Personal Branding and Career Progression - Amelia Sordell
We caught up with the number one trailblazer in the personal branding space, Amelia Sordell. Amelia is the founder of Klowt and she “brands people, not businesses”. As we continue with our “I am more than my CV” series, Amelia shares some of best practices and tried and tested formulas for success in personal branding.
What’s your definition of Personal Branding?
The strategic approach you take to building your reputation. In other words; what do I want people to think, say and feel about me when I’m not in the room? The answer to that will end up being your reputation, that’s your personal brand. It’s all about talking about things you want to be known for and continually talking about them, so you become an expert or a thought leader. If you want to be known for personal branding, you better be talking about it and giving yourself visibility in that space and in your organisation. A brand regardless of whether it’s a company or personal brand is all about how you make someone feel.
You also need to be clear on what your goals are: what do you want to be known for; have three things. I always say three things, as if you just have one thing, you probably won’t have enough to say about the subject matter. Talk authentically and confidently about these things and be consistent with your online posts to create a strong presence.
How has developing your own branding led you up to where you are professionally now?
I got into personal branding, firstly because I was a recruiter and as a recruiter, your business is people - selling and buying people. I was selling myself as a person to my client; I am the product. I noticed a theme in the agency, which was that no one was working with the business because of who we were as a business, they were working with us because they got on well with that particular recruiter. I realised then that we shouldn’t be marketing the agency, we should be marketing the recruiters who then market for the agency. We’re selling people and people buy from people. I started to grow my own personal brand to put my theory into practice and managed to rapidly grow my LinkedIn following from 1500 - 8000 on LinkedIn within months by selling myself. I then got headhunted because I got to over 8000-10,000 followers and someone who had been enjoying following my recruitment marketing content asked me to come and do the same for them as an Employee Engagement Manager.
I did that for a while, then the weirdest thing happened, I was posting about everything I was learning over the 6-12 month period and people began messaging to find out how I grew my followership. Me being lazy, I wanted to find out the most efficient way to share this information which was to do posts about it, rather than Direct Message (DM) everyone back individually. As soon as I began doing this, I went from 12,000 followers to 23,000 and then from 23,000 to 80,000 like that. It was a super organic journey, I just stumbled across it and saw there’s a lot of power in people to people. I think we’ve lost the humanisation in marketing, we undervalue the relatability of someone sharing their story; the ups and downs and the challenges and wins, and everything in between, it’s more compelling.
Personal branding changed my life. As I explained, it meant that I could change jobs and allowed me to get headhunted because I was building my personal brand. I was able to launch and scale my business from 0 to over-subscribed in 6 weeks. We (Klowt) still don’t have an official website, 100% of our business comes from my personal brand and my team’s personal brands. Most jobs are advertised so it’s important to build your personal brand and give yourself and your work visibility. This will attract inbound job opportunities as many companies prefer to headhunt, rather than wait for job applications as headhunting elicits better quality candidates.
Is personal branding something that bosses or managers should help cultivate more and if so, how?
Yes absolutely, the stats I will share show this:
The individual reach within a business is 10x the reach of a company brand
Brand messages are re-shared 24x more frequently when posted by an employee vs. the brand’s social media channels.
Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels.
Leads developed through employees’ social media activities convert 7x more frequently than other leads.
92% of people trust recommendations from individuals (even if they don’t know them) over brands.
The reason they should do it is that most employees struggle to hire, and almost all employers struggle to retain. When you’re building a personal brand as a manager, a leader, and an individual, an incredible thing happens, the content gets more visibility and people become engaged with the business as a result. 62% of candidates prefer thought-leadership style content. Glassdoor isn’t trusted anymore, they don’t trust the careers page, they trust the leader putting themselves out there talking about how they lead and being authentic about their mistakes. They trust the intern to talk candidly about their experience.
There’s often a fear among employers that if they let their employees talk candidly online that they will make them look bad, or their employees will get poached. My answer to that is, “yes, what if they do get poached? That means you’re not doing a good enough job as an employer”.
How should they do it?
Training - get a consultant in to teach them how to do it, someone like me who can help with cultivating their career by showing how to invest in the team.
Empower them and give them autonomy to feel free to share.
Don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, it usually takes 3-6 months to see results from personal branding.
What are the top tips you can give to help candidates build their personal branding and help strengthen their CV?
Your personal brand is not your job, it’s your story. Your current roles, your previous jobs, and your future jobs, what you're passionate about. Remember, your career is not a ladder, it’s a jungle gym.
You don’t have to be an expert to be valuable to people.
People will not always like what you have to say, whether.
Your personality is your greatest gift, it will attract who you want to attract and repel who you want to repel.
It would be boring if everyone agreed all the time, so don’t worry about what people think, be confident in who you are, your morals, and opinions.
For me, I separated social media from my personal life and I’ve removed the need to be validated by strangers online.
What is the best piece of advice a manager or mentor gave that poignantly shaped your professional journey?
The worst was by a very, very famous and wealthy business owner who’s very well known. When I first wanted to start Klowt, I spoke to him about it and where I thought the future of marketing was going. This person said my idea was going to crash and burn and I should “stick to marketing or something”. I didn’t listen to him of course.
The second was from a man who is a dear friend, Andrew McCastle, and he said never take criticism from people you would never advise from.
You can find out more about Amelia, personal branding, her thriving business Klowt here.