Personal Branding For Job Seekers Step 1: Showcasing Your Skills & Strengths
All right y'all, let's start crafting your personal brand so you can stand out in the job market and attract the companies that have been looking for you (seriously, there's a lot of them). First, we need to define 4 core elements of your personal brand: your skills, strengths, values, and passions. We'll only cover the first two in this post and I'll get to the last two in my next post.
Here's a quick overview of what defines both skills and strengths:
1. Skills
Generally speaking, job skills can be divided into two categories:
Hard Skills
Hard skills are technical abilities learned through formal education and/or hands-on experience. They can be observed, measured, and developed, and they're usually specific to a certain job.
Examples: Coding, data analysis, financial modeling, machine operation, foreign language proficiency, etc.
Soft Skills
Soft skills are non-technical abilities that relate to how you work and interact with other people, and they can be more broadly applied (transferrable) than hard skills. They can also be learned and developed but they tend to be harder to measure
Examples: Communication, teamwork, leadership, time management, conflict resolution.
2. Strengths
Strengths are foundational and inherent qualities and traits that are a core part of your personality and remain consistent over time. They influence your overall approach to tasks and interactions, often providing a basis for developing and applying both hard and soft skills, and can give you a natural advantage in certain areas.
Examples: Resilience, creativity, empathy, consistency, positivity, dependability.
Why Both Matter in a Job Search
Skills: Highlight what you can do.
Strengths: Highlight who you are.
Employers are looking for candidates who have the technical know-how, people skills, and personal attributes that will help them succeed and fit well within the company culture. Most candidates only focus on their hard skills. Knowing how to articulate your skills and strengths and connect them to the company you want to work for will set you apart and make it easy to become a top candidate.
How To Identify Your Skills & Strengths
List your accomplishments: Make a comprehensive list of your professional accomplishments, projects you've completed successfully, and any quantifiable results or impacts you've achieved.
Performance reviews: Revisit your previous performance reviews and look through the metrics, accomplishments, and areas of expertise recognized by your employers.
Work Samples: Create a portfolio showcasing your previous work to demonstrate your hard skills.
Identify your passions and interests: Consider the tasks, activities, or subject areas that truly engage and energize you, as these can reveal your inherent strengths and motivations.
Ask for feedback: Sometimes, we need an outside perspective. Ask for honest feedback from colleagues, managers, or mentors who have worked closely with you. Here are some questions to ask:
What do you think are my greatest strengths?
How would you describe my work style?
What makes me unique?
Use Assessments:
For hard skills, websites like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and Udemy offer various skill assessments and courses that help measure your proficiency in various technical and job-specific skills.
For soft skills, the website Truity has a variety of free assessments including:
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
DiSC Assessment
Big Five
Enneagram
You can also check out the following:
This free version of the Clifton Strengths assessment
Ask ChatGPT
Use this prompt and your resume to evaluate your hard and soft skills:
"You are a career coach with over 20 years of experience.
I am a job seeker looking for a [type of job, i.e. project manager] role.
I will share my resume and your task is to analyze it and create a list of my top 10 skills. Identify any skills I may have that are not explicitly stated but could be beneficial to the role I want.
Differentiate which skills are most relevant to the job I’m pursuing.
Output in a table form with 4 columns: skill, type of skill (technical/languages/soft), how to present, and which part of my experience it's derived from. Please provide specific examples from my resume.
I have attached my resume.
[Click on the paperclip icon in the chat to attach your resume]"
Follow up prompts:
Use either or both of these prompts in the same chat to dig a little deeper:
What other kinds of skills do ideal candidates have for this role?
I want to uncover any additional hard and soft skills I might have. Please ask me questions about my past accomplishments when I felt most proud and successful. Identify patterns in my achievements to pinpoint key skills that are most relevant to the role I want. Ask one question at a time and wait for me to answer before asking the next question. Allow me to review and respond to each skill, agreeing or disagreeing. For any skill I disagree with, replace it with a new suggestion based on further discussion, until we finalize a list skills that I feel truly represent my competitive advantage and unique value.
Compile The Results
Organize your results in a table or spreadsheet.
What does the data tell you about your top skills and strengths? Work style? Uniqueness? Here's an example:
Strengths: Detail-oriented, innovative thinker, great communicator
Work Style: Collaborative, proactive, reliable
Uniqueness: Blend of technical and creative skills
In my next post, I'll talk about how to uncover your values and passions. Then, in order to create your Unique Value Proposition, we'll define your Target Audience (i.e. recruiters, hiring managers, employers, industry peers, etc.), identify their needs and pain points, and figure out how you can be the one to help solve them.
