What Treasury & Finance Professionals Need to Know about Personal Branding

What's up? Good morning. Good morning, Florida. Morning. My name is Mike Richards. As you can see on the screen, I'm the managing director of Mr. Recruitment. We're a specialist treasury recruitment company. I'm not going to do too much shameless self promotion. I'll be doing that in the bar later, so feel free to join me. Also, AFP won't let me, but I just want to frame it a little bit why I'm up here and able to speak on the stage. So I've been in treasury recruitment now for the past 25 years. Originally started with a company called Robert Walters, then joined a search firm, Hydragon Struggles, before setting up Mr. Recruitment in 2002 as a specialist global treasury recruiter. Those people say they notice my amazing American accent. Obviously I am based in the uk, but we recruit right the way across the world. So we recruit right the way through Sydney, Australia, back through west coast and east coast here. Some of the clients we recruit for, just look at my notes. Duracell, adm, Johnson Controls, ge. So we've got good background. We recruit corporate treasury guys, do some banking work, but mainly focus on corporates. You'll see there's a lot of slides. We've only got half an hour, so I'm gonna whiz through them. And you might be saying to me, mike, there's a lot of words on there. I'm not going to make the mistake of just reading through the slides. I've done that once before. I was talking to a friend of mine, Phil Cabrera, used to be McDonald's, and we were comparing war stories. I said, phil, what was your worst ever? Oh, going back. There you go. Not that. I said, phil, what was your worst ever? He said, Paris, 2005, Mike, terrible session. Technical reading through stuff. Everyone was having a terror. I said, do you know what film? Mine was worse. And I basically was there talking to the audience, really nervous, reading through the slides. About 15 minutes in, I was looking out. These guys were bored. They were just looking at me. Oh, my God. And I was bored. And I thought, oh, God, what am I going to do? Jack it off? Said, look, Q and A and let's start the Q and A early. Oh, that's okay. The hand went up in the audience. Friend of mine, Simon Bullock, group treasurer or actually the CFO of cnbc, said, simon, what's your question? Simon gives me his question. I went, simon, that's not the question we rehearsed, so we won't be doing that. So I'm going to rocket through Some of these, obviously, today we're talking about the power of personal brand. A lot of your personal brand is online. I know the selfie picture there. That's something for later. What is your personal brand? 20 years ago, when I started in recruitment, it used to be called your reputation. It used to be what people would say about you before you walked in the room and when you left. And a few of you might have checked out today, before you walked in, you actually look at the digital profile of me, of some of the other guys you meet now, you can build it up. Years of hard work and it crashes down. It can be ruined in a few minutes, as Mr. Trump will show you with a couple of videos that are out there. So a lot of it's digital, but how do you make it powerful? People have said, you know, you come along here, said, why is it important, Mike? Well, if you look at some of this info again, you're going to get to take this away. You can have it both on a personal and a professional level. A personal brand. Lots of people are looking for jobs, but actually is personal brand just about your job hiring and thinks? No, quite the opposite. In actual fact, when you're not looking for a job, lots of people said, oh, I'm on LinkedIn, Mike, but I'm not really looking for a job. They said, well, that's fine, you don't need to be all out there looking for a job. The proof that you guys are actually here networking in a professional sense and learning and wanting to gain more information and develop yourselves actually proves to yourselves that you're actually good at the personal brand and you're actually looking at things like that. So what sites are we going to focus on? We'll do LinkedIn, we're going to do a bit of Facebook, bit of Twitter. And some LinkedIn people have said to me, but, Mike, Facebook, that's my personal life. That shouldn't cross over. Well, it does. It's out there, it's accessible. Twitter, the same. We'll talk about that and the success of that and LinkedIn. So, as I said, I want to keep it short and sweet because obviously it's first thing in the morning, see a few people with their coffee and they want to stay awake. So we'll keep it nice. So, 12 top tips, 12 minutes. Take a deep breath. Facebook. So people said to me, mike, why is that important on my personal brand? Because that's your private brand and lots of people confuse it. You can lock down your Facebook account. We were the treasury yesterday and actually when we went on it and we showed her exactly how to change our settings, because otherwise lots of people, you know, there are lots of times you don't want to see me on my Speedos on my holiday, particularly in Naples. Okay, maybe you do, but we're not going to let you. Sorry, go private. People have actually said this. You know when you're going into a meeting, they say, well, actually, I'm not looking for a job, Mike, I've said to you, I'm not. But actually, you want to go and meet your banking guys, they'll check you out before they get get to meet you. Your treasury management provider, they're going to actually want to find out about you. So make sure you don't have that. We've all looked like this after a couple of days at the afp, but I was speaking at Windy City Summit earlier this year, actually, I felt quite bad for some of the guys there. Youngish guys, or you just go back a stage and they were saying, mike, what do we do to hide our stuff? I was like, what do you mean, hide? And they went. They have pictures of them out of various frat houses and lots of things. And now they're going in the professional arena and they're like, oh, God, what