Your Name Is the Brand: When Personal and Professional Identity Collide

Where does your professional brand end and your personal brand begin?

In this episode, Edan Haddock explores how those lines are rapidly disappearing. Our opinions, expertise, personality, employers, online presence and professional reputation increasingly exist in the same place. But as personal branding becomes an industry of its own, have we started confusing visibility with credibility?

Edan challenges the obsession with followers, algorithms and manufactured authenticity, explores how employees and employer brands are becoming increasingly connected, and looks at what AI-generated content could mean for the value of genuine human voice.

Because your job title belongs to your employer. Your reputation belongs to you.

If your job title disappeared tomorrow, what would people still know you for?

No guests. No sponsors. Just an on-the-tools perspective on Talent, People and the future of work.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Hello everyone and welcome back to Eden Haddock Total Talent. I am your host, Eden Haddock, Head of Talent and People Experience at Movember. No guests, no sponsors, no vendor talking points. Just one practitioner, still very much on the tools, talking about the things happening across talent, people, work, and the workplace that I think are worth having a conversation about. And today I want to talk about branding. But probably not branding in the way you are expecting. Because I want to talk about the collision between personal branding and professional branding. For years, we've treated them as two different things. Your professional brand was your career, your reputation, your CV, your expertise, the organizations you worked for, how you showed up in meetings, what your peers thought of you, maybe what your industry thought of you. And your personal brand? Well, that was you. Your personality, your interests, your opinions, your sense of humor, your life outside work, your values, your weirdness, your music, your hobbies, your family, your Saturday afternoon. Two different worlds. Except I don't think those worlds are particularly different anymore. In fact, I think they are rapidly becoming one. And I think that creates some incredible opportunities. But it also creates some really interesting questions. Because when your employer is visible on your LinkedIn profile, and when your opinions are visible underneath it, when your podcast, posts, conference appearances, comments, and professional network all sit alongside your job title, who exactly are people experiencing? The employee, the professional, or the person? And perhaps the answer now is all three. So today I want to explore what happens when your professional branding and personal branding become almost impossible to separate. And whether we need to rethink what having a professional reputation actually means. So let's get into it, right? We used to have two identities. There was a time when work identity was incredibly controlled. You went to work, you behaved professionally, you dressed professionally. I still have a couple of my suits. You communicated professionally. And then you went home. The separation was physical. It was social and it was cultural. Your employer probably knew relatively little about what you did outside work. And unless you were particularly famous within your profession, the broader industry probably knew almost nothing about you at all. Your professional brand was largely built inside rooms, meetings, conferences, offices, interviews, industry events, and maybe the occasional article. And therefore, it was reasonably easy to curate. But then something happened. The rooms disappeared. Or, more accurately, the walls did. LinkedIn became enormous. Social media became enormous. Remote work blurred home and work. You know, video calls literally brought colleagues into our houses. Podcasts exploded. People started publishing their own ideas. Employees became creators. Executives became creators. Recruiters became creators. HR professionals became creators. And suddenly the professional world became much more personal. We started seeing the person behind the title. And I think that is mostly a good thing. Because titles are boring and people aren't. But it does create a question. Where does Eden, the professional, stop, and Eden, the person begin? And I use myself deliberately here because I actually don't know anymore. So like maybe if I post something about talent strategy, then that's obviously professional. If I talk about something I've learned at work, professional. If I record this podcast, professional, yeah. But the way I talk, my humor, my opinions, the things I choose to challenge. You know the quirky rock and roll references, the things I refuse to pretend I agree with. That's personal. So which brand is it? Professional? Personal? I I actually think increasingly the answer is neither. It's just reputation. I actually think the phrase personal brand has become slightly damaged. Because when someone says I'm building my personal brand, there's a part of me that gets nervous. Because we've created an entire industry around personal branding. You know, the coaches, the courses, the content strategies, posting schedules, engagement hacks, thought leadership formulas. How many times should you post? What time should you post? Should you use a