 Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I had a great chat with a guy called David Royston Lee and David is a leadership coach and a personal branding expert and he wrote a great book on personal branding. So we had a chat around what the essentials are of personal branding, how to tell your story, get it out there, become more visible and build your online brand which is extremely important nowadays. So I hope you enjoy the conversation. Hey it's Lewis, welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Cool, and we're live. David, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast. My pleasure, my pleasure. So what is your background? I'm a psychologist by profession but I'm also a recruiter and an HR director and a management consultant and a marketing person. So I've gone through quite a few different kind of transformations in my life. So you started out doing psychology at university and then? That's right. Psychology at university and rather than join a psychometric firm as most psychologists do, I decided I didn't want to do that. I was interested in people and I went to my local employment agency to find a job and they offered me one. Oh nice. So within about virtually a year I was the operations manager of this recruitment agency but the interesting thing for me which is what I do now is all about is I had my kind of epiphany, if you can call it that, probably the first day of my work in the recruitment agency because I was given the graduates and I didn't realise that was the job that no one wanted. They don't have no idea what they wanted. They have no idea what they want and you don't make any money out of it. No, that isn't a fire. Absolutely and I thought as this cocky psychologist all they had to do was look at their educational background and see what they did at school, what courses they did, what university they went to, what course they and bingo, I'd be able to channel them into that job there or the other one there but within the first four people I got things like yeah well my parents said I needed to do accountancy. I hate it but that's what I did at university or I've done this course in whatever law. I really don't like it. I want something else. Yeah so you learnt more about people in that first couple of weeks in your whole degree course in psychology probably. Yeah and the thing was it started making me think so how do people really find what they want to do and that became the thing that I've been doing for the rest of my life. No it's interesting I mean I meet so many people and most people have no idea what they want to do or you end up doing a bunch of different things where you have like you and actually probably eventually like me three careers in your life and your parents do tend to push you into something you know a profession because it's safe and it's safe that's the point but do you enjoy it and and most people I did correct me for wrong but most people I meet don't actually enjoy what they do. No and that's that's my mission to try to help people find a job that they really enjoy and want to do and get you know a lot of satisfaction out of it because I have the premise you only live once. Absolutely. So why not enjoy what you're doing. That's true very true so after your your graduate recruitment stint did you stay in the industry? I stayed in the industry I became the operations director at the time and then I got involved with the institute of employment consultants as it was then okay and on their learning and development side and realised there was a big job there got more and more involved and eventually after about three or four years of the agency I I'd done everything I really needed to do. Yeah I professionalised it so to speak I trained people in different things and basically the the six branches at that time had good managers I've made myself redundant. Yeah and I got more interested in all the work that needs to be done to professionalise the industry so when I was off of the job to run it I grabbed it. Great great and so how long overall did you stay in the recruitment sector before? Probably about seven years six seven years great you know the last two I was doing my MSc in occupational psychology while I was at the institute. Right right right so and my thesis was on the recruitment industry actually. Okay interesting yeah interesting yeah and then now so you just published a book yeah well 10 years ago was that 10 years ago yeah wow it's been translated into seven languages wow including Greek and Korean wow amazing so it's quite well and then you sell it on Amazon and yeah yeah mainly through Amazon yeah yeah it's published by Pearson's. Great and how what like arrived you at writing a book and actually it was it was on a program with some friends of mine who were setting up a kind of a group of headhunters and they had a kind of a way weekend basically a jolly and I met someone on that weekend who became my co-author on the book he was a headhunter with Hydrix and he was talking about writing a book and I said funny and funnily enough I've been thinking about that and we decided that brand U was the book to write. Awesome awesome so what is personal branding? So personal branding isn't what a lot of people think it is when you're looking for a job it's not about deciding what you're going to be it's about actually understanding who you are so what we're concentrating on is the authentic you not the one that you'd like to find yeah because many people have this idea that you know they're attending to their personal branding well sorry you know you can't sort of make it up it's got to be real and it's got to be authentic so that was the reason for for that book because by the time I'd written that book I'd been working at KPMG as a management consultant for many years working with a lot of people in the last recession because in the 80s where they were being made redundant for the first time right and they didn't know what they wanted to do so I was dealing with about eight people every day for about god knows how long yeah four years to be honest right so I created a way of helping them to understand who they were what they wanted and if you like help them to kind of carve a journey for themselves out of their future interesting and you and you did and you wrote this book before instagram yeah and instagram's interesting because um you know big criticism is that