Building a personal brand that brings right people to the company

In a nutshell

In this article we continue a story about our journey with Resume.io. Here will tell you how we've helped Tikhon Belousko and Alex Taktarov develop their personal brand. As a result of our collaboration, we released several media materials, gave interviews, and spoke on podcasts. All this has been useful not only for their personal brand but for the HR brand as well. Now Resume.io keeps on getting candidates, who fit the guy's culture perfectly, the candidates who care where and with whom to work with.

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Resume.io is a free online resume maker to create CVs and cover letters in one click. The company has existed for five years and has attracted over 12 million users worldwide. The marketing office is in the Netherlands and the product office is in Russia.

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Collaboration period: June – September 2021

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Materials released

• The article on how to adapt products to different countries for the Firm’s Secret.
• The interview on the Resume.io creation for VC.
• The article on what to focus on during a SaaS product development for Rusbase.
• The article on how to shape the company culture for Inc.
• The interview for the podcast Proriv.
• The interview for the podcast It's a Failure.
• The post about selling the company to the American holding for the Telegram channel Russian Venture.
• The post on how to create competitive products for the Telegram channel the Edinorog.

Our first steps

1. External content analysis
2. Competitive analysis
3. A series of interviews with Tikhon and Alex
4. Creation of speaker profiles
5. Media plan development
6. Communication with platforms, control of deadlines, and agreements fulfillment

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Resume.io request

<div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Daria Bondarenko, TYPICAL</div>

For Alex and Tikhon, selling the company to the American holding Talent.Inc was a great personal achievement. The guys did a great job. So, they asked Valeria to record it and to present themselves as entrepreneurs, not as a designer and developer.

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<div class='p-container'><div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Valeria Rozova, TYPICAL</div>Tikhon and Alex have noticed that they get  amazing candidates who come to Resume.io after they read their interviews. So, the guys were inspired and wanted to reach broader media representation. And they asked us to help them with that. The guys wanted candidates to google Resume.io and to see what the company was about. Who its founders were, what it was doing, and how complex its product was with all its services taken into consideration, not the single one. In a word, they wanted people to see what Resume.io is in a click. </div>

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<div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Tikhon Belousko, Resume.io</div>

Whenever I open Facebook, on the top of the feed is see Valeria's posts: articles, courses, or just news. Always something new. After the sale, we realized that we wanted people, lots of people, to know about that. I was inspired by Valeria's publications, so I asked her: "How do you do it? Who can teach me to get the same results?" Turned out that TYPICAL could.

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We had several targets. The first was to record our successful sale and to mark this event red on our timeline. The second was to develop the HR brand and the company's brand too. The third was to learn what true PR was and to understand how it worked from the inside.
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The workflow

<div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Alex Taktarov, Resume.io</div>

When we launched the project on Product Hunt, we presented ourselves on VC. But this article was a hurry-scurry. The facts were mixed up, even the year of foundation was incorrect! The start is always rocky, but I thought that the further articles would also be messy. Hopefully, I had been wrong, and TYPICAL nailed it. The team studied Tikhon and me from head to toe and offered numerous options, formats, and media sources. TYPICAL made a strategy that worked and kept upgrading it along the way. For example, I was agreeably surprised that my favorite podcast It's a Failure became a part of it.

<div class='p-container'><div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Daria Bondarenko, TYPICAL</div>The guys and I fell in love with each other from the first meeting. Well, maybe it was just me who fell in love. But whatever, we really liked working together. Their target was to record the point of sale. Surely, we could just write the news about this and it would be published in all the business media sources. And surely, Alex and Tikhon would say that they were OK with that. But we didn't go that way. Firstly, we had numerous restrictions, because the American company didn't let us disclose any figures. Secondly, we wanted to make the most of Alex and Tiknon's media representation, so we aimed to come up with something catchy</div>

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<div class='p-container'>The work started with interviews and the creation of the guys' speaker profiles. They were to be laconic, but in-depth. So, they depicted Alex and Tikhon's life paths with their education, career, personal experience, projects, and Resume.io's history. With those points in our minds, we explored what interesting the guys could say and what they wanted to talk about. So, we made a list of potential topics. Next, we analyzed various platforms and their peculiarities. As a result, we got exact ideas of what and where to publish.</div>

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<div class='p-container'>Whenever we had an idea, I asked the guys whether they had what to say on the topic. After that, the pitching started. The kind of preparations depended on the media. And, surely, we always discussed what to improve, what we liked and what we didn't like.</div>

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<div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Tikhon Belousko, Resume.io</div>

Frankly speaking, we knew nothing about our personal brand, so we were lost. Our only scenario was to talk about the sale. But TYPICAL opened our eyes and showed that we could talk about numerous things.