picture? Should you put the link in your comments? Should the first line create curiosity? Should you tell a vulnerable story on Tuesday morning? And somewhere along the way, personal branding became strangely impersonal. We started manufacturing authenticity. It's quite a thing when you think about it. Because authenticity shouldn't require a content calendar. And I think that is where we need to separate visibility from brand. Visibility is how many people see you. Brand is what they think when they do. Those are completely different things. You can have enormous visibility and a terrible reputation. You can have almost no on following and an extraordinary professional reputation. Because followers are not credibility. Impressions are not expertise. Engagement is not trust. And I think we sometimes forget that. Because the algorithms give us numbers, and humans love numbers. Thirty thousand followers looks measurable. But twenty years of quietly being brilliant at something doesn't. But which person actually has the stronger professional brand? It depends. And that's precisely the point. Your brand isn't the audience. Your brand is the association people make with your name. When someone mentions you in a room that you're not in, what happens next? That is your brand. And you don't get to completely control it. Your employer is part of your brand. Now, this is where it gets more complicated. Because our personal and professional identities aren't simply merging with each other. They're also becoming intertwined with our employers. If I work somewhere and I am publicly visible, people make an association between me and that organization, whether I intend them to or not. And the reverse is also true. The organization becomes part of my professional identity. This has always happened to some extent. We look at someone's career and we recognize certain organizations. Working at Google means something. Working at Apple means something. Working at a startup means something. Working for a charity means something. Working for a big four consultancy means something. Not necessarily something good or bad, but it does create an association. And employers have historically understood this transaction in one direction. Our company brand gives credibility to your career. But now employees can also give credibility to the company. That's huge. Because increasingly, candidates don't discover organizations through corporate communications. They discover organizations through people. They hear employees talking. They see leaders posting. They hear people on podcasts. They watch conference presentations. They read comments. They look at Glassdoor. They look at LinkedIn. They see who works there. And suddenly employer brand isn't just what the organization says about itself. It's what the people associated with it demonstrate publicly. That means employees are becoming part of employer brand, whether organizations like it or not. And I think the smartest organizations embrace it, not control it, not script it. And they certainly don't turn employees into corporate billboards, but they embrace it. Because there is nothing less convincing than a hundred employees publishing the same approved corporate message. And you know the posts. We're thrilled to announce. Everyone is thrilled. Apparently, nobody in corporate life has ever been moderately pleased. But genuine employee voices, that's a different story. Someone talking honestly about their profession while clearly enjoying where they work can be more powerful than almost any employer brand campaign. Because we trust humans differently from institutions. But there is a risk for employers. Let's acknowledge the uncomfortable side. Because if employers encourage employees to have visible professional brands, they lose some control. Someone might say something the organization doesn't agree with. Someone might have a controversial opinion. Someone might post something badly worded. Someone might become incredibly well known. And there's another fear that organizations don't always say out loud. What happens if we help someone build a massive professional profile and they leave? And they leave. That's a legitimate concern. You've effectively helped build someone else's career capital. But my response would be yes, that's employment. People are supposed to leave organizations stronger than when they arrived. We shouldn't be trying to trap talent by keeping people invisible. If someone becomes respected in their profession while working for you, that can be incredibly powerful. People start thinking there are interesting people working there. And interesting people attract interesting people. Hey, that's talent attraction. That is employer brand. That is reputation. You can't spend millions trying to convince the market that your organization has brilliant people and then tell the brilliant people not to speak. Those two ideas don't work together. And let's talk about the risk for individuals. Because this isn't all upside for employees either. Because the more intertwined your personal and professional brands become, the harder it is to switch them off. And this is something I think we should talk about more. If your career identity becomes your public identity, what happens when you change careers? What happens when you change your mind? What happens when something you passionately believed five years ago no longer represents what you