people are portraying you know who they want to be their best self their best life um yeah what do you think about that have you seen a change or um I actually think well interestingly the this authenticity which actually has been much more in the news in the last five years whereas before you know it was all pretend to be who you were and all my work with organizations were they were saying well this is our culture and had all these grandiose terms saying how wonderful they were and you go in and it's a cesspit really you know full of people stabbing each other in the back yet apparently you know we're all collegiate and everything else so you know it that's that's changed now because in today's world you know graduates graduates new people in the industry even those into their twenties and early thirties they walk in and they can assess quite quickly whether this is a good place to be or not 100% once it can also I mean you can also do your research on people before you can look on social media online I mean yeah and you can see what's happening in that organization yeah you can talk to people you know through LinkedIn through everything now yeah before you go and I encourage people to do that you know see if through your contacts have you got any contacts with people in that organization talk to them first before you go for the interview yeah because if nothing else you're going to be the person who who's actually going to say in the interview well I was talking to one of your people and they said and it shocks the interviewer and actually if nothing else it reminds the interviewer of who you are yeah so even more I mean this is even more important now with social media and getting your brand right on social media online you know making sure you're you're you know you've got a good LinkedIn profile and all that kind of stuff that's right and the LinkedIn profile actually needs to be written not like a CV if you notice on LinkedIn a lot of people kind of put their CV on it yeah it really should be more about who you are and what you do and what you want to do you know so that you would you not do your you so how would you do it would you do the the career history obviously but then would you do like well the profile at the beginning would be so what am I into now what I'm what am I really interested in uh okay it might be a little bit uh difficult if you're in the job you don't want to be by someone from that company looks at your profile but you know try to be you know I think it's really important because for LinkedIn certainly it should be one of those places where you're more you and people are thinking actually he looks like a good guy yeah yeah but people are people have a very different opinion on it I met I met someone at a training course the other day and and she you know she didn't want to connect with she was very very selective with who's she connected with yeah she's very minimalist with what she put on her profile um but she was hoping to find her next role and she was in a role at the moment and she was very concerned about her colleagues you know she didn't want to connect with me because I'm a headhunter and what would my colleagues think if they saw ruled by fear yeah that's what a lot of people are nowadays and it's one of the things that I'm researching at the moment this whole area of fear and taking risks because there's this fear of fear of what fear of well like that person virtually everything yeah you know fear of being present anywhere hiding behind a minimal CV yeah you know I mean how how is anyone going to actually find this person and actually know whether she's any good yeah unless you start talking about it absolutely the thing with LinkedIn is all the profiles are public and you're only you'll only really want to be on there if you want to be found I mean the point for me of LinkedIn it's a professional networking site and it's it's there for people to find you exactly and the other social media platforms you know you can be quite close and it's you know it's your social group Facebook whatever yeah it's all about building your network of people that you want to be linked to yeah yeah you know and and uh get encouragement from support from and of course if you're looking for a job naturally you start yeah contacting people in your network and possibly outside it through your contacts yeah so what do you think then for professional LinkedIn platforms for your for your personal professional branding the place to really like focus and make sure it's I think it should be it isn't as much as it it could be simply because people use it just like a place to put their CV if you see yeah so I don't need to write another yeah that's that's true that's true and so what are the like what are the essentials around personal branding what do people need to be well really doing of course the the thing that is different about personal branding from a CV a CV is just about what you've done in the past right so it's a one-dimensional picture of you that is purely based in the past what the personal branding should be building a kind of three-dimensional picture of you so it should also tell people but well one of the things that most people aren't very good at is actually knowing what their talents are yeah you know you've got your skills that you've learned uh you've got your degrees maybe or courses that you've done but what are your actual talents and do people really understand what their talents are plus also what are your values you know if I asked most people I asked if I asked straight out yeah what are your values there's lots of umming and earrings and then they've come out with things they think should be a good value not really what their values are so you have to you have to uh when you're developing your brand you have to start with an analysis of yourself not if you which I think most people do they think here I am now I want to be there so I have to create yeah kind of presence that allows me to be in this place yeah but actually you need to start with understanding who you are first yeah who am I first where am I going and then how am I going to get there whereas most people do it the other way around how am I going to get there well they look at like I don't know I want to be that person or I want to be a CFO or and how they got there and they look at you know this career path which is a fair way to do it