Why online Personal Branding is important. A case study
So earlier today, I had to interview 2 candidates for an internship. Both of them were clearly nervous and I don’t blame them because it’s probably their first job interview ever. If you asked me, who stood out from that interview? None did.
But then I did what any normal person would do today, I Googled. For the sake of this article, let’s call them Candidate A & Candidate B.
When I searched Candidate A’s name, I found his Instagram page. At one glance, I could tell that he enjoys posting selfies. Nothing wrong with that. Except I couldn’t really tell if he would make a good intern just by looking at all those posts. But then I saw a Video post titled Vlog. I watched the Vlog and thought it was not bad for a young content creator starting out on videography.
From that video post alone, I could tell that he knows how to film, edit and hype it up on his socials. Now that is something I can work with. Because during his interview, he was too nervous to share all this or probably didn’t think it was worth sharing. He also linked his portfolio on his Instagram Bio where I could see more of his photography & videography work.
Candidate B on the other hand, has her Instagram page on Private. That is pretty much all I could find from her name. I feel bad for her though but that’s just the reality of job interviews.
So from that alone, it’s pretty obvious who stood out. Personal Branding exist for everyone whether you like or not. Be it private or not. So it’s best that you have control over what people see & know about you. You can do this by crafting your own story either in the form of a Portfolio website, Instagram page, Linked page or even Facebook. Show your strengths or niche skills online and hopefully one day, when you least expect it, your future employer or client might find you there.
