Personal Branding: Why You Need Employees Who Market Themselves

BRODY has taught thousands of people how to market themselves in our Ignite Your Personal Brand: Market Your MAGIC workshop. We tell participants: Don’t be the world’s best-kept secret. Stop waiting for others to notice your skills, and tell them what you can do.

This idea of personal branding is foreign – maybe even confusing — to many people. Some view self-promotion as bragging, so they don’t show their companies what they have to offer … especially if it falls outside their usual niche at work.

Remember, people aren’t mind-readers!

You can’t know what your employees don’t tell you. That’s why you need employees who market themselves.

Here are three ways that employees who use personal branding techniques can help your company as a whole:

1. Discover hidden talent. When employees promote themselves, they tend to reveal hidden talents that are useful to the entire team. In one of our recent workshops, a shy graphic designer shared that he often made slide decks for the design department. He showed a few examples, and his marketing and sales co-workers exclaimed, “We had no idea you could do that! We’ve been outsourcing our slides to external designers for years.” Everyone walked away happy to have discovered this internal resource.
2. Promote from within. Personal branding can clarify your view of potential candidates for job openings. If you like to promote from within, it’s helpful to have lots of employees who market themselves. Otherwise, you’re left promoting the one employee who got an endorsement from a manager, but may not be the best person for the job. The more employees who self-promote, the greater your chances of finding the right internal candidate for an open role.
3. Retain top performers. If your top performers don’t market themselves, they’re more likely to leave your company. You simply won’t be able to leverage their full skillset — or give them projects that tap into their talents — if you don’t know what they have to offer. This will leave them feeling frustrated, bored, and looking for other places that will take advantage of their talent.

Personal branding is a win-win for your employees and your company.

Remember, it’s not about bragging; it’s about sharing interests, skills, and experience. To learn more about how BRODYpro can help your employees build their personal brands, see the workshop overview here.