but but yeah very few people look introspectively and think about like what motivates me what do I like to do or you know yeah I do a lot of work with leadership development the difficulty that a lot of people have even quite senior people in the world uh is their belief in what a leader should be is based on people that have led them yes rather than actually understanding the leader in themselves and who they are as a leader they try to emulate someone who is well I've been working with someone recently who because their bosses are bully as soon as they got into a position of responsibility guess what started bullying interesting yeah because they thought this was what you did as a leader yeah no that's a good yeah I guess you yeah your go-to style is he yeah if you're lucky you might learn how not to do things from those types of people yeah so the key thing I think I think I need to say is you need to be get a sense of detachment from what you're doing and actually understand yourself and how you interact with the world yeah so you need a bit of a gap so at any point in time you're you're actually thinking here I am this is the world how am I really interacting with it or am I pretending to be someone else because I think that looks good yeah yeah and then how do you go about communicating that story or telling that story well actually one of the things we do in the personal branding book is we talk about stories you know everything's about stories yeah yeah you know you know as a recruiter that you say well given me a time when you know and you ask them to tell a little story well I try to get people to to to identify what are called crucible moments okay in their like an aha moment aha moments or or times which they they really felt they were in flow yeah yeah using a psychological I love that yeah yeah and and then talk about that so we identify help people to identify a number of different stories now out of those stories when they start talking about what they did how they did it with whom in what situations you start to build a picture and you can find out the talents from that you can start you can find out the values yeah and you can also get a sense of actually this kind of environment is the kind that actually suits this person down to the ground and then what they can so they can use that knowledge to think about what job they've been most suited to or that's right and and and the thing is it you know it though honing those stories so that they're clear about what those stories are saying about them and they're real yeah not pretend they're incredibly useful when you're they're coming in front of someone like you as a recruiter absolutely no it's all about telling the story I mentioned this like almost every podcast but we did we did a quite a bit of training on storytelling and it's so powerful very important you know really really powerful stuff you know you know that of people that blooming hopeless oh yeah I know you can always improve but you know you get put on and if it's if you're in an interview scenario or you've met someone for the first time and they're uncomfortable situations which a lot of people don't like to be in and and their mind goes a little bit blank or they default to like the technical aspects you know I went to KPMG I did my ACA I'm a yeah yeah you know rather than really you know telling a great story and because you feel a much more affinity to someone when you you've bought into this story yeah sure I mean it's yeah really powerful stuff yeah and so and stories of course the most important stage to get your stories right is at the beginning of your career yeah you don't have work stories but you have life stories yeah you can tell a recruiter and that recruiter can say oh that's interesting what were they doing there that shows that they've got a bit of gumption that shows that they've they've actually got something that I would quite like to develop in this gun yeah yeah do you think now in kind of the age of you know technology where you have linked in and you know it's super easy to find you know every CFO in the financial service industry in a few minutes you know to really stand out now do you think this storytelling has got more and more important and more weight to it I think so I think being able to tell the stories genuine stories yeah yeah in a in a clear way so you give people a real understanding of not just what you've done but what you're capable of doing yeah yeah I think is important that is that's the goal yeah definitely so the CV can get you through the door once you start meeting people in your interviewing and the storytelling and making sure your brand is on point will ultimately secure you there exactly exactly yes fine and then so how how would one become more visible so I mentioned it just now but you know if we do a search for someone that I mean the world is our our talent pool now right I mean with the internet with technology with linked in you know suddenly you're hunting from a global talent pool rather than just the black book and yeah and stuff so any advice on how one can become more visible and maybe get across their brand better I think I believe in the new uniqueness of everybody the difficulty often when you're looking for a job is because you want to be all things to every recruiter you kind of like wrong word but blandify yeah what I mean yeah like that blandify your CV so it can catch lots of things rather than actually be quite honest and say that is what I do and I do it in that way yeah and and I think it's about it's it's goes back to what I was saying a bit earlier about risk yes yeah taking a risk and being clear about the key things that you're you're really interested in and what it is you do what do you do how do you do it and in what ways and really push on that and be a bit of a maverick yeah no no it's it's and you'll stand out I think it's going to risk it's very risky yeah because you meet a lot of people in there um you know they might want to change industries or change careers slightly and it's very hard to do and you know they're more likely to get another job if they kind of stick to their area of specialism but so I feel it's a lot of people think it's a minefield of you know what do I do how do I pitch myself how do I move from you know here to here how do I do it how but the thing is you see most of the people I've worked with have been sort