How to Create and Share Your Personal Brand, with Michael Ramirez

We hear a lot about branding in the job market, but what does it mean to create a personal brand? Find Your Dream Job guest Michael Ramirez says you already have one, whether intentional or not. Michael defines a personal brand as the way you communicate your values and strengths to a company or hiring manager. Self-confidence is enhanced when your personal brand is strong and well thought out. Sharing your brand with others is as simple as developing an unforgettable elevator pitch that you can use in networking situations. 

About Our Guest:

Michael Ramirez is a talent acquisition manager at the Oregon Health & Science University. 

Resources in This Episode:

• OHSU is hiring! Find out more by visiting ohsu.edu and clicking on the “Jobs” tab.
• From our Sponsor: Find Your Dream Job is brought to you by TopResume.  TopResume has helped more than 400,000 professionals land more interviews and get hired faster. Get a free review of your resume today from one of TopResume’s expert writers.

Transcript

Find Your Dream Job, Episode 445:

How to Create and Share Your Personal Brand, with Michael Ramirez

Airdate: April 10, 2024

Mac Prichard:

This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life.

I’m your host, Mac Prichard. I’m also the founder of Mac’s List. It’s a job board in the Pacific Northwest that helps you find a fulfilling career.

Every Wednesday, I talk to a different expert about the tools you need to get the work you want.

Find Your Dream Job is brought to you by TopResume. TopResume has helped more than 400,000 professionals land more interviews and get hired faster.

Get a free review of your resume today.

Go to macslist.org/topresume.

You have a personal brand whether you know it or not.

And how you use it to present yourself to others can make a big difference in your job search.

Michael Ramirez is here to talk about how to create and share your personal brand.

He’s a talent acquisition manager at the Oregon Health & Science University.

It’s a public research university where healing, teaching, and discovery come together.

Michael joins us from Portland, Oregon.

Well, let’s start right here, Michael. What do you mean when you talk about someone’s personal brand? Why don’t you define that for us?

Michael Ramirez:

Yeah, I feel like before we define the personal brand, I would love to define brand itself, and in the Cambridge Dictionary, it is defined as a type of product made by a particular company and sold under a particular name. So when you see a brand, you see it every day; in logos you wear, commercials, and printed coffee cups. It’s the ability to remember the company.

The way that I define personal brand is the effort to communicate and present your value to the world, but in this particular focus, we are presenting the effort of our values to the career you want. The idea is to make your personal brand to help others remember you.

Mac Prichard:

How does your personal brand matter when you look for work?

Michael Ramirez:

Yeah, it matters because when you see things nowadays, a lot of it is through websites, applying for jobs, and all they see is a resume or your LinkedIn profile. What helps with personal brands is kind of three ways: it allows you to story-tell who you are, and with many things, like when you see social media, there’s a story behind every type of post, video, and audio, things that you present.

Another thing is individuality. Recruiters go through a lot of resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and a personal brand can help you elevate that type of persona that you’re trying to identify and make you stick out.

Finally, it gives you the confidence because with a personal brand, you know who you are, you know your strengths and your interests, and this is your ability to confidently say who you are and what you do.

Mac Prichard:

Your personal brand lets you tell your story, it defines your persona, and it helps you deliver that story and that persona with confidence. Do you have to be Michael, an expert writer or digital marketer, to successfully create and share your personal brand?

Michael Ramirez:

Absolutely not. I think the first start in any type of personal branding is just to know who you are and dream and be creative. I think everyone in this world is creative in some sort of way. What a personal brand does is it helps you communicate that through the different channels.

Mac Prichard:

What stops job seekers from improving their personal brand? What are some common barriers that you see when people are looking for work, and they want to get that brand out there?

Michael Ramirez:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest thing is when they think of brands, you have to create a logo or do this type of focus group of who you are and such, and I think that’s really overwhelming for the individual, and it’s really just about self-reflection and understanding what your interests are, and once you understand that, you’re able to create an identity that you’re confidently saying and communicating that will allow other people to say, “Hey, this is this person that I know, and he or she or they do this.” Which allows them to remember them as they move forward with, possibly, a career or a connection or a network.

Mac Prichard:

You’ve got a three-part structure that you encourage people to use when creating and sharing a personal brand. Before we dive into that, I’m just curious, Michael, are there personal branding mistakes that you see people make because they don’t understand both the importance and how to create and share a personal brand? Just rookie errors that we’ve all committed at different times; what are a couple that stand out?

