How to Present your Personal Brand as a Fresher

Which gets your heart beating faster? First love letter or first job offer letter!! It’s really difficult to conclude which of the two is more exciting! Years of hard work, exams, sleepless nights, and finally it happens! Your first job.

I remember my first job, the welcome gathering at the office conference hall, the induction party and connecting with more such freshers like me! All excited and curious like timid rabbits. Sniffing and exploring the new environment. This will sound like bed-time tales, perhaps to the future generation.

So how do we go about making new friends or getting grasp over the new role, and most importantly acclimatising the new corporate culture.

A few things as you get office-ready:

1. In current troubled times, making sure you are appreciated, visible and respected at work needs innovative methods beyond just working hard.


2. Understand the brand culture of your organisation. Every organisation is different, and the more you align your personal brand to the current organisation, the easier it will be for your success.




3. Being vanilla no longer works! Find ways to express your specialisation.


4. Online or offline, make your brand look real. Be imperfect but alert - it is a sign of being human. (sounds so simple yet so heavy, right?)


5. Be very careful about your social media presence, even in the personal sphere. Remember you are being watched and so every action of yours adds to your personality judgement. Many employers and recruiters do follow their employees on social media.


6. Spend more time on identifying your offline (actual) brand. It is about the way you interact with others, your knowledge, your compassion and how you react in difficult times. Remember you cannot fake it for long.


7. Being professional does not make you a dry, boring person. Flaunt your gorgeous persona, appear holistic. Showcase your hobbies, interests and associations that you connect yourself to - it shows how you are as a person, your perceptions towards life.


8. Last but not the least, maintain a calendar, a notebook and a system to monitor your performance. Remember you are the best judge to decide how people should see you, do not leave it to others to make their own judgements. Balance your confidence - over or under, both can hurt.

Remember, your professional performance is no longer about your qualification or experience. It is more about how professional the experience you offer to your different stakeholders.

Follow steps to making a brand and nurture it well to let it grow and shine. It is like working out in the gym to get a body of your choice, like investing in your most precious asset called YOU, so that it can reap you bounty rewards with time.

Work on yourself with love and compassion. You are about to get started or have just started a journey, that will need you to be respected, loved and accepted in the network you are going to weave. Be a brand, people will put their faith in it.