If you don’t think personal branding is important, you’re flat out nuts.

Nowadays it’s so much easier to brand yourself online – through blogging, social media, networking – and then leverage that effectively offline as well. Bringing your online branding efforts offline is key; because you can’t live exclusively online. And this is especially true in the job market.

There are plenty of places online to look for jobs, and we know that Gen Y and Gen X do almost all of their job searching online. It makes completely sense. And now we’re seeing tools to help companies and candidates brand themselves more effectively online. But ultimately, hiring people is about one-on-one connections and meeting people face-to-face to see if there’s a fit. The online job market helps bring people together, and it’s getting better at it, but you still need to bring your online brand with you when you meet potential employers for interviews, etc.

Dan Schawbel gets personal branding.

The man is building himself a mighty fine soapbox, and he’s happily and constantly standing on it to espouse the importance of personal branding. In many cases he’s speaking directly to Gen X and Gen Y about personal branding in the job hunt.

One of Dan’s initiatives is the Personal Branding Magazine, which is a subscription service you can buy. Here’s a link to a free sample from the latest issue of Personal Branding Magazine.

This issue is particularly interesting to me because … well, I’m in it! And, it’s all about the job market.

Dan interviewed a host of people in the job market, including yours truly, asking us each one very important question, “If you could change one thing about recruitment, what would it be?”

Here’s my answer:

The one thing I’m most interested in changing and seeing changed, is that a strong influence be put on the relationships between employers and candidates versus anything else. Ultimately, people hire people. We don’t hire machines. We don’t hire a resume. We hire people.

Here are a couple other answers worth highlighting:

From Chris Russell at Jobs in Pods:

To get employers to open up more and show more transparency when it comes to their work environments and company culture. This means engaging the next gneeration workforce on their own turf, using new media like blogs, podcasts and social networks. Recruitment’s future is all about establishing relationships, not just advertising jobs.

From Joel Cheesman at Cheezhead:

I would eliminate the barriers that restrict recruiters from being innovative and experimentative, such as legal, marketing and IT departments.

From Alex Rudloff at Emurse:

Job seeker empowerement. Candidates are intimidated, overwhelmed and often don’t know where to even begin. Better tools and easier access to helpful information go a long way towards helping someone build the confidence to tackle a modern job hunt.

The feature article in the magazine is entitled, Job Hunting in a Brand YOU World — which is an interview with Rob McGovern, Founder of JobFox. It’s a great interview, and the rest of the content in the magazine is well worth it too.

The Importance of Personal Branding

Personal branding matters now more than ever because of the proliferation of ways in which people connect online. It makes it easier and easier for people to stand out and really build up their own profile. If you’re competing with them for a job, and you’re not as actively developing your personal brand, you’re in trouble. Of course the same holds true for employers – if you’re out there looking for top talent (and you should be!) then you’ll need to build up a brand that gets recognized and resonates with job seekers. Otherwise they’ll skip past you without batting an eyelash and move on to the next company that gets it.

Check out Personal Branding Magazine — it’s definitely worth reading.