take the time to go deeper. They want to know much more about their Target Market. They want to get into the heads of the people who are buying their brands and understand their behavior. In marketing, this information is called “psychographics,” which sounds pretty heavy, but basically means personal information that tells you what makes a person tick.
How does this apply to personal branding? Well, in general, your Audience is anyone or any company you want to influence with your personal brand. In your job search process, this includes the people who could hire you for the great new position you’d love to have. Your Audience might simply be the person who interviews you, but you may not know at first who your interviewer will be or even your potential immediate supervisor. So, in the beginning of your job search, your job-seeker personal brand Audience might be the entire company or a group of people within the company, such as the division or department where you’d like to work.
Now, you’re probably thinking: “But how can I know so much about an Audience that I haven’t even met yet? I don’t know anyone at most of the companies where I will be applying for a job. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I don’t even know which companies I’m interested in yet!”
Yes, it’s true that when you’re looking for a new job, learning about your Audience may seem challenging at first, and even choosing companies to target can be confusing. But learning about your Audience before you land the job is definitely doable, and all it takes is some smart investigating, which can actually be fun if you let it. With a little bit of sleuthing, you can find out which companies are the best fit for YOU™. In fact, you may be surprised how much you can learn about a company and its people with just a little bit of ingenuity and effort.
Getting Ready to Get Ready
When you’re at the very beginning of your job search, you’re in more of a company search than anything else. There are literally thousands of companies out there, so choosing the right ones to target may feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. But as the determined Brand Manager of YOU™, it’s your task to decide which companies should receive your resume — the ones that will truly turn into an Audience for your job-seeker personal brand.
How do you do that? Start by asking yourself some questions about the “type” of companies you would be interested in. What is most important to you?
•Location?
•Size of the company?
•Culture of the company?
•Learning and training opportunities?
•Opportunities for advancement?
•Whether the company gives back to the community?
You might even rate these elements from 1 to 6 — with 1 as your highest priority and 6 as your lowest priority. Once you’ve decided what aspects of a company matter most to you, it will be easier to dive deeper and find out more about the companies that fit the bill. You’ll then learn what you need to know to determine if a company is truly a good fit for you.
If you don’t know which companies in your field are out there, do an Internet search and begin to gather names. Then, you can look through their websites and see how they measure up on your rating scale. As you begin to see which companies have the qualities and opportunities you’re looking for, you can narrow down your choices.
Become a Creative Detective
Once you’ve selected your top companies, it will be time to get out your detective’s magnifying glass. At this point, the Audience for your jobseeker personal brand is the entire company you’re targeting. Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re expected to learn about every single person in a big company. Not only is that impossible, but it’s not even necessary to get the job you want.
Instead, you can think of the entire company as an “individual” with its own set of facts and attitudes. As a great marketing sleuth, you can take what you learn about a company and begin to piece together a profile of how it operates, just as you would if you were learning about one particular person. You’ll discover if the company has a relaxed, more casual atmosphere or a more structured, buttoned-down way of functioning.You will find out if the company finds innovation important or if it values adhering strictly to policy— that type of thing. Here are some of the ways you can dig deeper to find out more about your companies of interest:
Talk, Talk, Talk. Take the time to ask your friends and other people you meet if they know anyone who currently works for, or formerly worked for, your target companies — your potential Audience. If the employee is someone your contact knows well, you could even call or e-mail that person to ask them a few questions about the company.
Meet and Greet. If you get an opportunity to attend an event where you’d have the chance to meet people who work at one of the companies you’ve targeted — by all means, take it! Of course, in that kind of situation, it’s important to keep up a professional image — even if it’s a casual event — because you’ll be meeting people face-to-face for the first time.
Search the Internet. Thanks to the worldwide web, it’s easier than ever to find out a lot about potential employers. The number of online directories has quadrupled in the past ten years. While reviewing the company’s website is the absolute best first place to start, it still only scratches the surface of what you can discover about a company online. With just a few research skills, you can mine an enormous amount of great information that you can use to put together a more detailed profile of your target companies.
Try typing the following into your search engine to discover more about a company:
[Company name] [your desired division or department]
[Company name] annual report
[Company name] press release
[Company name] event
[Company name] brochure
[Company name] newsletter
[Company name] e-zine
[Company name] charity
[Company name] values
[Company name] culture
Through these searches, you should be able to find out a great deal of information, including:
•How does the company present itself in the media?
•What is the tone and style of the various documents the company publishes?
•When you read the company’s annual reports, brochures, newsletters, and e-zines, what facts and attitudes do these documents reveal about the company?
You’ll be amazed at the amount of information you can gather about potential employers this way. What other aspects of a company are you interested in? Use your search engine, and see what comes up.
The Old Stand-Bys. You can look up companies on a number of traditional lists such as Standard & Poor’s, Dun & Bradstreet, Dow Jones, Moody’s Investors Service, and Polk’s. While not all countries will be represented, many international companies are included. If searching these lists online requires that you pay a fee, check your local library to see if you can use the printed versions of these publications there for free.
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