of people mid career who've decided I've had enough of being a partner in a big accountancy firm and decided to do something completely different as an example yeah yeah absolutely I mean we do you know we do board level search and but you still you still see a lot of people they want to maybe they want to move industry yeah which is challenging um maybe they just want to do something completely different um which is also tough it I think it's it's the you know courage or well but the thing is it's interesting because of course there's the verticals if you see yeah yeah but what's going on verticals just being so finance it whatever it might be yeah or but it's the horizontals I'm working on yes in a sense is what you can do in each of those verticals yeah you know what you do in I don't know chemical engineering yeah actually how you operate with people in managing that business can equally apply to any other actually absolutely absolutely very little change but when people are scared they think by moving out of a vertical they've got to change everything but actually no what do you think about just turning it around slightly if you're hiring someone and they've come from a slightly you know talk about the technical skills they could probably do the job slightly left field um I found that certainly given the current economic environment and various things that have me um people are very scared to make a bad hire or take a risk on someone but given what you've just described I think if companies are looking at the the softer skills and the wider piece they might actually end up making better hires much better hires I would maintain yeah it's this issue that you know of what investment banking dare I say you know uh where do people look yeah normally what universities do they look at normally top ones what do they get all the people are exactly the same as everybody else yeah and then they wonder why they can't compete with the others in the market because they're hiring from the same pool it's ridiculous if they can actually open their eyes and start thinking about some of the potential mavericks that are on the edge of their their kind of recruitment pool yeah who who got something a little bit different to offer I mean it's it's a bit like when I was at Oglediz as the HR director there uh you know we always hired from Oxbridge how come because that's what we did yeah but we got the same people yeah Rory Sutherland who's the vice president you know they're now who I knew at the time you know or if you look now they hire thirds from another university really right because they're looking for something else magic stardust thing that it's the creativity yeah rather than the academic excellence it always used to be academic excellence that doesn't mean to say you're going to be any good at business very true very true so what do you think of the psychometric stuff personality questionnaires the well I'm a psychologist so I can't say very much but I believe it's valuable for hiring you know it is valuable for hiring yeah as a guide right and as one part of the process okay not they'd be all in end all which it used to be where I remember uh talking to some uh business people and they would hire everybody with the same profile and then they wondered why there was chaos oh so you have like a standard we will hire someone with this personality set basically you know a high-powered salesman yeah yeah so you can imagine an office full of those people yeah they're they're stabbing each other in the back the whole time yeah and actually not selling very much no definitely but so what so how would you think about if you're hiring someone and you want this magic stardust creativity um they're they're tools that they can use rather than just seems like a nice chap or nice girl and well I go back to the stories I go I always go back to the stories I'd rather the thing is with psychometrics is of course what what is happening when you you do a psychometric you're being compared with other people yeah and you're being put in kind of boxes really yeah um I'm more of the the view that if I want to find a uniqueness of the individual and find is that something that actually we're looking for for the future what do we need not just to fill that position now but what do we need if we develop that person where do we want to go with that person what do we want to achieve as a business you know what's the competitive landscape like what's the economic situation like yeah what do we need in the future because we've got to be recruiting for that not just filling a job yeah and do you think humans are better at that than computer algorithms and big pools of data and uh I think you need both yeah you know because of course you need some kind of basis on which to to filter out the ones who maybe doesn't don't suit your organization yeah but I would certainly look at things like values yeah you know very important if you're hiring a CEO or a CFO absolutely organization yeah because they will alter it because they're in a senior position and it could disrupt it too much that's true yeah but then in other situations you you want disruptors to come in because your your organization your effectiveness is starting to not be as good as it used to be you're getting a bit old and a bit decrepit and you need to get more life into your business and you need to move it on into this digital age well you're not going to do that if you keep hiring the same people you've always hired and use the same recruitment processes you've always used and you seeing people are still doing that or yes because it's safe yeah yeah it's safe we get safe people but safe people aren't going to end up uh creating an Uber or a Airbnb no no you're just going to be doing the same old same old yeah I think I was running Steve Jobs there was an interview with him and they asked him you know how do you come up with these crazy ideas and new and new products and he said well I find people with maniacal tendencies I lock them in a room for a day and then open the door and out floods all of these amazing ideas and yeah I'm working with organizations now who you know get a cross section of their staff they give them a project to do and they do it and then they don't interfere with it they let them do it literally there's no senior management interference it sounds frightening sounds risky but what has happened in