do I do? What we did, went through and coached those guys about turning off tagging and what tagging is for those of you who don't know you have a picture of you somewhere. And someone said, oh, helpfully, oh, yeah, that's Mike Richards. Well, actually, you can turn that off, that ability, so they can't tag you. That means you can't be found. The other way of doing that as well, Go incognito. Now. People said, is that a bit ott? It's up to you. But if you don't want to share your private life, then you don't have to share it. You can also change your name on things like Facebook. Give yourselves. You know, I could be Mike Richards, I could be Mike R. I could change various bits. If you use that nickname, you can't then be found. It helps you. So a lot of this, again, is very digital and it's about protecting yourselves. Twitter people have said to me again, Mike, does Twitter really count? I was just looking at some stats this morning and I think it's 34% of people have found out about a job or an opportunity through Twitter. Twitter's good. It's not just good for job sharing, it also sees about different people's opinions. You're going to meet someone, have A quick look at their Twitter profile. If you go into a meeting, you can actually find out a bit background information about that person. And one of the things you don't want to do is be diplomatic, or do be diplomatic, rather. So don't say anything online that you wouldn't want plastered on a big billboard. So what I mean by that. So you go in for a meeting with someone, you tweet on there, say, mike. Or you say, love those Cubs or can't stand those Cubs. Ah, they're terrible. Blah, blah, blah. You walk into the client's office, the next day you go for this meeting. There's the baseball signed by Babe Ruth. Yeah. They say, should we finish the meeting now? Might as well. Don't just tweet for the sake of it. Share something of value. And again, if you are on Twitter, you know, just look at what you're doing and thinking about your personal profile and how it goes. Now, here's the big one. LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, if you go to the LinkedIn booths that we've actually got set up here, it's been quite fascinating to talk to a lot of people about LinkedIn. A lot of the time we're saying you need a good professional headline. If you look at mine, I talk about how I help treasury professionals find their next opportunity, find their next role. And this is where your personal brand starts. A lot of people say, well, hang on, Mike, I'm a Treasury analyst, I'm a Treasury manager and I go through their profile and actually say, look, why don't you tell them what you do? Working capital. This is something I do. Or I've just given a speech recently. Well, actually shout about it. Talk to the audience. Don't just be group treasurer. This is what I do, actually, make it some achievements. Tell us about what you do next section in your summary. Your summary section. Now, I've been reading a lot of these at the LinkedIn booth over the past few days and people said, well, Mike, I just do my job and everything else. You know, look at this. Treasury management system, look at this. I said, well, how much money have you saved? And everyone was able to give me numbers straight away. They were like, I saved X amount for my company. I did this. I said, great, so shout about it. Tell us about this. This is your opportunity to show the real you. Never leave it blank. I've seen that a few times. It just lists your name, lists your job and that's it. Use your numbers to back up the results. Also, please don't the number of Times flexible, accomplished, motivated, individual. Because you're not going to be right on there. Inflexible old fart. Just doesn't work. But that's what it says. Empty words. Do have a photo. Why? It's 14 times more likely that people will connect with you if you have a photo. There's obviously a photo booth here, which is really good, and it's your virtual handshake. It's your first time. I had a thought. One stage, I was going to come on here, slouch on, play a little video, and I thought, do you know, is that the first impression? I want you lot for me? No, that's not what I want. And this is your first impression. I was in spoke in Belgium a couple of weeks ago and Patrick, one of the senior treasurers there, said, mike, not being funny, I'm not very photogenic. And I said, look, Patrick, look at this. But I said to him, when you next go into a meeting, do you walk in to meet these guys, whoever it might be, and say, morning, I'm Patrick, how are you? Great. No, you only get one chance to make a first impression, so make it count. Now, let's talk about. Make it appropriate, please. Now, the photos you're about to see, for those who are of a nervous disposition, you might want to leave the room or close your eyes for a couple of minutes. These are not appropriate pictures. They're all remade. They're actually real photos and I can send you some of the LinkedIn links to them later. But they're remade photos of people that we found on LinkedIn. It's a bit of a rogues gallery. There you go. I'll let that one sink in. So I don't know who this guy was. Well, I do know he was, actually, but I will share it to you at the bar. Mr. Moon and Moody. No, please, no selfies. It's just wrong on so many levels. And you can see that there. Yeah. You will give me this job and then the next one. The real doozy. Yeah, you don't need to see me in that shirt. Although it is available for private hire. That is for Facebook guys. That's the Facebook one. Why? Just all kinds of wrong. That's better, approachable, professional. Doesn't have to be all the face shot and everything else. That was taken a couple of years ago at Euro Finance and it was really nice because. Caught me unawares, but actually, you know, a friendly, friendly face. Someone you want to talk to, recommendations. People were saying to me, I've seen a couple of times over the past few days people haven't had any testimonials or recommendations and someone said, mike, but do they