By the time you’ve finished working with the six parts of your College Graduate Personal Brand Positioning Statement, you’ll be ready to put YOU^TM into action. Armed and ready with that, you will be able to make clear to your ideal employers exactly what you can offer them. So, roll up your sleeves! Your personal brand — and that amazing job you want — is waiting.…

      3

      Audience

      College Graduate Personal Brand

      Positioning Element #1

      It’s up to the Audience. It always has been.

      — Kate Smith, Singer

      When you’re just graduating from college and looking for your first full-time job, let’s face it: It’s hard not to focus on yourself. All you want is to find a job that you love with great people to work with and a steady paycheck. But the surprising truth about using personal branding in your job search is this:

      The best way to land the job you want the most is to focus on your Audience.

      After all, potential bosses (your personal brand “Audience”) are interested in what you can do for them. How are you going to make their jobs easier? What have you learned in school that the company can benefit from? While it’s human nature to wonder what the company can do for you, showing them what YOU^TM can offer a company is how you land a great job.

      One of the most common myths about personal branding is that it’s “all about you.” But think about it: If your brand exists in the minds of your Audience, how can personal branding be all about you? It can’t, and it isn’t. The focus has to be on your Audience. So, the more you learn about your Audience, the more in sync you will be with the interviewer. And the more you learn about what the company needs, the faster you’ll get the great job you really want.

      Now, you may be thinking, “Sounds good, Brenda, but I don’t even know where to begin.” Well, the key is to get as much information about the company as possible. In fact, one of the recruiters I interviewed said: “You want to stick out in an interview? Be knowledgeable about the company. You wouldn’t believe how many students know virtually nothing about the company they’re interviewing with. It’s a big mistake.” Some company recruiters told me that college grads have actually walked into an interview and asked, “What does your company do?” How will a recruiter react to that? Your resume will get thrown in the trash!

      One of the HR pros I spoke with said: “It isn’t enough in an interview to simply say, ‘You have a job I’m interested in, and I know this is a good company.’ But you’d be surprised how many candidates do exactly that.” Interviewers will see this kind of thinking as lazy, so not knowing about the company just won’t cut it. You need to have a very specific reason for wanting a particular job at a particular company. And the only way you can figure out if a company is right for you is to learn about it. Then, you’ll be prepared to tell your interviewer that reason.

      The more you learn about your Audience, the more you’ll have a head start on the interview process because you’ll already know more about the company than most of the other applicants. Bottom line: Your interviewers will remember you if you can give them a detailed reason why you want to work there, if you’ve taken the time to read about the company’s background, and if you’ve learned about the company’s recent news.

      Who is Your Audience?

      So, how do you go about getting that information in order to connect with your interviewer? Let’s pretend you’re a top-notch marketer — the newly-promoted Brand Manager of YOU^TM. You’re in charge, and it’s your job to see that your brand reaches the top.

      If YOU^TM were a product, your Audience would be called the “Target Market,” and you would find out all you could about your Target Market through surveys and questionnaires that ask questions about who they really are. You would want to know provable facts about the people in your Target Market, like their age, sex, income, education, etc. How much do they earn? Do most of them live in the city or in the suburbs? In marketing-speak, these provable facts are called “demographics.”

      Now, an average marketer might stop there, but provable facts are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to learning about the Target Market. Think about it for a second: If you really want to get to know someone, it wouldn’t be enough only to find out this person’s age, how much they earn, and where they were born and lived, right? Those kinds of “facts” wouldn’t really tell you much about a person. You would only have scratched the surface, and you would need to base all of your beliefs about that person on less than what they’d write on a doctor’s office form.

      That’s why top-notch marketers 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 particular person or group of people tick.

      How does this apply to personal branding? Well, in general, your Audience is anyone or any company you want to impact with your personal brand. In your job search process, this includes the people who could hire you for the kind of job you want after graduation. Your Audience might simply be the person who interviews you, but you may not know at first who your interviewer or even your potential immediate supervisor will be. So, in the beginning of your job search, your job- seeking 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 want to apply for a job. In fact, I don’t even know which companies I’m interested in yet!”

      That’s fair. It’s true that when you’re looking for a new job, learning about your Audience may seem challenging at first. Even choosing companies to target can be confusing, especially when you’re looking seriously at the professional job market for the first time. But don’t worry. We’re going to walk through this process together. Learning about your Audience before you land a 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 research, you can find out which companies are the best fit for YOU^TM. In fact, you may be surprised how much you can learn about a company and its people with just a little bit of effort.

      Getting Ready to Get Ready

      When you’re at the very beginning of your job search after (or just before) graduation, 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^TM, 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 focus?

      •Opportunities for advancement?

      •Whether the company gives back to the community?

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