believe today? What happens when your employer changes? What happens when your industry changes? Or what happens when you simply want to disappear for six months? The internet doesn't particularly enjoy nuance, we know that. It likes certainty, hot takes, strong opinions, the good guys, the bad guys, the right, the wrong. And professional life is rarely that simple. The danger of building a professional brand around absolute certainty is that eventually reality catches up. Because genuinely experienced people often become less certain as they learn more. That's expertise. You start understanding complexity, you start seeing exceptions, you start saying it depends. Which isn't nearly as exciting on LinkedIn. But it is often far more accurate. So I think a strong professional brand needs room to evolve. You should be allowed to change your mind. You should be allowed to learn publicly. You should be allowed to say, I used to believe this, I don't anymore. That doesn't weaken credibility. I actually think it strengthens it. Now authenticity doesn't mean sharing everything. That's another misunderstanding I want to clear up. Being authentic doesn't mean giving the internet unlimited access to your life. You don't have to share everything. You don't have to talk about your family. You don't have to share vulnerable experiences. You certainly don't have to photograph your breakfast, please stop it. And you don't have to turn every difficult life moment into a leadership lesson. You are allowed boundaries. In fact, I think boundaries make personal branding more authentic. Because authenticity isn't here is everything about me. Authenticity is what I choose to show you is genuinely me. There are parts of my life that are public. There are parts that aren't. That's healthy. The idea that professional visibility requires total personal transparency is nonsense. You can be human without becoming public property. And I think this will become increasingly important as professional and personal identities continue to merge. The objective shouldn't be complete visibility, it should be consistency. Does the person people experience online resemble the person they experience in a meeting? Does the person speaking at the conference resemble the person working with their team? Does the leader posting about empathy actually demonstrate empathy? Does the recruiter posting about candidate experience actually provide one? That's where branding gets interesting. Because eventually brand meets behavior and behavior wins every single time. Now, here we go. The AI problem, I'm sorry. We need to throw AI into this. Because AI is going to make personal branding much easier and much harder. Easier because everyone can create content. You can generate posts, articles, videos, images, podcasts, newsletters, thought leadership. You can polish your writing, you can improve your grammar, you can create content faster than ever. But it creates, you know, something that's lacking, that's increasingly becoming lacking. And that human voice is what I'm talking about. When everyone can produce polished content, polished content stops becoming impressive. And I think we're already starting to feel this. You read something online and think that's technically excellent, but I have absolutely no idea who wrote it. There's no fingerprint, no personality, no imperfection, no unusual phrasing. Nothing tells you that there is a human behind it. AI will make content abundant, which means personality becomes more valuable, opinion becomes more valuable, experience becomes more valuable, storytelling becomes more valuable. And perhaps even imperfection becomes more valuable. Because the future of professional branding won't be providing or proving that you can create content. So it won't be providing that content for you. Machines, they can create it, right? But it will be proving that there is a credible human behind it. Someone who has done the work. Someone who can defend the idea when there isn't a prompt box available. It is going to matter enormously. Now let's bring this back to talent. Because professional branding is already changing recruitment. Candidates research hiring managers. Hiring managers research candidates. Recruiters research candidates. Interview no longer necessarily starts when someone joins the Zoom call. It may have started weeks earlier. Someone saw your post, someone heard your podcast, someone read your article, someone watched you speak, someone saw how you responded to another person in the comment section. And they've already started forming an opinion that is both powerful and dangerous, right? Because it can create familiarity, but it can also create bias. A candidate with a visible professional brand may feel more credible simply because we recognize them. That's something talent professionals professionals need to be conscious of. Again, visibility isn't capability. Someone who posts every day isn't automatically better at their job than someone who never posts. Someone with 10,000 followers isn't necessarily more experienced than someone with 200 connections. Someone who is brilliant on a podcast isn't necessarily brilliant in their role. We cannot allow personal branding to become another proxy for talent. And I personally think that's a really important distinction. Professional brand can open the door, but capability still needs to walk through it. So should everyone