Michael Ramirez:

I think one of them that mainly stands out is doing too much at the same time. Keeping it simple and breaking down a specific thing that you want to work on and focusing on that will allow you to focus and craft it so that it is not perfect, but at least it’s a start, and once you’re confident, going back to how a personal brand helps impact confidence, it allows you to move forward with other types of ways to communicate yourself and ideas to learn upon. I think that’s one main take away, I would say, is just focus on one thing.

Another rookie mistake is having too many channels and too many different identities. Again, going back to sticking with one thing, it is way better just to think of one thing that you’re confident in, whether that’s strengths or capabilities, and that will allow you to create that personal brand that you are confident in, in terms of telling to the world.

Mac Prichard:

Keep it simple: start with one channel and focus on one identity. Don’t try to be all things to all people.

Let’s talk about that three-part structure that you recommend job seekers follow when creating and sharing a personal brand. Your first step is to start with who you are. What do you mean by this, Michael? Tell us more.

Michael Ramirez:

Absolutely, so the first step…in late-term discoveries, so there is a famous designer and educator, Debbie Millman, who does this class that she teaches where you take a blank piece of paper or blank Word doc and write your perfect day, what it looks like, in five to ten years. From the time you wake up to the time you fall asleep, where are you living, what do you work for, and what do you do after work?

Doing this type of exercise will allow you to dream big and be creative. This will allow you to set a goal within your life and what you want to do in terms of work, and again, for this type of exercise, you’ll be able to reiterate as you go, but it’s a good starting point for you to really think of what it means to work and what your life is meaningful for.

Mac Prichard:

Michael, how do you break that down and apply it to your job search? You’ve got this vision, you’ve imagined or pictured, rather, this perfect day, and the work that you’re doing is part of that. How do you apply that to the personal brand that’s going to help you stand out from your competitors?

Michael Ramirez:

Yeah, absolutely, so once you have your story that you identify for, there’s a really cool exercise that I do that takes four different quadrants.

The upper left quadrant would be what I like and what I’m bad at doing, the upper right quadrant would be what I like and what I’m good at doing, the lower left quadrant is what I don’t like, and I’m bad at doing, and finally, the lower right quadrant is what I don’t like, and I’m good at doing.

You really want to use this visual board to start crafting your brand in terms of your strengths and interests. Ideally, you want to focus on jobs and who you are in the upper right quadrant, but at the same time, you shouldn’t not think about the first quadrant where you’re still learning these skills but still are interested in doing.

That’s how you can start using what you have in these two exercises to really start coming up with your brand of who you are and what you’re confident in.

Mac Prichard:

How detailed is that quadrant? Are you putting, say, four to five bullets in each section? What have you seen be effective?

Michael Ramirez:

I think what you do for the first round is put as many things or ideas as you want, but as you start revising and looking at it, what are the top five that you feel like you want to do in the next five to ten years, is how I would minimize it.

Mac Prichard:

You do the two exercises, Michael; what do you do with this information to get clear about your identity and strengths? Are you creating a one-pager that you can reference when you’re creating job search documents?

Michael Ramirez:

Yeah, so at this moment in time, it’s basically, and this can move forward to the second segment or structure, which is basically planning and tracking or creating a structure for your communication. The easiest way to do that is to create a spreadsheet.

Mac Prichard:

Okay, let’s pause there, Michael because I want to take a break. I do want to move on to that second step after the break.

Stay with us. When we return, Michael Ramirez will continue to share his advice on how to create and share your personal brand.

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Now, let’s get back to the show.

We’re back in the Mac’s List studio. I’m talking with Michael Ramirez.

He’s a talent acquisition manager at the Oregon Health & Science University.

It’s a public research university where healing, teaching, and discovery come together.

Michael joins us from Portland, Oregon.

Now, Michael, before the break, in that first segment, we were talking about how to create and share your personal brand; you’ve got a three-part structure that you encourage job seekers to follow to do this, and you took us through part number one, and we were about to start on number two when we had to take that break, so let’s pick it up there.

I was asking, what do you do with all this information, the self-assessment and you were talking about the value of setting up a structure for your communications. Tell us more about this second part and what you have in mind.

Michael Ramirez:

Yeah, to put it simply, it’s basically to plan and practice. So now that you’ve done the discovery, where people start to feel overwhelmed is where do I go from here, how do I communicate my story? Before we go into the planning and practice, I definitely would recommend doing your prework and doing your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is a great place for you to start your personal branding.

