Self-Marketing
Self-marketing refers to promoting oneself and one’s skills, experience, and achievements to potential employers, clients, or business partners to increase visibility and opportunities for professional growth. It involves various activities, such as creating a personal brand, networking with peers and industry experts, and presenting oneself in a compelling and professional manner in job interviews.
The art of self-marketing is tricky but not difficult. All it needs is self-awareness which is the knowledge of your skills, talents, achievements, and goals. Create your “self-brand,” make it famous by believing in yourself, and convince your employer to buy it.
In this competitive era, where people strive to get the job of their dreams and enter the business and corporate sector, getting a job of your interest is not easy. You have to promote self-marketing and search for the ways in which you stand better from others. You have to toil hard, update skills in your CV, work on your personality, learn new talents, and gain experience.
Everyone is busy finding unique ways to market themselves. Companies nowadays are experimenting not only with technological resources but also with “human resources.” They want a self-marketing workforce that is highly competent in every skill. Companies are recognizing the importance of humans as a resource and working hard to choose the best candidates out of the pool of applicants. This dominancy of human resources has raised fierce competition amongst the candidates searching for an ideal job.
Before diving into self-marketing, there are three questions you need to answer yourself.
- What are you going to market?
- Who will you market yourself to?
- What is the need to market yourself to them?
Self-Marketing Tips
1. Strengthen Body Language and Gestures
Non-verbal communication plays a key role nowadays in judging an employee’s personality. You may feel that giving appropriate answers and having a confident talk will do all of it, but you are not right. Employers nowadays pay more attention to your body language, gestures, and movements. Your lack of confidence and the number of times you prevent eye contact, rub your nose, move your legs, and fold your arms reflect your timid, uncommunicative, self-contained nature lacking self-marketing. You may not even count gestures like tacking your hair at the back of your ear and scratching your head as inappropriate gestures. Doing this too often may deviate the interviewer’s attention from the topic.
A Smile is the easiest way to express your interest and can be performed often during the talk. Have a firm and sincere handshake with your employer before the interview and at the end of it. Clumsy handshakes with sweaty or shaky hands reflect an informal image. The way you sit communicates a lot. A relaxed and balanced posture shows that the employee is social and communicative, and a rigid and statue-like posture shows reserved and unapproachable nature.
Posture balance should be there, neither too rigid nor too moving. Don’t try to be too frank with your employer, cracking short jokes and laughing; they may not like it. Include hand movement while explaining something, and nod your head while your employer is explaining something. Don’t nod your head too often like a puppet doll, have a balance. These short yet powerful body language tips are somewhat tricky, but after proper understanding, these will help you a lot with self-marketing.
2. Resume’s Help
Your resume is a great companion; it goes with you wherever you want to work.
- Update your resume with every new achievement you get.
- Don’t make your resume lengthy; make it brief.
- Arrange all the statements and bullet points properly, which is easy to read and understand.
- Include a separate section for strengths and skills. This skill section is what makes you different from your other competitors.
- Weave a story out of every bullet point. These stories will help you to communicate and express yourself. Moreover, a story-type explanation is a more interesting and approachable way of explaining something.
3. Sell your Potential
Well, every candidate talks of their education and qualification. “So what, I want to know how can you and your skills benefit me”-this would be the reply of most employers.
- Convince your employer of your skills and talents.
- Tell them a story regarding how you’ll blend your skills within the company, increasing productivity in the workplace.
Nowadays, self-marketing companies prefer those employees who are highly extroverted, are willing to give suggestions and ideas, and are ready to take up any task.
4. Open Doors for Learning
The learning process benefits you and increases your chances of getting recruited. Keep learning even if you get a job. Try learning various courses on your weekends, either online or offline.
The following courses are of great importance in the self-marketing sector
Try gripping these topics to enhance your self-marketing skills and increase the probability of your selection.
5. Take Mock Interviews
Don’t consider yourself a genius who’ll crack an interview without prior preparation. Interviews have become more difficult than you think because of growing competition in self-marketing. Hence you must practice a lot before going for the final.
