Building a Personal Brand, step 1
The online job application process is broken, and everyone knew it but me.
Every day you get inundated with all these sites promising to connect you with the job of your dreams, help you write your resume, build your skills, and give you lots of helpful advice…
And your carefully crafted resume goes into the bucket with all the others, to be key word searched by bots and drones, and maybe, if you are lucky, you can get an interview. But it will take a lot of app submissions and cover letter repurposing to get there.
The painful truth is revealed; you can’t get a job unless you know someone already, or they know of you.
So, how do I get the word out about just how amazing and awesome and humble I am to all the world?
Build a personal brand.
Huh?
I’ve heard this before, about leveraging social media to market yourself, but I never gave it much thought. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hear about my trials and mistakes. All my sins for the world to Google, that is just scary. I always worry that if people google my email address, they will find that one stupid question I asked to a linux board back in the late 90s. Please don’t hold that against me, I didn’t know what I didn’t know…
So, here we go, documenting the process to build a personal brand, so that if I am successful, others may have a path to follow that isn’t spread all over a million job boards and social media sites.
My first step has been to dust off my domain name, and start blogging again. I’m going to keep it strictly technology related, no politics or work stuff. My goal is to post something each day. I can write, I just don’t know if what I write is something others would read, or am I writing to my self, a journal with an expensive carbon foot print. We’ll see.
So, I published my first story and have started drafting a couple of others. I got my first retweets a few minutes ago, so at least a couple people found them interesting. It is also possible a bot just passed it along based on the keyword “AWS”, but hey, I’ll take it.
My next goal is to build out my consulting site. I’ve done a fair bit of work over the years, just need to document the projects and put them up. I haven’t had the need to do this before, so the site wont win any prizes for a while. The useful part was that I had a chance to put in my first VPC with public and private subnets, and get my websites all playing nice on the same instance. It gave me a chance to learn a bit about Apache’s ServerAlias directive. I’ve been putting duplicate entries with ServerName changes in my v-hosts.conf file all these years. Could have saved me some typing!
See, the stories just come to me, so the challenge is writing and publishing them. One step at a time.