work? Well, let's just do a quick experiment. If you could put your hands up the very little known website you might have heard called Amazon. So could you put your hands up if you've ever bought anything from Amazon? Great. Keep your hands up, please, just for a moment. Won't be long. Could you keep your hand up if you've ever looked at the recommendations? Fantastic. Everyone's looking at the stars. Could you keep your hand up if you've met that person? But I thought recommendations didn't work. They do. It's called social proof. And you want to be like your peers, you trust their recommendations. What I would say as well, don't ask the person sitting next to you, that's the person above you, or people that have worked for you before, because if the person sitting next to you isn't going to say something nice about you, then you're not buying them lunch tomorrow. But what you need to be doing is asking, say a past boss or even your current boss to say, could you give me a recommendation about this project? Or if you're managing someone, could you just give a bit more information about what you think of me as a boss and 92% of people actually. So these peer to peer things do actually work. Connect wisely. After this conference, I'm sure quite a few of you will get connection requests and it's, there you go. Don't use. This is when you're connecting to lots of people, so you're going to get all these connection requests. Don't ever send it from your mobile. Why? It just goes as a random thing that says, hi, connect to me, I'm Mike. So what if you go on the desktop app for LinkedIn, you can personalize your connections and, you know, mention something you've perhaps had in common. I was at Mike's session, we cooked up afterwards. We're talking about this reference, common ground. And that's what you want to do because that's how you want to build your network. And people said, oh, I've only got like 5, excuse me, 5, 10 connections. And I said, well, that's all right, but you're a professional networker, you want to be out there. The reason you guys are here is to actually learn things from your peers. If you go to your network of five people and you're looking at using a new treasury management system, you send it out to your group, how many of you guys use it? Oh, no one. Back at square one. If you were to send out, say 50 or 500 people, you could get a really good benchmark from lots of those guys and they can help you be a groupie. But not those kind of groupies. I don't know, you know, they were at my last session. It shows you engaged in your field. There's a really good Euro finance group you might want to join. There's some good. When you're sharing information and you're learning, it's actually helping. You're looking at working capital, you're looking at different things. Actually, the LinkedIn groups are actually really useful for your professional development. As I said, lots of your stuff is there and you can get this on the app as well. And I'm happy to chat through as well. I've got a session later on today, but before we move on to that and go do some question and answer wanted, a quick final thought. Walk a mile in someone's shoes. What I mean by that is put yourself in the eye of the reader. So if you're actually reading someone's LinkedIn profile, look back at your LinkedIn profile, take a step back and say, would I want to connect to this person? Would they help my career? Is that, you know, put yourself in their shoes. And as I say, I've got a lovely little graphic there. Try and walk a mile in someone else's shoes. And then if you find at the end you still disagree with them, you're a mile away and you've got a nice new pair of shoes. So think about it all there. So I'm doing the Learning Lounge a bit later, 1:15, you'll be there going through LinkedIn profile already. Looking forward to it. AFP have given me that very high tech flip chart to use, so I'll be using that later to talk about that. So, Q and A questions, what questions do people have? I've rocketed through question at the back. So I've got the first bit. Treasury recruitment and then apologies. Okay, so just to repeat it here, what are people looking for when they're recruiting at the moment? They're looking for achievements, in our opinion. You know, when I've actually spoken to people, they're looking for, what have you improved about your company? How have you taken it from A to B? The number of times I sit down with candidates and I get their resume and it's a list of their responsibilities and I get to say to them, how would. Why would you employ you? And they're actually saying to me, well, I'M not so sure. And you're looking at your own resume. It needs to be about them. And what they're looking for is. So you've come in as a Treasury analyst. Did you just sit at your desk for three years and do nothing or just turn the handle? No, of course you didn't. The first year you learned your job, second year you did it and started to make the improvements. Year three, you were actually making iterations and getting a lot better. So that's what they're looking for. They're looking at what difference you made. So again, it's when we go back to the other one walking someone else's shoes. There you go, Nice. And we're back at the room, you know. Yeah, that's what they're looking for. Does that answer the question enough? Yeah. Other questions. Everyone's stunned silence. They're like, oh, God, my personal brand is done. Yes. I think it's a really good question. So the question was, could you be too private on your own private social media? I think it's got to be a personal choice, really. And you can choose the levels, as we said on the slides there, you can over connect, you can over share, you know, no one wants to see. That's why we had, we whizzed through some of those slides, you know, I don't want to know what you had for breakfast might be nice, but I don't care, you know, there's no need to actually share a lot of that stuff, I think. So there's control over it, I think Also, you know, LinkedIn is a professional forum, professional networking. So