The other side of personal branding

A guest speaker recently visited my journalism class and said something that surprised me.

She stressed that in this modern age, it is important, even necessary, to have an online presence. If people don’t have an online presence, it actually hurts their potential to be hired at a company. The primary reason was not to show if a candidate has the ability to function normally in this technology-inundated time, but because social media accounts brand a person so a company actually knows a candidate is human.

I find this concept absolutely remarkable, not because companies want people to fall into nice and easy categories branded as this or that, but because people are expected to reduce themselves into a simplified version of who they are.

Let’s say, in order to get hired at a sporting goods company, a person decides to brand himself as a snowboarder. He becomes the snowboarder. Not only is it disturbing that, with enough time and effort, people can pass themselves as whoever they want to be, but the branding reduces his level of humanness. He becomes this one-sided construct: the snowboarder.

Of course, he will naturally throw in more intriguing details about himself such as, “I have toured the world looking for the best gyro” or “I’m a huge fan of Breaking Bad” so he stands out among the masses of other faceless applicants.

However, he becomes known solely by these interesting, though ultimately paltry, details. That is not to say he himself believes he is a sum of his accomplishments or that his closest friends believe him to be the snowboarder, but he portrays himself to the business world through this superficial persona.

Businesses begin looking for the most interesting people who might indeed be the most accomplished and proficient for the job, because the interesting people stand out.

This is extraordinary stress placed on having interesting facets of someone’s character. Someone’s potential career relies on an anecdote that makes some recruiting agent laugh for a few seconds.

I believe this stress places far too much emphasis on the immediate differences between people. I did X and he did Y, this is how we are different, and you should hire me because I’ve had the ability to experience more than he has.

Not defining people based on their accomplishments but on character quirks does not take into account the enormous complexity of the human life — the joys, struggles and trials which make us human. These intriguing details ignore everything that makes us what we are.

Perhaps it is just me, but if I meet people planning to build a professional relationship, I would not want them to introduce themselves by saying, “Yeah, we raise pet guinea pigs as a hobby.” Sure, it’s interesting, but that doesn’t define their character.

I would rather them tell me about themselves, interesting parts and not, and be entirely genuine because getting a true scope of their character would make me want to hire them.

allenjo@indiana.edu
@IAmJoshAllen