- You can practice speaking in front of the mirror.
- Notice your face, gestures, and expressions while speaking, and work on anything that needs improvement.
- You may also practice with your friend or sibling. Explain yourself to them, and ask them if they liked how you explained your skills and talents.
Practice ensures near perfection. Keep taking mock interviews; you can sharpen your flaws with every new mock you perform.
6. Acquire Knowledge
The thing which most self-marketing aspirants fail to do before their interview is to do homework. Most of them don’t know about the company and its goals. So, it becomes crucial that you conduct thorough research about the company’s background, missions, goals, products and services, and other information. Take your self-marketing search to the next level and search for the company’s competitors and their achievements. Also, have a thorough knowledge of the self-marketing skills required for the particular job position you are applying for, analyze if you fit in that position, and prove to be an asset to the company. Formulate answers to these questions to help you during the interview session.
7. Be the ‘Perfect Employee’
Yes, there are people who want to work just for money, unwilling to take on extra tasks. Be ready to offer any solutions to problems that benefit the company and provide ideas and opinions in the interview, which could take the company far ahead of its competitors. Before giving ideas, take several mock tests at home and brainstorm how to formulate the solution, present it, convince your interviewer, etc. You might not get paid for these, but the respect you gain from them is incomparable to any monetary benefits.
8. Enhance Confidence Limits
If you have faith in your activities and accomplishments, no one can pull you back from the path of success. Be positive, enhance confidence limits, and focus on personality development. Never criticize yourself for what you haven’t got or what you’ve not achieved; always be ready to accept failures. Applaud yourself for everything you have achieved because when you feel good, you perform well. If you reach the company premises with a non-confident and nervous personality, you’ll never be able to give your best in front of the employer. Remember, others will never help you achieve what you want, and that too in this competitive world of the rat race. You have to struggle hard for each and everything you wish to achieve.
9. Accept Recognition
Some people have the habit of not accepting compliments. Even after achieving something, they reply, “it was not that hard,” or “it didn’t take much time”. When someone compliments you, accept it by saying “thank you,” which would boost your inner zeal and give you the power to perform better. Record your achievements in a diary or a journal, and keep track of the compliments you got and how they would benefit you in the future. Read them whenever you get time. It will help you confidently present yourself, help define your self-marketing skills and achievements easily in front of others, and enhance your personality and attitude.
10. Use Social Media Profiles
Nowadays, many employers prefer social recruiting as it saves time and cost. Social recruiting gives a glimpse of the candidate’s personality and interests. Hence, it is important that you not only update your CV but polish your social media profiles as well.
- Fill your profile with all the basic information for others to know who you are.
- Use the “interests” column proficiently by posting your professional interests.
- Remember, whatever you upload, and share is seen by people all over the world. Use social sites wisely.
- Never post anything inappropriate related to politics, alcoholism or drugs, sexual topics, caste or gender bias, or any negative comments.
- Fill your profile with motivational pictures, news related to your career stream, etc.
Another advantage you could gain from social media is sharing all the groups with jobs of your interests. Join those groups; apply for the positions which suit you. You can also form a network of professionals, adding your coworker, former friends in other companies, professional acquaintances, and former employers, etc., who may help you get to your dream job through referrals.
Conclusion
For self-marketing, you must first understand yourself, your interests, what you would perform proficiently, what you have to market, etc. All this needs practice on a regular basis. After going through yourself, you must learn the art of effectively representing all your skills and talents. Not everyone can speak or express what they want to. Enhancing confidence limits is the ideal way of describing your self-marketing assets. The last thing to do is to ‘practice what you preached.’ Convincing your employer with mere words is insufficient; you should be competent enough to showcase your self-marketing skills. Remember, self-marketing continues even after you get selected for the job. So never let anything play with your reputation. Perform everything with your full enthusiasm and proficiency.
To present yourself as an “ultimate choice” is the key role of self-marketing. Nothing is easy to grab in this world. Everything comes with terms and conditions.
