Personal Branding

Warning: This blog contains promotional content. Personal branding is all about that, what else did you expect?

We had a pretty awesome CV clinic for Sydney Testers yesterday held at Opus Recruitment Solutions. Barry Smith and Mike Hollowbread specialise in recruitment for software testers and went through their pointers for CVs. These guys see a lot of CVs and had built up years of experience in this area. They had tons of pointers and have put together some awesome resources with this advice:

Opus CV Pointers

This event completely booked out and the waiting list filled out to double the event capacity within 24 hours of the announcement. If you missed out don’t worry. We are doing a month of these events. Next week will be at Four Corners Recruitment. This event is already full but please join the waitlist. We had a dozen people change their RSVP at the last minute with the last one which opened up the event for half the people on the wait list. If you want some inspiration for your CV I’ve blogged about the evolution of mine before.

Have a good LinkedIn Photo

My LinkedIn Photo

My LinkedIn profile came up in Barry and Mike’s talk as an example of a good LinkedIn photo. I’d like to dig into more detail the planning that went behind that photo in this blog post. I used a professional photography service called Snappr. I paid a photographer $59 for a 2 hour photoshoot with the soul purpose of getting a good LinkedIn photo. They now charge $75 for this service. Snappr is a Sydney based startup that’s making the news for disrupting the photography industry and being successful in funding rounds. I quite enjoyed the photoshoot and I had a bit of fun with it too:

Some of my favourite photos from the photoshoot

For the photoshoot we walked around Pyrmont and the Star Casino looking for good backdrops. Maybe you can recognise a few of the locations? Some of the photos didn’t come out that great but it was still fun. You should check out Snappr’s LinkedIn Photo analyser, it’s a fun way to analyse your photo using an algorithm. What score did you get?

Hair and Makeup

The thing is, the photographer was not the only thing I paid for leading up to this shoot. It was my birthday, I decided to treat myself to a pampering. So I also got my hair and makeup professionally done. I think that cost me around $150 at CatWalk hair and beauty in Gladesville. And then there’s the outfit:

I bought the suit from the Oxford Factory Outlet in Alexandria for roughly $200. The shoes were from Paul Dane; $90. The tie was an impulse purchase from an antique suit shop in Melbourne. I think it cost me $140 but I love that tie. It’s so groovy. I didn’t purchase this outfit just for this shoot, I will wear my suit on the odd occasion. You don’t have to spend what I did on this shoot but I’m trying to highlight the planning that went into that one smiling photo.

Tailored Suits

If I was to get another photoshoot, I’d probably order a tailored suit from Luxury Plus Suits, they do a basic suit for $349. They will measure you here in Sydney and it’ll get made in China. I actually did get one of their suits but it was just before my weight loss surgery. I’ve now lost 50kg since I bought that suit so it’s safe to say it doesn’t fit me any more.

Corporate branding

There’s two testing companies that I love the branding for; Ministry of Testing and House of Test. I love the sense of Community that Ministry of Testing is working on building. They even inspire community members to get tattoos of their logo:

Rockstar Testers

House of Test literally market themselves as rock star testers. If I ever move to Europe, this is the company that I’d be begging to join. I’ll tell you a secret. There’s a small community of context driven testers out there (House of test) are one such group. Mentioning context driven testing is like secret handshake material that gets you on top of interview list with these people.

Do you want to improve your Context Driven Testing? Do the Rapid Software Testing course by James Bach at the end of August. I consider James Bach to be the original rockstar tester. If I ever saw a CV with his course on it, it would be at the top of my interview pile, no questions asked. It is some of the best training any tester worth their salt can do.

You will occasional see this secret handshake material mentioned in Job ads too; like this one for a Quality Coach role at Campaign Monitor. Campaign Monitor is an awesome company to work for; awesome people, awesome perks (free breakfast and lunch) and awesome views of Sydney.

Taking Personal Branding to the next level

Edward Zia is an example of someone in my network who has taken personal branding to the next level. He even has a caricature made up with his facial birthmark as part of his branding:

If you don’t have a personal brand, people won’t want to do business with you. What have you done with your own personal branding before? Have you ever made a bad investment?

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