For an individual, creating a personal brand to be promoted or to get employed in an organization is an excellent idea. What is a personal brand? A personal brand is the unique and distinct image or reputation that an individual builds for themselves in both personal and professional contexts.
As an individual, why bother with a personal brand? Individuals can use a personal brand to present themselves to the world so that they can quit complaining that no one understands what they do. It not only helps clarify how others perceive them, but also what sets them apart from others. Individuals can also create their personal brand to convey their identity, expertise, and personality.
Why it works? People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Also, there needs to be a scalable way to read resumes for job positions and go through packages for promotions. Having a personal brand would make it fast to read and easy to remember.
A recent HBR article does a wonderful job describing the benefits of having a personal brand and the pitfalls of not. The article talks about how conscientious and dedicated employees get passed up for promotion because the senior leadership did not get excited about promoting those individuals. Why did that happen? Quoting that article:
We believe our efforts, education, or performance are enough to outcompete our colleagues and secure advancement opportunities. We overlook (or simply are not taught) the value of building a personal brand.
While this is true and highly recommended for individuals, it presents some dangers that are worth outlining:
Leaders Slacking off on their Duties
An effective leader is one who takes the time to learn about what everyone in their organization does, and used that knowledge to make connections. There are vice presidents in companies and associate deans for research at universities that do that. The employees feel so good working for such leaders. These are not the kind of leaders who would say “I have 15 seconds, give me an elevator pitch about what you do”. But they take time to learn what we do, write down copious notes, and send out emails. The opposite end of the spectrum are leaders who rely on their employees’ personal brand to make promotion decisions. There is no excuse being a manager and not taking the time to understand what each employee does, what their strengths are, and where they can help the employee to grow.
Recruiters Valuing Unimportant Stuff
The students with the greatest potential for success are not the ones that get the best jobs. This is because recruiters pay too much attention to personal brands. The most common advice one hears is to try and make our resumes stand out. This will make it easier on the recruiters. While that is true, it is indeed sad that the recruiters are going for presentation and not paying attention to content. A flashy presentation, with beautiful graphics, a gripping story, and a tagline weaved throughout but with no significant content (in this day and age) has a higher chance of getting selected than someone with a modest presentation but with earth-shattering contents. Holistic admissions to colleges are no different, setting aside objective measures to hear a nicely crafted story is the new game.
Ignoring Stalwarts due to Personalities
Not everyone feels comfortable over-emphasizing their contributions, twisting stories to fit a narrative, or making bold claims. Some people are not so confident, some have an imposter syndrome, and some are just truly humble and too shy to toot their horn. Whereas, these people can be the most valuable assets of an organization. Further, there are people working on some unsexy research that get overlooked, but they are following their passion. More importantly, there may be individuals that do not have the means or the access to create a personal brand. So, instead of expecting a personal brand from everyone, one could spend time asking around either the individuals directly or people they work with. Eventually, the right kind of information would become available.
In summary, it is shortsighted to put the onus on the individual to sell themselves. Instead, although unscalable, invest in time to learn about individuals. It would be easy to train an AI bot to pick out personal brands and reward them. It would be extremely hard for it to identify a diamond in the ruff.