There are great videos out there on best practices to create a LinkedIn profile so I would definitely would recommend doing that prior to starting this practice.

To simplify things, there are many ways to create a personal brand document and tracking it. Let’s just start with planning and using a spreadsheet. In this, you’ll have different tabs, a tab of ideas of what to post. Basically, you’re learning, your project work, and interesting articles and accomplishments. You have a list of ideas to post within your LinkedIn profile.

One other tab to have is your calendar. This will be your digital channel to communicate your story, and the best practice that I would recommend is to start with one small post per week. What I mean by that is, out of that list in your previous tab of things that you want to post, post one thing out of that list so that it can help you start. As you get more confident in posting about things that you want to share within your LinkedIn network, you’ll be able to do more.

Another tab is to track your network. The basic breakdown for this is their contact information, where you met them, whether that’s through LinkedIn or a career fair, et cetera, and additional ways to make sure that you’re touching base with them in a cadence.

Again, there are many technologies out there to help you out with posting and connecting with organizations. One of them is Trello, which is a good platform to do some sort of managing of everything, and there’s an app called Later to help you schedule future postings so that you don’t have to worry about posting a specific time or day.

Mac Prichard:

I love that structure, and it also goes back to a point that you made in the first segment, which is pick one channel, and you recommended LinkedIn. Why do you recommend starting with LinkedIn when you’re paying attention to your personal brand, and you’re doing your job search, Michael?

Michael Ramirez:

That’s a great question. With LinkedIn, it is, so far, at this moment in time, the number one social media profile for jobs. There’s millions of people that use it to connect with looking for jobs or people who work in the organizations that they would love to work for, so it’s an all-in-one place to start professionally expanding your personal brand.

Mac Prichard:

You recommended doing one article a week in the beginning. How is that going to help promote and share your personal brand when you do that on LinkedIn? What kind of difference have you seen that activity make?

Michael Ramirez:

Absolutely, so first, it is posting to people that you’re connected with. These are people that you have met in some way, whether that’s at career fairs, family, friends, or people within your circle. What makes this really impactful is when people in your network see this, they may even share it in their LinkedIn posts, and those who are networking with other networkers will be able to see that and look into it and like, “Hey, this is a person that has something interesting to say. Let me reach out to them, or let me repost it.”

Then, that kind of pyramid effect happens where your message is going across different people that you may not have heard of but is spreading the message of who you are.

Mac Prichard:

When you’re choosing the content that you’re going to put in your calendar and share on LinkedIn, how do you recommend people look for those articles and connect it back to the self-assessment work that you did that we talked about in the first segment?

Michael Ramirez:

Absolutely, so it comes down to, when you look at your quadrants, your upper right quadrant, things that you’re good at, things that you enjoy, there are ways and resources out there, blogs, websites, influencers, that you may use their work to help you post on your space. At the same time, you can use their work and create your own thoughts.

What I like doing as well is, if there is a specific project that you’re working on and you see some other person with a similar, you can post about them. Something like, “Hey, I worked on this specific project, and this person is doing the same thing.” And you can tag them, and then they can comment back and forth in regards to, like, “Oh, this is awesome.”

Again, it’s tapping into their networking to see what your work is done, and I think that’s a great way to start in terms of communicating with people and connecting with people.

Mac Prichard:

Talk more about the benefits of doing that communication with people, connecting with people. How is that helping you as a job seeker when people start seeing the articles that you’ve shared, comments that you’re making on LinkedIn?

Michael Ramirez:

What’s interesting, statistically, when you look at jobs, it’s 60% are referrals, and 40% are cold resumes that people look into. So, with these connections that you make, you are humanizing who you are as a person rather than just seeing a resume and just seeing letters and words. What happens at that moment in time is that the person that you’re connecting with sees you as a person that may be a fit for this particular job that they know of or that’s within their organization.

It gives you that referral aspect and that extra leverage to connect with people and apply for the job that you may be interested in just because you know someone else or you know that organization so well that people in that organization see what you’ve done in your LinkedIn profile and it piques their interest in terms of, “Oh, we should look into this person, and they should apply.”

Mac Prichard:

You’re a recruiter, you work for a large healthcare institution, and you spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, Michael. I know that about you.

