Often time in recruitment we hear people talk about personal brand. Recruiters will say things like “build your personal brand”, “ask yourself, does this add to your personal brand?” and even the old classic line for candidates, “Raise your profile”.

The level of understanding that most of us have of personal brand is that it is to do with things like social media, our LinkedIn profile, our name, and all sorts of other trivia that make up our personal brand. To me, personal brand has nothing to do with these. Though social media is a powerful tool, there are countless examples of people who use social media in a way that doesn’t build personal brand, and even better, there are many candidates I meet with hardly any presence on social media, but a strong personal brand.

So, what is personal brand exactly? It starts with self.

I have split personal brand into three parts; Self-awareness, self-care and self-actualisation. Though these are abstract concepts, ultimately these are the three elements that go into making your personal brand. Everything else is just the tool to get you there.

Most self-help gurus will preach the term “self-awareness” as means to enlightenment. Though this may be true, self-awareness goes far beyond Tony Robbins.

For your personal brand, self-awareness means being able to balance speaking what is in your mind with understanding your motivations for doing so. Self-awareness means being able to understand how you are feeling, why you are feeling that way, and how to balance yourself back to normal.

This one seems to be simple, but it’s a lot more complex than simply looking after yourself. Self-care comes from being empathetic to yourself and being able to engage in the fine balance of self-deprecation with self-appreciation.

Self-care is the equivalent to the quality of product when it comes to personal brand. The truth is for many brands, is that their message is for quality and trust over anything particularly fancy. Coca-Cola has spent a lifetime building a brand that people will trust, and to build up enough trust in the quality of its product that it would take a lot to bring that perception down. Your self-care is no different. By having enough self-care, you can ensure others of the quality of your product.

On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the self-actualisation is at the zenith, and for good reason.

In recruitment, you can tell the candidates that have realised and understand what they want to do with their lives. If that just so happens to be their role, then its easy to see why they are in such high demand. When we as recruiters talk about passion, what we really mean is your sense of self actualisation.

If you can incorporate self-actualisation into your personal brand, it goes a long way to showing how valuable you are to an organisation and will almost certainly inflate demand for you in the job market.

Remember, personal brand is not who you are on social media. Personal brand is who you are behind the screen, and by taking self-care, self-actualisation and raising your self-awareness, you are almost guaranteed to build a brand that will last.