A personal brand for your job search, without the cringe

"Personal brand" is a phrase that makes most sensible people want to close the tab. It suggests motivational quotes over sunrise photos and calling yourself a thought leader with a straight face.

Underneath the cringe there is something plain and useful. Anyone can type your name into a search bar. Whatever comes up is your brand, whether you built it or not. The job is not to perform. It is to make sure what is out there is accurate, current and consistent with the CV you are sending.

Start with a five minute search

Open a private browser window and search your full name, then your name with your city, then your name with your profession. Look at the first page only. Ask three questions:

• Is the person in these results clearly me?
• Does what I see agree with my CV: titles, employers, dates?
• Is there anything here I would not want to explain?

Most people find the same thing: a half-finished LinkedIn profile, an old bio from two jobs ago, and not much else. That is good news. It is a small job to fix.

Make LinkedIn and your CV agree

The most common problem is drift. Your CV has been updated for every application and your LinkedIn has not been touched since 2022, so the two now disagree on titles and dates.

Pick one source of truth, which should be your real employment record, and bring both into line.

• Titles: use the title you actually held. Describe bigger scope in the description, not by renaming the job.
• Dates: month and year, the same in both places.
• Headline: say what you do and for whom, in plain words. "Payroll officer, construction and mining, Perth" will be found. "Passionate people person" will not.
• About section: three or four sentences. What you do, the kind of problems you are good at, what you are looking for next. Write it the way you would say it to a neighbour.

Show one or two things, do not just claim them

You do not need a content calendar. You need one or two pieces of evidence that you can do the work.

• A short post about a project you finished: what the problem was, what you did, what changed. Leave out anything confidential.
• A document, deck or portfolio piece in the Featured section.
• A recommendation from someone who actually supervised you. One specific recommendation beats ten generic ones. Ask them to mention a particular piece of work.

If you work in a field where public posting is unwise, such as Defence, health or parts of government, skip the posts. An accurate, complete profile is enough.

Tidy, do not scrub

You are entitled to a life. The aim is not to delete your personality. It is to check your privacy settings, and to remove the handful of things that would distract from your application. Old public posts arguing with strangers are the usual candidates.

Keep it true

Everything here follows one rule, the same one we use for CVs: only say what you can back up. A profile that matches your CV, and a CV that matches what you would say in an interview, means you never have to remember which version you told to whom.

When your profile is in order, the next step is making each application match the job. CVelo compares your CV with a job ad and shows you where they differ, using only what your CV and your own answers support. The free ATS checker needs no signup, and nothing you paste is kept.