What do you think, as a recruiter, when you’re looking at someone’s profile, and they haven’t posted in a year versus someone who is following the advice that you’ve outlined here? They’re contributing once a week or, eventually, maybe more. What difference does that make to you as a recruiter?

Michael Ramirez:

It shows that they’re confident in themselves with their work. It also shows me that they’re interested in the space that they’re looking into. For example, if there is an RN that posts about neuroscience and is eager to learn more, it makes me think, “Okay, this is a good person to join our organization because they are passionate about it.”

You don’t really see that when you don’t post anything on your social media or communicate that. How can we see that extra level of who you are if you don’t share that? I think that’s what makes people who do post about their interests, their accomplishments, and how they stand out throughout the crowd when you look at LinkedIn profiles.

Mac Prichard:

There are three parts to your structure for how to create and share your personal brand. One is to start with who you are, doing that self-assessment that we talked about. Number two is setting up this structure to manage your communications.

The third part is to prepare and practice your communication. Tell us more about this.

Michael Ramirez:

Yeah, and to put it simply, again, it’s to innovate and iterate. Many times, you hear about elevator pitches. These elevator pitches are a great way to start conversations and connect with people, but to make it more impactful, you should craft your elevator pitch as if you’re a storyteller. This makes it more personal instead of listing out your skills. A great way to practice on your pitch is to record yourself, share it with friends, and gain feedback from them to see what you can work on.

With that, you can iterate your pitch and make it better as you use it in meeting with people in career fairs or one-on-one coffees. At the same time, with your postings, you can innovate those as well. For example, using your spreadsheet that you’ve created for yourself and the posts that you want to be on track.

You can see, and LinkedIn does a great job of doing this, to see how many people have looked at it or liked it and you can see what makes people tick when it comes to your posts. You track that out, see how you can iterate it, and make it better. There is no one stopping you from making things better in your personal brand as well as your life.

Mac Prichard:

How will you know, Michael, when the work that you’ve put into creating and sharing a personal brand is making a difference in your job search?

Michael Ramirez:

Internally, again, going back to how it’s impactful, once you feel confident and you’re seeing those likes or feedback from your connections, that is one way to tell that you are making impacts with them, as well as yourself. It’s the self-confidence and the feedback from others.

Another way is, and this is hopeful, it’s that recruiters start reaching out to you saying, “Hey, I love your posts.” Or, “I love your skillset that you’ve been posting. Can we have a conversation about an opportunity to get to know more about who you are and what you do?”

Mac Prichard:

Well, it’s been a terrific conversation, Michael. Now, tell us, what’s next for you?

Michael Ramirez:

Yeah, work-wise, OHSU is hiring folks out there that are passionate about helping others. You can find opportunities at our website, ohsu.edu, under the “Jobs” tab, or find me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to help and make that connection.

On the flip side of things, I’m actually starting my own podcast. I’m diving deeper into what we talked about today, and the conversations that I want to have is about identity and how we perceive it in our work and everyday life. Basically asking questions: how do I want to be seen? And how that makes me understand how I want to be seen both in work and in life.

Mac Prichard:

Terrific. I know that listeners can learn more about you by connecting with you on LinkedIn, and when they do reach out to you, I hope they’ll mention that they heard you on Find Your Dream Job. Congratulations on the launch of that podcast. That’s terrific news, Michael.

Now, given all the great advice you’ve shared today, what’s the one thing you want a listener to remember about how to create and share your personal brand?

Michael Ramirez:

Don’t be afraid to fail because, with every failure or mistake that you make with starting your personal brand, you find the improvements that you can make to make you more confident in how you communicate yourself.

Mac Prichard:

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Next week, our guest will be Hayden Iverson Todd.

She’s an assistant director of career and fellowship advising at Reed College. It’s a private liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon.

Do you let the openings you see on job boards drive how you look for work?

Step away from the computer, says Hayden.

A better approach is to know your purpose and your strengths and reach out to your community.

You’ll not only find more opportunities, she says, but when you do see an online posting, you’ll be in a better position to apply.

Join us next Wednesday when Hayden Iverson Todd and I talk about how to do an intentional job search.

Until next time, thanks for letting us help you find your dream job.

This show is produced by Mac’s List.

Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media.

Our sound engineer is Matt Fiorillo. Ryan Morrison at Podfly Productions edits the show. Dawn Mole creates our transcripts. And our music is by Freddy Trujillo.

This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.