this particular organization I'm thinking of it's it's it's created an amazing difference awesome no amazing what's harder though is asking let's say a mid-level manager to hire a maverick and if they get that wrong they're out the door you know that's that's a challenging yeah but the middle I suppose it depends who the mid-level manager is because of course we all tend to recruit in our own image absolutely no most people do for sure yeah yeah definitely we like people like ourselves yeah so the thing is you again that detachment I talked about when you're recruiting you've got to be really detached in terms of am I do I just because I like this guy I've got something in common with this guy it's the bias thing that yeah yeah the Daniel Kineman yeah all of that yeah I mean you know that is you have to be really careful about that yeah so do you think then to sum up the HR director the CEO the senior leaders need to put the right structure in place to enable them to take a risk on a maverick or I I think it's increasingly important in today's world where things are moving faster and faster you need to bring in new ideas innovation needs to be at the center of organizations not something that you you play with on the edges yeah it's got to it's got to be part of of the way you conduct your business talking about innovation you started a new company called future resume yeah um what is it well it's basically goes right back to those at first few days in my recruitment agency where I just relied on the CV and ever since then the CV has gotten the way of helping people to get a decent job yeah because it's all based in the past and if you think about seeing these they were developed when people had jobs for life so all you did was look at what they did in the past and you'd know what they were going to be doing in the future in today's world people change jobs massively yeah so you need a different process so all I'm trying to say by with future resume is I'm starting the process I'm just throwing a pebble in the pool of recruitment to say shouldn't we be thinking beyond just a CV why are we just looking at the past where and not looking at the talents not looking at the values of the person not looking at the stories that we've talked about yeah but what we've so what I'm saying is we need a three-dimensional picture created and that's what future resumes trying to do we just add the present and the future to the past of the CV interesting so how does it then actually work in practice so I come and see you or I go on your well it's all digital of course in today's I go on your I visit your website yes uh do you have an app as well or it's it's it's on yes it's basically you can use it on amazing and then and then so what what do I so there's a hiring manager because that's what we're aiming at yeah uh what we're we're saying is we have we have the CV we get them to follow some interview questions and we create a future resume as well as the CV awesome so it's targeted it so I'm hiring yes I receive applicants and I and I I ask them to complete the questions absolutely what are and and you and the applicant get a copy of the future resume great it's completely as the person wrote it we don't alter it at all so it's authentic yeah and what it what it's there for is in a sense to reduce the need to have the first interview you know the bits where you find out something about yes yeah yeah we've got the stories in there we've got the values we've got the the talents that they've identified so it enables a hiring manager to reduce the the time spent interviewing right okay and so that they move up straight onto the second interview and do they have in mind a baseline profile that these people should be matching well actually they might yeah but I I prefer to suggest if there's a little bit of the consultancy coming into it yeah suggest that they look at the applicants that they've got because of course going back to what we said earlier about the blandness and recruiting people in your own image and maybe you need something with a bit of spice someone a bit different but you actually look at these candidates and you think oh actually I wouldn't have thought of interviewing that guy before but he sounds quite interesting and she's actually brilliant but initially with the CV I wouldn't have seen it and would they have seen the CV first they might have seen the CV first yeah you know because the difficulty of course we're having is it's something new and everybody's used to just using CVs so people are all a bit reticent oh I'm not sure about this I'll just rely on my psychometrics and my CVs and my gut feel or whatever yeah and all I'm trying to do is say come on let's let's try and disrupt this recruitment process a little bit I love it I love it and see what happens how long have you been going for well we've only just started great launched January this year perfect and gone well it's starting people we're getting a actually from a LinkedIn point of view yeah it's all through LinkedIn we're working so the marketing activity and branding and yeah everything's through that right okay which is relatively new for me but so as in even the the actual questions and well everything you don't go through LinkedIn you go through our website yeah all our marketing fine yeah yeah yeah but we're getting you know the hit rate we're getting is quite massive and we're we're aiming at new tech new techie companies you know small ones yeah as well as the big ones as well as the middle ones we're actually testing at the moment and we've had a good buying from the like startup tech yeah well they're of course more interest they've got no the raping to new things no history yeah yeah I love that anything that's new they're more interested in looking at yeah and did you think they'll make a better hire as a result I think so because what what they're they're given is more information on less people so they spend a bit of their time actually thinking about actually this guy you know we can build some really interesting teams with these kind of people with these kind of attributes yeah I love that I love that we're good luck with that thank you I hope that goes well thank you very much for joining me and yeah look forward to speaking to you again okay thank you thank you all cheers hey folks thanks for listening don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places