Branding Your Job Search
Achieving Career Goals with Your Next Job
With millions of people looking for jobs, the number of books addressing the search for employment has skyrocketed. Most of these books offer similar content, including résumé writing, social networking, and job interviews, but only a handful comment on the idea of personal branding, as does Michael Glinter in Branding Your Job Search. The author, a professional staffing and career consultant, argues that branding is “both the most important and most overlooked factor when a candidate presents him or herself to potential employers.” Glinter suggests that job candidates use personal branding to distinguish themselves from others and to help potential employers “understand the value that you bring to the company in the long-term.”
This is an interesting premise, and the reader expects it to be the primary focus of the book. But Glinter devotes only one chapter, “Branding Yourself,” to the concept of personal branding. In this chapter, the author talks about knowing one’s target audience, determining the demands for skills, researching companies and industries, and targeting their particular needs. He tells how using recruiters and job search agencies and “getting engaged” in the branding process can improve your results. All of this material is valuable, yet some sections seem a little thin.
For the most part, the remainder of Branding Your Job Search is standard content that can be found in other employment guides. The author addresses topics such as establishing career goals, developing a résumé, performing a job search, working with recruiters, and handling interviews.
One distinguishing aspect of Branding Your Job Search is the author’s use of vignettes about job seekers. These brief stories appear throughout the book and offer helpful examples of how individuals take actions that improve the effectiveness of their job searches. In the chapter on branding, Glinter offers four vignettes about people using different techniques to create their own personal brands. Tim, for example, is a middle-aged worker who recognizes that his experience in Six Sigma could be valuable to companies using “lean” manufacturing techniques. He highlights his training and certification in this area and focuses his job search by networking with people in engineering and targeting companies that concentrate on lean manufacturing and continuous improvement.
While much of the content of Branding Your Job Search has been said before by others, Glinter’s book does offer something of value to job seekers through his personal-branding slant.
Reviewed by
Barry Silverstein
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