build a personal brand? No. I actually don't think everyone needs one. At least not in the creator economy version of the phrase. You don't need to become a content creator. You don't need a newsletter, you don't need a podcast, you don't need 10,000 followers, and you don't need to post every day. But I do think everyone has a professional reputation, whether you actively manage it or not. And that's where I'd like to shift the conversation to stop asking, how do I build my personal brand? And start asking, what do I want to be known for? I've asked my team that recently. What do you want to be known for? That question is much more interesting. What problems do people come to you to solve? What do colleagues trust you with? What perspective do you bring? What are you unusually good at? What do you care enough about to challenge? And then importantly, does your behavior support that reputation? Because you cannot content strategy your way around poor behavior. You can post about leadership every day. But if you're horrible to work for, that is your brand. You can post about candidate experience, but if you ghost candidates, that is your brand. You can talk about culture. But if people are frightened to speak around you, that is your brand. The content is marketing. The behavior is the product. And eventually, no matter how good the marketing is, people always discover the product. Your brand is what survives the job title. This is perhaps the biggest shift for me. Careers are becoming less linear. Organizations change, roles change, technology changes, job titles change, whole professions change. And as we move deeper into a world of humans and technology working together, I think individual professional reputation becomes even more important. Because your job title belongs to your employer, and your reputation belongs to you. That matters. Head of something, director of something, VB of something, chief something, officer, whatever. Those titles disappear the moment you leave. But what people know you for, that travels. Your relationships travel. Your expertise travels. Your credibility travels. Your ideas travel. Your reputation travels. And that's perhaps the healthiest definition of professional branding. Not becoming famous, not becoming an influencer, not gaming an algorithm, building a body of trust that isn't completely dependent on the logo sitting beside your name. That is career resilience. So the collision I talked about. Where does this leave personal branding versus professional branding? For me, I think the distinction is disappearing. Not completely. We still need boundaries. We still have private lives. We still have different contexts. But increasingly, there is simply you. One human, one human being. One human being operating across different environments. Sometimes professional, sometimes personal, sometimes both. And maybe we've spent too long teaching people how to create professional personas. Maybe the future is about creating less distance between the person and the professional. Not bringing your entire private life to work, but allowing more humanity into professional life, your humor, your interests, your perspective, your values, your curiosity, your imperfections, your voice. Because when technology can increasingly replicate competence, content, and communication, being recognizably human becomes valuable. And that might be the ultimate irony. We've spent years teaching people how to become polished professional brands. And just as we finally perfected the formula, AI arrived and became better at polished than us. So perhaps the competitive advantage now is the stuff we're editing out. Messiness conviction or humor humanity. So I'll leave you with this. Google yourself. Not because you need to obsess over your online presence, certainly not. But look at what exists. Look at your LinkedIn. Look at the things you've published. Look at your job history. Look at what people associate with you. And then ask yourself if my job title disappeared tomorrow, what would people still know me for? Not where you work? Not your title? Not your follow account. You. What do you stand for? What do you know? What do people trust you with? What would someone say about you when you're not in the room? Because that ultimately, that is your brand. And whether we call it personal branding or professional branding probably doesn't matter much anymore. The lines are disappearing. The person and the professional are becoming intertwined. And perhaps that's not something we should be frightened of. Perhaps it's an opportunity to like to make our professional lives a little more human, less polished, less manufactured, less performative, more credible, more individual, more real. Your employer will change, your title will change, your career will change, the technology will definitely change, let's not forget that. But your name follows you through all of it. So build the name, not just the title. So I'll leave it there. You've been listening to Eden Haddock, Total Talent. No guests, no sponsors, just conversations about talent people and the future of work from someone still very much on the tools. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might enjoy it too. I'll be back next week, and until then, look after yourselves. And maybe think a little less about building a personal brand. And a little more about building a reputation worth having.