I may call this an experiment: we had no idea of what to expect, but TYPICAL foresaw everything and showed us how to act. The team told us "Look, you will be asked this and that. The effect is likely to be the following..." The work was pretty meticulous.

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<div class='p-container'><div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Daria Bondarenko, TYPICAL</div>The truth is that the success of any media campaign always depends on the expert's potential. Even the smartest people can't upgrade their communicative skills in a week if they lack them. The expertise is not enough if it is not beautifully framed in the needed format. Tikhon and Alex have amazing and distinctive speeches. The guys are really pleasant to talk with. They are worth being watched, listened to, and read. Our materials get inspiring feedback: "So touching, cool written, and vivid. What a rare find!" This is the result of speakers' solid grounding. The in-depth training always enables them to talk on any platform and win the listeners' hearts.</div>

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<div class='p-container'>Our task was to frame the story of Alex and Tikhon in a way that would spark the interest of many people. But we didn't want to invent anything, we aimed to tell the truth. So, firstly, nobody spoke for the guys, they told their story themselves. But, to make their expertise catchy and correct, we had to work a lot together. Secondly, we did our best to take care of them. We prepared for every interview and podcast to make the guys' experience smooth and pleasant. Otherwise, it might have been traumatic, so Alex and Tikhon could decide to give in.</div>

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<div class='p-container'>I always listened to all the podcasts myself and producers to evaluate whether they really wanted to talk with the guys and how straight-thinking they were. Then I tried to guess what questions they might ask. Then we called up with the guys, talked all the questions through, and discussed what they did not want to say. As a result, guys had an exact idea of what to expect.  Not to get lost, they got a memo on how to prepare for podcasts and how to answer questions. When I speak about our care I also mean our weekly progress reports. They included the number of articles published, what was being prepared, and at what stage it was.</div>

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The results

<div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Tikhon Belousko, Resume.io</div>

We got good coverage. For example, our material for VC got 30 thousand views. These were not bots or random readers, it was the audience truly interested in what we were talking about. This publication has strengthened our HR brand: now "our" people come to us more often. They read all these materials and listen to podcasts. They know who we are and say during the interviews: "Yes, it's cool, I've read about it. Your company is cool and your culture fits me." These are the people we're looking for, the ones who care with whom to work with.  

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And, surely I've learned the ropes of PR. It was a breathtaking journey. When you dive into the core of the process, you start taking it easier, and, consequently, become more confident. The process is no longer an enigma, it is a well-structured set of actions to take, an exact method. This is the result of working with professionals that I'm very grateful for.

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<div class='p-container'><div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Daria Bondarenko, TYPICAL</div>All our work was about co-creation. And the guys were much into this. They were so intriguing to chat with and to ask for more details, that our calls used to overtime the noted hour. And Alex, for example, could just walk and record me a voice message: "Daria, I've been thinking about my failures. I don't know if we'll get into the podcast, but, anyway, I've come up with something..." That was cool. Such an approach always makes the work easier and deeper.</div>

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<div class='p-container'>Now the project is already finished. But the guys may return with the words: "We've spent 6 months trying to hire the right person. But we haven't managed to. What can help us? Is there any exact tool?" Well, if something like this happens, we will be here for them. And we will work on their HR brand. But this is just a case scenario.</div>

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<div class='h3 color-green font-25'>Alex Taktarov, Resume.io</div>

Before coming to TYPICAL, I had already worked on our personal brand, but it was far from being good. Firstly, I had no exact strategy. Secondly, I cut the content too fat. It turned out to be extremely complicated, and consequently didn't fit customers.

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For us, the sale to the American holding company was a big event. We wanted to depict its grandness but knew that the text written on our own would fail. We needed some relevant help, and we got it. Without TYPICAL, we wouldn't manage to make terms with platforms, come up with themes and formats. Their team literally rescued us: they explained how to upgrade our personal brand and framed it in a well-structured plan we keep on following.