When a Company Hires You They Endorse Your Brand

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Acceptance = Endorsement

The second you accept your job offer, you are being endorsed by your company. Every single employee at your company is endorsed by your company, if they like it or not. Every single student is endorsed by their college or university upon acceptance as well. This exists even after a personal brand is transferred to another corporate brand. If you are fired or expelled, then you aren’t endorsed any longer.

Why does this happen?

If you are hired or accepted to a college, they have lended out their brand to you for as long as you need it. This form of endorsement states that you are worthy of being connected to their brand. They value your personal brand and feel that you represent their corporate brand. In this way, it is mutually beneficial and a relationship is formed automatically. To them, it’s all about filling requirements. For colleges, this means that you have SAT scores, a G.P.A., extracirrucular activities and good writing skills in order to meet their qualifications for admittance. Once you have met this need, then you have the power to brand yourself in combination with their brand.

Typically, unless your famous, their brand is much stronger than yours, so you must “feed” off of it until your full. This happens when you graduate, drop out of school to become an entrepreneur or just decide to change jobs.

Be careful

When you do good things people are your friends and love you, but when you have negative associations wrapped around your personal brand, they won’t like you. It’s like the “Dark Knight” movie, where Batman is loved for helping save Gotham, yet becomes an outcast when they don’t require his services anymore. What I’m trying to say is that you need to be careful because you A) might get used by the larger brand, which may suck you dry B) might be disassociated based on bad publicity.

Picture of Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting firm. He is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success (St. Martin’s Press) and the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future (Kaplan Publishing), which combined have been translated into 15 languages.

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