Weaving a Personal Branding Strategy into Your Recruitment Marketing

You might have heard that a personal brand strategy is more important, more valuable even, than your company branding. That your and your consultants’ individual brands can be just as effective as a wider marketing strategy in recruitment. If you have then it’s tempting to drop your company branding from your recruitment marketing altogether and just rely on personal branding!

But we’re here to tell you all might not be as it seems. In fact, we’re here to tell you to step away from the quick fix of isolated personal brands. Instead, you need to be focusing on how to properly integrate the positives of personal branding strategies into your broader brand strategy. By weaving elements of individual branding into your company wide marketing, you get the best of both worlds.

Understanding Personal Branding vs. Company Branding

First, let’s look at what we actually mean by personal branding and company branding, what makes them different from each other and why they both might be useful as part of a marketing strategy in recruitment.

A personal brand allows individuals to showcase their expertise, values, and personality to set themselves apart from others in their field. You can build a strong personal brand strategy through a website, on social media and by networking.

For recruiters and consultants, personal branding is crucial as it builds trust and credibility with clients and candidates, establishes authority in specific niches, and connects you with potential leads. Through a strong personal branding strategy, recruiters attract talent, differentiate themselves from competitors, and drive business growth through enhanced visibility and reputation in the industry.

Company branding however is about shaping the perception and identity of an organisation, in this case a recruitment company. Company brands are built around a shared mission, values, culture, and visual identity and a company branding strategy will focus on elements such as logo design, brand messaging, advertising campaigns, and customer experience.

Unlike personal branding, which focuses on individuals, company branding emphasises the collective identity and reputation of an organisation. Like a personal brand, your company brand also helps build trust and credibility among target audiences, but is centred around a cohesive brand identity, and positioning the agency as a reputable and reliable partner in the industry with the aim of driving growth through brand loyalty.

The Pitfalls of Relying on a Personal Branding Strategy

So why is it unwise for a recruitment agency to rely solely on the personal brand of its founder or consultants? Well, there are several scenarios where a recruitment marketing strategy that doesn’t integrate both elements may let you down:

• When consultants leave or scale down their activities

  Let’s be honest, life happens! And your current crack team of recruitment consultants may choose to leave the company or scale down their activities for a multitude of reasons. The problem comes when your recruitment marketing relies heavily on a few big hitters. When they leave, they take ownership of their personal brand with them, sending you back to square one.

• When individuals don’t commit the same resources

  Recruitment marketing that is built on personal brand also suffers when individuals just aren’t as committed to investing their time and resources into creating and maintaining their personal brand. Not only will some spend less effort than others, but your consultants often have more pressing things to do with their time than manage their personal brand. A balanced marketing strategy in recruitment gives your consultants back their time so they can focus on activities that drive revenue, improve candidate experience and attract talent.

• When messaging becomes inconsistent

  While there is an expectation of a certain level of professionalism from individual consultants in your business, they are under no obligation to use their personal platforms in exactly the way you want them to! One poorly considered post, controversial shared article, or throwaway like could reflect negatively on them and by extension you. Relying solely on a personal branding strategy for your marketing will lead to a lack of unified brand identity and potentially damaging inconsistencies in messaging and representation.

• When there is more equity in personal brands than the company brand

  For those businesses looking to create meaningful value in their business – whether it’s to prepare for future exit or investment or simply to create a business with residual and sustained value – investing in the company brand is essential. While personal brands can drive short-term revenue bursts, it isn’t scalable for a business. Likewise, if the company brand is intertwined with the owner/founder, it won’t be as attractive nor valuable to an investor.

Integrating Personal Branding into a Wider Marketing Strategy

The answer to these issues is to integrate both personal and company branding approaches into your holistic marketing strategy in recruitment. Doing so is straightforward and guarantees results. You can achieve this by:

• Establishing guidelines and frameworks for company brand activities for consistency. These can include visual brand guidelines, tone of voice documents and formatting guides. You can then provide these to individual consultants to use in their personal comms.
• Aligning a personal branding strategy with the company’s mission and values. Go beyond brand guidelines and aim to invest both company and personal content with a sense of your organisation’s culture and broader mission.
• Coordinating personal and company messaging across platforms for maximum impact. Encourage individuals to share work successes on their personal pages, use the company account to interact with them and ask them to give your company posts some love too. The click-through rate on content shared by employees is 2x higher than that shared just by the business.

In short, brand marketing in recruitment doesn’t have to come down to personal branding strategy vs company branding strategy. Instead, recruiters should be aiming for a blend of approaches. Unifying your company branding with your consultant’s personal brands is the most effective way to build trust and credibility, attract talent and differentiate your business in an increasingly competitive recruitment landscape.

Empowering Recruitment Agencies with Tailored Brand Strategies

Don’t sacrifice the power of your company brand. If you’re looking for a partner for recruitment marketing success, look no further.

Here at Thrive we’re experts in activating brand strategies for recruiters and employers of all sizes. We empower you to achieve your recruitment goals through marketing strategies that integrate expert content, cutting-edge marketing automation and more.

Check out how Thrive helped one client refresh their brand for a more professional digital presence that drove engagement and got results.