Candidates will check out the LinkedIn profiles of senior leaders as part of their due diligence on potential employers. That makes senior leader personal branding on LinkedIn an important part of your talent attraction strategy. Read our blog post and learn how you make the most of it.
In today’s crowded jobs market, businesses need to seize upon every opportunity to make themselves more attractive to top talent. It might not be the first thing that springs to mind, but developing senior leader personal branding on LinkedIn is one such opportunity. And, as candidates become more diligent in researching who they work for, it’s an increasingly important one.
With 134.5 million people using LinkedIn every day, and more than 80% of job seekers reporting using it searching for jobs, how your business and its senior leaders come across on the platform really matters. Suffice to say, skeletal or neglected senior leader profiles are not a good look. However, with the right approach to reputation management, the LinkedIn profiles of senior leaders can be a real talent attraction asset.
Let’s look in more detail at how to optimise the personal branding of senior leaders on LinkedIn.
Senior leader personal branding is the process of creating and promoting a unique identity and reputation for a senior leader within their industry. It involves promoting the skills, experiences and accomplishments of a senior leader to differentiate them from others in their field.
The first step in doing that is to identify the unique value proposition of your senior leaders. What is it that makes your senior leaders stand out? It needn’t be a professional achievement and, in fact, it’s more likely not to be—most senior leaders have lots of those. That’s why, when we do senior leader personal branding work at Genius, we often focus on leaders’ personal stories—how they got to where they are and the challenges they had to overcome. Unique, human stories like this set leaders apart in an authentic and engaging way.
That’s not to say the professional achievements of senior leaders aren’t important—they're important in establishing credibility and authority. The "Projects" and "Publications" features on LinkedIn are where people will look for information like this. It’s important that these are kept up to date and include industry related keywords so that the professional achievements of senior leaders are visible on search engines. This will make them discoverable to your target audience and hook their interest.
Wondering how to shape the LinkedIn profiles of senior leaders and boost their personal branding? Book a consultation.
Developing senior leader personal branding isn’t just good for the leader in question, it can be great for recruitment. Senior leaders are representatives of your business so, with the right approach, strong senior leader personal branding can double as a powerful employer branding tool.
Strong, empathic senior leader personal branding, for example, will give candidates a strong indication of the culture that candidates can expect to find at an organisation. What if a senior leader has overcome mental health issues or feelings of inadequacy, for example? Stories like that say just as much about the organisation they work for as they do the leader and are an opportunity to highlight some of the specific mental health initiatives your organisation offers.
Senior leader personal branding can benefit employers in three main ways:
Didn’t realise how important senior leader personal branding had become in employer branding? Book a consultation to learn more.
The important role senior leader LinkedIn profiles play in talent acquisition means that optimising them should be a priority for HR executives. Take some time to look through the profiles of your senior leaders, making sure profile pictures are professional and the headline and summary are aligned with your senior leader’s personal brand and the employer brand of your organisation. You can also research keywords related to your industry and use them throughout profiles to improve visibility in search results. There’s a lot to consider, so it’s a good idea to put together some guidance for senior leaders to help them make the most of all the personal branding opportunities LinkedIn presents.
Before taking to LinkedIn to develop senior leader personal branding for recruitment purposes, however, you should have a good understanding of your employer brand. If you don’t already have an established employer brand, or it feels out of date with your organisation today, you can work with your recruitment marketing agency to develop one that will help you target and attract the best talent for your organisation. Once it’s in place, you’ll be able to unlock the full recruitment potential of senior leader employer branding on LinkedIn.
Creating and sharing content is where the big wins are for senior leader personal branding. Writing and sharing blog posts, articles and infographics on LinkedIn can demonstrate thought leadership and help organisations to build an audience for their employer brand. Your recruitment marketing agency can help you develop a content calendar that will enable senior leader blog posts to cover subject areas in a strategic way. This also boosts SEO by directing users to a page on your site where—as long as they’re getting quality content—they are likely to spend significant time on-page (what we call ‘dwell time’).
Strong personal branding content needn’t be confined to a senior leader’s personal LinkedIn profile, or indeed to the kind of content usually found on LinkedIn. At Genius, for instance, we have worked with our clients to interview their senior leaders to create podcast content that is posted on the business profile and shared by senior leaders, which has received fantastic engagement. The more creative your approach to senior leadership personal branding content, the more widely it will be shared, and the more visibility it will give your employer brand.
Building a personal brand on LinkedIn for senior professionals can be a lengthy process, which is why many companies outsource it to third party recruitment marketing agencies. We believe that senior leadership personal branding forms part of a strategic, content-driven approach to employer branding. To learn more about the role senior leader personal branding can play in that, book a consultation.
Genius Group Limited
The Watermill
Broughton Hall
Skipton
BD23 3AG
01756 701222
hello@thegeniusgroup.co.uk
