, is it automatically broadcast my network? Like those things used to happen all the time. And frankly, it was annoying, but now they've got settings to control all those things.

And so there's some really cool ones to like signal to a company when you follow them right now, the recruiter will know, Hey, Dave is following your. they want people that are interested in me, right? They don't want to go through long belabored hiring processes. If a person is signaling interest, that's gonna be a great sign.

So think about how you can use all these settings. And especially if you've got those dream companies that you're really excited about a recruiter can see that you follow the company and that's gonna show genuine interest. And then they're gonna value that. All right, others to look for is when you wanna change any settings, this is the one I mentioned earlier.

Use this strategically be mindful. If you add a new role, add a new achievement, sometimes you may want this on because it'll broadcast it in the daily newsletter or sometimes you might not. We've all seen those emails and say, oh, wow that person must be job searching now, so you wanna be mindful of that. Obviously there's a ton of perception that comes with these things, but use it be deliberate because it can be hugely valuable. All right. And now other ways to think about the way you drive people to your LinkedIn profile. A lot of people have personal website, but I would say many more don't and all of our social sites usually have an ability to add a website.

And if we don't have one what could we use? We could use our LinkedIn profile. We could drive more traffic to our LinkedIn because that becomes our online bill. and you wanna make sure that your LinkedIn profile is set to public. You can choose what to reveal on there and not, obviously it's not gonna have your phone number and your personal email address, but having it as a personal landing page that you then show up on Google when people Google your name and you show up when you can use it as a link, we highly recommend that you do it.

So places to think about it, right? If you're a Twitter user in your Twitter, Link to your LinkedIn profile on Facebook for your website, LinkedIn profile, Instagram, LinkedIn profile, right? Those are ways that you can drive traffic to your LinkedIn profile and build that personal brand. Another one that we absolutely love that we don't think people use enough is your email signature in your personal email, right?

When it comes to work, we all put an email signature. It's just second nature. On our personal email, it's usually co-opted by our email provider, sent from an iPhone that's apple being incredibly intelligent about using screen real estate to promote their product. Let's not let them do that.

Take over that space. It belongs to you. So use it to promote yourself in your personal emails, add a simple email signature and connect with me on LinkedIn, grow your network and send more people to that traffic. Cause when you're putting that message out there, they'll see it and they'll be able to help you grow your career.

And that is part of the way you build that personal brand and leverage LinkedIn for that. So with that, we'll wrap up the personal branding session or a class I should say. This is one of my favorite classes because a lot of these things we don't think about it really, it takes this deliberate action and you will start to see it time and time again.

We've heard from people. Wow. I made all those changes to my site after my LinkedIn profile. And now I'm getting all sorts of inbound from recruiters. Trust us. It works. If you put in the effort, you will see the outcome and managing and tending to your personal brand online and offline. We'll pay dividends and the other really good thing about it is it lasts forever, right?

You have to tend to it and it will go away. But those efforts in building that brand and increasing those followers and putting out that content and doing things like that will continue to increase it. And those things are compounding. And once you get it going, you will see you'll start to get more opportunities, show up for you.

So we couldn't recommend enough that you do this work, tidy up all your material. Get prepared. And then whether it's, you're seeking a promotion, whether you're looking for a new job, all these things are gonna be incredibly valuable and save you a ton of time in the long term. So with that, we'll wrap up and thanks for watching the class.