3 Misbranding

By Jeff Altman, Big Game Hunter

It’s shocking to see the mistakes people make when building and maintaining their personal brand.

Okay, let’s get started. If you are a seasoned professional, listen up. There’s a good chance you’re following a completely outdated set of professional rules.

The strategies that got you to this point in your career, not only are they ineffective now, but they may actually kill your opportunities in the future. Let’s face it. That old social contract, you know, work hard, move up the corporate ladder, get a gold watch, and then retire at 65.

it’s over. This is an antique. We are no longer in a 40-year career sprint.

This is a 60-year marathon, and there’s no way you’re going to win it with a map from the 90s. So you really have to ask yourself, are you playing a game that’s already over? Because holding on to those old ways of thinking is not only a little behind the times, but it’s a huge risk to your career and your message. So let’s break down three big mistakes you might be making right now without even realizing it.

Well, the first mistake, and by far the most common, is still playing the employee game. This often manifests as an addiction to what Jeff Feltman calls job board porn. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Literally, endless scrolling on LinkedIn, applying, tweaking your resume. This feels productive, but honestly, it does you absolutely nothing good. That’s tough love, that whole spray and pray approach of throwing your resume out there.

This is a suicide mission for your morale. Look, when you’re 22, this might work for cheap stuff, but you’re not cheap anymore. At your level, these online application systems are actually designed to filter you out.

Companies are not looking to hire candidates, they are looking for a solution to a very expensive and painful problem. So it all comes down to a huge shift in mindset. You have to stop thinking like an employee waiting for their boss to assign them a task.

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You have to start thinking like a proactive consultant who manages for results. It’s a big leap to go from focusing on your to-do list to focusing on the strategic impact on your business. See the difference here.

The old idea is that you are a beggar. You ask passively, are you hiring? You are submitting your resume to the black hole of HR. You’re just waiting for them to ask you questions.

The new mindset is peers. Colleagues won’t ask you if you’re recruiting, but they’ll ask, what price did this problem cost you? Instead of sending resumes, they send diagnoses and perspectives directly to the people who are feeling the pain. Instead of waiting for questions, they dominate the entire conversation.

Well, the second mistake is to build your entire brand around your skills. In this era of artificial intelligence, machines can complete extremely complex tasks. Your technical skills, the software you know, and the framework you master are all depreciating assets. They are losing value every day.

For professionals like you, the real gold is your wisdom. Let’s really clarify this difference. Skills are tactical, they tell someone how to do something.

Wisdom is strategy. It tells them whether they should do that thing in the first place. See the difference? Skills can be automated and outsourced to cheaper people, but wisdom, the kind that comes simply from years of pattern recognition and seeing things go wrong, actually appreciates in value over time.

I mean, that sentence says it all, right? The young engineers on the team have skills. They can show you the data, run the numbers, and prove that a cheaper base can work on paper. But as a senior leader, he has wisdom.

He witnessed firsthand a multimillion-dollar disaster that no spreadsheet could have predicted. This is a value that artificial intelligence cannot touch. Now for the third major branding mistake, trying to be better rather than different.

You know, when you market yourself as the best project manager or the most experienced marketer, you’re basically in a race to the bottom. This is totally a trap because it forces you to compete on price with others claiming to be better. That’s the problem.

If you try to talk to everyone, you’ll end up talking to no one. A broad brand is a vague brand. A generic title like Senior Financial Director makes you completely invisible.

It essentially invites people to compare you to younger, cheaper talent who may appear equally qualified on paper. When you’re everyone’s choice, you’re no one’s first choice. So what’s the solution? How do you escape this trap? Well, the solution is to stop competing altogether and start creating a category.

You need to build a personal brand that is so specific and so deep that you are the only logical choice for the right questions. This is the whole idea behind what Jeff Altman calls uniqueness. Here’s a simple three-part formula to calculate your uniqueness.

First, you’re vertical. What is a specific industry or even sub-industry that you absolutely dominate? 2. Situation. As a world-class expert, what are the specific, high-risk, expensive messes that you specialize in cleaning up? Third, your mechanism.

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What is your unique intellectual process for solving this problem? You answer these three questions and you build a competitive moat for yourself. Let’s see how this happens in the real world. Look at these transformations.

Experienced HRVP, that’s a commodity, but cultural architect of a post-acquisition tech company, wow, that’s authority. Senior finance directors become some of the CFOs scaling green tech startups. You see, you’re no longer just a regular job title.

You are a high-value expert who solves a very specific and very expensive problem. So how do you put it into action like you are doing now? Start by weaponizing your LinkedIn profile. Seriously.

First, change the title from the old job title to the new uniqueness statement. Next, delete your graduation year. Don’t let age bias have the chance to rule you out.

Then use the 15-year rule. Focus on all the interesting details of your high-impact work from the past 10, 15 years. Anything older than that, just condense it down to a title and company.

There is no point. Your profile is no longer a resume. This is your unique genius sales page.

So as we wrap up, I want to leave you with this question to think about. Take a hard look at your personal brand now. Does it position you as a cost that needs to be managed, just another line item on a spreadsheet? Or does it present you with a high-return investment that needs to be protected at all costs? All of these ideas are based on Jeff Altman’s excellent book Onlyness, a no-nonsense handbook for the age of artificial intelligence.

You can get copies on Amazon, job search communities, and other places online. This is indeed worth reading.

Don’t kid yourself. Self-promotion is important.

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