What is personal branding, and just how important is it? With the online digital revolution in full swing, the art of how people market themselves and their career as a ‘brand’ is a frequent water cooler and dinner party topic of discussion. It seems we are constantly receiving emails from various social media websites inviting us to join and post our profile online for ‘free’.
Whilst previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal-branding concept instead suggests that success comes from self-packaging—how you present yourself to your target audience. How can we create a memorable, positive and professional online brand and why is this important for HR professionals?
LinkedIn power profiles
Professional networking site LinkedIn has recently unveiled Hong Kong’s Power Profiles list of the 41 most-viewed LinkedIn profiles. This list includes the people whose pages receive the highest number of hits out of the 600,000 people using the site in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s Power Profiles list includes C-suite professionals, senior executives and entrepreneurs from industries spanning human resources, technology, the internet, finance, retail and marketing & advertising.
Commenting on the development, Nellie Chan, Director Southeast and North Asia, LinkedIn opined, “Hong Kong is one of the most competitive talent markets in the region serving as the regional hub for many international companies. As a result, having the right skills and connections plays a key role in professional growth and development.”
LinkedIn recommends these quick steps to build an effective profile:
1. Add a position
2. Add at least three skills
3. Add your education
4. Add your industry
5. Add your photo
The right ‘guanxi’
People often speak about the extreme importance of networking in Hong Kong and Asia in general, and the greater emphasis placed on ‘knowing the right people’ in comparison to the lower relative importance of this phenomenon in the west. When companies in Hong Kong hire; internal recruiting, referrals and recommendations are frequently now the first actions in HR’s attempt at filling a vacancy, as opposed to simply posting a job advertisement or contacting a recruitment company. Much of LinkedIn’s success in the Asia region (and in particular Greater China) can be attributed to the fact that people perceive networking to have a higher priority here than they do in the USA, UK or Australia.
Thousands of daily hits
In theory, having a Power Profile and a substantial view count on your profile will lead to increased job offers, business proposals, services offered and general networking opportunities. According to Chan, “The list includes those LinkedIn members in Hong Kong who truly understand the need for personal branding. Many of them are seeing the value of investing time in LinkedIn to build and reinforce their personal brand, grow their connections and obtain insights.”
Know thy neighbour
HR departments may take advantage of LinkedIn for a number of important reasons. Being able to identify, communicate with, and hire top talent for practically zero cost (besides time) is a godsend for many companies, particularly those SMEs that don’t have the luxuries of a large recruiting budget. However, what are the drawbacks of personal branding?
People can write whatever—and be whoever—they want on LinkedIn. If someone has limited experience in a field they want to enter, they can always ‘window dress’ their profile to buffer-up their experience. After all, white lies on LinkedIn can’t get you into the same kind of trouble with fraud as a factually-incorrect CV, can it?
In an effort to lead to greater transparency in substantiating peoples’ claims of expertise, LinkedIn has created the Skills & Expertise section, where people can ‘endorse’ someone based on the skills they perceive that person has. But would people think very carefully before endorsing a colleague or friend for skills they do not really have, or would they simple click willy-nilly, in the hope that the target person then reciprocates the favour?
Whilst LinkedIn is a fantastically powerful and inexpensive tool for HR and recruiting teams to take full advantage of, it is important to identify and understand the potential drawbacks that come with the self-packaging phenomenon and the rise of personal-branding social networking.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
