Everything Is Awesome (When You’re Branding Yourself)

Recruiting some slightly more left-field HR positions recently has thrown up a whole new breed of candidates for us.  Obviously in this age of personal branding and employer branding blanding (*hat tip Bill Boorman) the opportunity is now presented to the more vainglorious of jobseekers to beef up their sense of self-worth with increasingly fatuous job titles.

Matt Charney wrote a blog post recently highlighting the 25 LinkedIn profiles bearing the title of Chief Awesome Officer (one of which happens to be the girl who runs our Christchurch co-working space Ministry of Awesome, which is slightly unfair, as she probably derives her title from the business name rather than her own pomposity).  And so we come to our own recent sourcing efforts, that turned up CV’s emblazoned with titles such as Chief Wholeness Officer and Chief Strengths Officer…yes really.

The funny thing is these kind of titles so often seem bestowed upon people who also appear to be some kind of Executive or Life Coach or something equally specious.  Funny, that.

So I felt it topical and entirely appropriate to share with you readers, for your end-of-week viewing pleasure, this hilarious video published last week by The Telegraph.  LinkedIn Out Loud is the most pompously egotistical LinkedIn profiles read out loud by actors in what they clearly imagine might be the voice and tone of the real-life owners:

Some inspiration for many of us in the HR and Recruitment industries there, for sure.

Sometimes, though, the right level of self-effacing humour with dreamed up job titles can actually work. The best example I’ve seen is this one from a New Zealand recruitment company website “About Us” page:

Which reminds me of another debate that sprung up on LinkedIn this week about the relative pros and cons of dogs in recruitment offices, but I’ll leave that one for another day!

Happy Friday.