RCEuro Member Blogs

This is the headline of an article posted today by Dawn Passaro, I liked it so took the liberty of posting the article in full and it very much follows on from my last blog on RCE on Britney and "personal branding"...it seems there might be a business model in this chaos!!

Attention all recruiters! Are you having trouble finding recruitment assignments? Maybe you should shift your target to the other side of the street. By that I mean, sell your services to the job seeker, instead of the corporate employer.

In the news today, and from people I know, I see massive layoffs and downsizing everywhere. The law of supply and demand tells us that many organizations will not have to work so hard to fill their open positions (if the skill sets fit). Companies may think twice before budgeting for recruitment expenses.

Consider this alternative: Personal Branding. It's a good skill to develop in any case as a part of your own career management process, even if you don't offer it to clients. Check out Dan Schawbel's
Personal Branding Blog. He is the author of " Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 2009) . His blog has a wealth of "how-to" information on Personal Branding.

I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal titled Job Seekers Pay Marketers to Improve Their Prospects in the 1/6/09 edition. The article mentioned a company called Reach that helps outsourced individuals or any job applicant for that matter, to focus on their own personal branding, and to use that information to find their next job.

This is a different approach to outplacement services. Traditional outplacement focuses on finding open positions that match the candidate's skills and background. Personal branding falls into the category of career management, and can take a bit more time. The optimal candidate for these services would be a high-level executive, looking to make a move into a different field of expertise.

I took a look at the services they offer, and one called "Online Identity Certification" looked very interesting. It is geared to the self-employed, and thus it may be another great opportunity for recruiters (who are often self-employed). It offers techniques that can be used to evaluate and change someone's online "brand". You will see that these techniques are the same as those we teach in our webinars, and white papers - to our own HRmarketer.com subscribers to increase their online visibility.

For example, here is a check list of things that are suggested on the Reach Website, for those who want to change their online identity:

• Use personal branding to develop stand out websites and blogs
• Determine who should have a website or blog or both
• Plan content and information architecture
• Set up and custom brand a TypePad blog
• Partner with top-notch designers and programmers to develop a website
• Write copy for the web

Does this sound familiar to anyone? More and more HR suppliers are already able to do most of this, as they market their own businesses. How hard would it be to apply or teach these skills to clients? According to the WSJ article, there are only 300 people certified to perform this service right now