By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

It is stunning to see the mistakes people make when establishing and maintaining a personal brand.

All right, let’s jump right in. If you’re an experienced professional, listen up. There’s a good chance you’re playing by a set of career rules that are, well, completely out of date.

The very strategies that got you to this point in your career, they’re not just ineffective now, they might actually be killing your future opportunities. Let’s just be real for a second. That old social contract, you know the one, work hard, climb the corporate ladder, get your gold watch and retire at 65.

It’s over. It’s an antique. We’re not in a 40-year career sprint anymore.

This is a 60-year marathon, and you absolutely cannot win this race with a map from the 1990s. So you really have to ask yourself, are you playing a game that’s already over? Because clinging to those old ways of thinking isn’t just a little bit behind the times, it’s a massive, massive risk to your career and your infom. So let’s break down the three big mistakes you might be making right now without even realizing it.

Okay, mistake number one, and it is by far the most common, is still playing the employee game. And this usually shows up as an addiction to what Jeff Feltman calls job board porn. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Endless scrolling on LinkedIn, Indeed, applying, tweaking your resume. It feels productive, but honestly, it gets you absolutely nowhere. Here’s the tough love, that whole spray and pray approach of just blasting your resume out there.

It’s a suicide mission for your morale. Look, it might’ve worked when you were 22 in a cheap commodity, but you’re not cheap anymore. At your level, those online application systems are literally designed to filter you out.

Companies aren’t looking to hire an applicant, they are hunting for a solution to a really expensive, painful problem. So what this all comes down to is a massive mindset shift. You have to stop thinking like an employee who waits for a boss to give them tasks.

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You have to start thinking like a proactive advisor who is managed by results. It’s a huge leap from focusing on your to-do list to focusing on your strategic impact on the business. And just look at the difference here.

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

The new mindset is the peer. A peer doesn’t ask if you’re hiring, a peer asks, what is this problem costing you? They don’t send a resume, they send a diagnostic, a point of view directly to the person who feels the pain. They don’t wait for questions, they lead the entire conversation.

Alright, mistake number two is building your entire brand around your skills. In this age of AI, where a machine can do incredibly complex tasks, your technical skills, the software you know, the frameworks you’ve mastered, these are all depreciating assets. They’re losing value every single day.

For pros like you, the real gold is your wisdom. Let’s really get this distinction clear. Skills are tactical, they tell someone how to do a thing.

Wisdom, that’s strategic. It tells them whether they should even do that thing in the first place. See the difference? Skills can be automated, they can be outsourced to someone cheaper, but wisdom, the kind that only comes from years of pattern recognition and seeing things go wrong, that actually appreciates with time.

I mean, this quote just says it all, right? The younger engineers on the team, they had the skills. They could show you the data, run the numbers, and prove that a cheaper foundation would work on paper. But the senior lead, he had the wisdom.

He had the experience to see a multi-million dollar disaster that no spreadsheet could ever predict. That is the kind of value that AI can’t touch. Now for the third major branding mistake, trying to be better instead of being different.

You know, when you brand yourself as the best project manager or the most experienced marketer, you’re basically jumping into a race to the bottom. It’s a total trap because it forces you to compete on price against an ocean of other people who also claim to be better. And here’s the problem with that.

If you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one. A broad brand is a blurred brand. A generic title like senior finance director makes you completely invisible.

It literally invites people to compare you with younger, cheaper talent who, on paper, look just as qualified. When you’re an option for everybody, you’re the first choice for nobody. So what’s the fix? How do you get out of this trap? Well, the solution is to stop competing altogether and start creating a category of one.

You need to build a personal brand that is so specific, so dialed in, that for the right kind of problem, you are the only logical choice. This is the whole idea behind what Jeff Altman calls onlyness. And here is the simple three-part formula to figure out your onlyness.

First, you’re vertical. What’s the specific industry or even subsector that you absolutely dominate? Second, the situation. What is the specific, high stakes, expensive mess that you are a world-class expert at cleaning up? And third, your mechanism.

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What’s your unique wisdom-based process for fixing that exact problem? You answer these three questions and you’ve just built yourself a competitive moat. Let’s look at how this plays out in the real world. Check out these transformations.

Experienced HRVP, that’s a commodity, but culture architect for post-acquisition tech firms, wow, that’s an authority. Senior finance director becomes a fractional CFO for scaling green tech startups. You see, you’re no longer just a generic job title.

You are a high value specialist who solves a very specific and very expensive problem. So how can you put this into action like right now? Start by weaponizing your LinkedIn profile. Seriously.

First, change your headline from your old job title to your new onlyness statement. Next, go delete your graduation year. Don’t give age bias a chance to screen you out.

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

No bullet points. Your profile isn’t a resume anymore. It’s a sales page for your unique genius.

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

You can grab a copy on Amazon, on Job Search Community, and other places online. It’s really worth the read.

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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER

People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS Career Advice globally because he makes many things in peoples’ careers

easier. Those things can involve job search,  hiring more effectively, managing and leading better, career transition, as well as advice about resolving workplace issues. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 3100 episodes. 

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You will find great info to help with your job search at my new site, ⁠⁠JobSearch.Community⁠⁠ Besides the video courses, books and guides, I answer questions from members daily about their job search. Leave job search questions and I will respond daily. Become an Insider+ member and you get everything you’d get as an Insider PLUS you can get me on Zoom calls to get questions answered. Become an Insider Premium member and we do individual and group coaching.

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Schedule a discovery call at my website, ⁠www.TheBigGameHunter.us⁠ to discuss one-on-one or group coaching with me

LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/T⁠⁠heBigGameHunter⁠

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