How Do Personal Branding Efforts By Candidates Affect Your Corporate Recruiting Process? follow this blog post

posted by Paul Ewinger on Sept. 7, 2009

First, I'm a big proponent of personal branding.  I agree with the notion that the traditional resume can no longer effectively communicate an experienced professional's background, skillset and experience.  It makes me cringe when I hear a friend say something like "maybe if I tweak my resume...", knowing that for all his efforts in font selection and margin work, it will all get stripped and dropped into an ATS and at the mercy of a well-designed boolean search string.

So now we have the new breed of candidates that are beginning to see the value of differentiating themselves by using tools like blogs, a strong social media presence, video, etc.  We as recruiters are starting to recognize those efforts, and are rewarding them by getting them in the interview cycle.

Here's my question. While these strategies might have worked to get our attention, how are recruiters pushing that down the path to the interviewers?  While there are exceptions, most ATSs don't give us any practical tools for linking that with their candidate profile.  Hence, it becomes difficult to push it out to the interview teams, especially when recruiters are dealing with volume.  Moreover, we put in place recruiting process protocols, standards on candidate infoflow, etc. in order to ensure that interviewers get a consistent quality level of candidate information.  What happens to the information given to us by candidates that doesn't normally fit within those boxes?

How do other recruiters preserve the efforts of the candidates to differentiate themselves in the candidate pool while maintaining a consistent level of service and information flow to the decision makers?

ats corporate recruiting personal branding process

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•  Paul Ewinger

  1 point 2 months ago

  Hi Sarah-

  Great comment.  I guess if I viewed the purpose of personal branding as just "getting in the door" with the recruiter, that would make sense.  But I also think that PB-related information can be invaluable during the interview cycle with the team and hiring manager as well. So I would be concerned for tracking that information enough that if that candidate gets to that stage, I can pass that information onto my interview team as part of giving them a more complete profile of the candidate.  I agree that it doesn't necessarily have to be through the ATS - most cannot do this. Hence where I see the challenge for corporate recruiters.

  BTW, totally agree that many candidates have not developed personal branding skills.  Some efforts can even hurt their chances, which I guess is my point too.

  Keeping in mind that PB-related information can be either positive or negative in the context of the open role, I assume that you want to pass this information onto the decision maker in some way, correct? 

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•  Sarah Welstead

  1 point 2 months ago

  If the candidate has done their personal branding correctly, we don't have to worry about how it's tracked in the ATS - we're (recruiters) are already talking about them amongst ourselves, and they're placed within days.

  ;)

  Though I have to say that I don't think there are as many candidates developing strong personal brands as those of us in the blogosphere often think, and I don't think they're leveraging them in their approaches to potential employers.

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