keep it professional, I think, with your personal stuff. I don't have, for instance, I do have a Facebook profile. You won't find any pictures of me and my Speedos. No one needs to see that. But actually I don't put stuff up there because it's. What's personal is personal and it's my private life. And I don't want to share my private life with you guys because you're not interested. Really. You want to know, can I help you get a job or can I help you move on or develop your personal brand? Does that answer it? Yeah. Other questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, great question. So the question was, if someone's connecting to you or wanting to connect to you and it's just this, as you say, this random, hi, connect to me. Should you do. Do you have to? You don't have to. For start. Don't worry, they don't feel the bitter taste of rejection. They don't get a note that says, no, Mike, he does. Mike doesn't like you. He's not connecting. They don't find that out. But what you might want to do is actually look through their profile and people say, oh, but I don't want them to know that I'm looking. And actually we were showing this yesterday. We're just looking top right of your screen. Whenever you're on the desktop app, you've got the three little dots and actually you can go and change your privacy settings and you can make yourself incognito for a while. You might want to do it after afp. You might want to look at some of the people. Oh, I want to connect to them, or don't want to connect to them. But they don't actually see that you view their profile. It just says a random, you know, a blank gray person looked at you and that that's better for yourself. And then you can choose who to connect to. So does that answer the question? Yeah. Okay, so again the question there. What's the difference between LinkedIn really and your resume? I saw a thing, it was actually a blogger the other day. She said, oh, your LinkedIn is your online resume. That is rubbish. It's not true. If you see a resume and things like that, what you want to do is your resume still needs to be achievement focused, but that's more of a chronology of your work life, if you like. With LinkedIn, it's not. LinkedIn is showing off. LinkedIn is demonstrating your achievements at that stage. A lot of guys have actually said to me, mike, I don't really do LinkedIn. And it's quite interesting because they say, I don't do LinkedIn. And I say, why have you got a profile then? You either do LinkedIn or you don't. And actually, some of my clients, a couple of them have said, they said, mike, we don't do LinkedIn because if we want a new job, we'll come to you. Which is quite nice and, you know, quite complimentary. I've actually said, I think that they should have a profile. Why? Because I think then the opportunities will come to them rather than just coming through me, which I like. But the fact is, then they will get approached for various roles that might help develop their careers. Yeah, no, I don't think so. So the question was, this lady said that recruiters are devious scum and basically all they want you for is your connections. Sorry, it's true. You got me. But joking aside, you can actually connect to any recruiter you want and you can actually turn off the visibility of your connections. So when someone comes to look at mine, mine is switched off because I don't want people to feel uncomfortable. So if any of you guys were to connect, you think, hang on, I don't want my boss to know unnecessarily I'm connected to this guy. So. But joking aside, there are a lot of recruiters that will just try and build up their databases just to say, and build it. And it's very different. Actually I wrote an article on LinkedIn. Again, we'll talk about this at the LinkedIn Lounge later. But that was about the difference between the UK and European recruiters and US recruiters. And the job here is very different. So in the UK and Europe, for instance, you will get a basic salary, then you'll get commission on top of that according to your success over here. They are generally rewarded just on results commission only. So very short termist, it can be a real challenge unless you're in the search level. So some of those recruiters, if they connect to you as a Treasury person, that then if they don't get a Treasury job in the next month, then they'll leave, you know, they'll just move on to the next job. And that's one of the reasons they don't necessarily always build up a long term relationship. So that's maybe. Does that answer the question? I think mostly, but we can talk more about it outside and perhaps we'll connect later. I don't want to see your connections. It's okay. Sorry. These are some great questions. I'll buy them a drink later at the bar. I know that's two beers. It's happy hour. All right, two for one. So the question was cover letter, what should it be like? Your resume is about you and the things you've achieved. The COVID letter is about them. It's about when you read a job description, it's the top if you like their pain points. If you look at a client and they're saying, oh, we've got an issue here, or you actually put yourself, look at that company. Have they got issues with their cash flow? Have they got issues with capital? Have they got international problems? When you're doing the COVID letter, address that directly. So you might say, I implemented a cash solution for Latin America because that's where they're expanding as a company and they're going, oh, wow. So that's the reason, if you like, that's the invitation to get you through the door to actually meet them for an interview and then the rest is up to you and go through that. But, yeah, I'd say keep it short and sweet. Two or three points about why you're the perfect solution, why you're the headache, the paracetamol, if you like, to their current headache. So we're running out of time. We've got a couple more minutes. Last, please. So, again, we're talking devious scum. Okay. Is it necessary to respond to recruiters who are sending you random jobs that aren't suited to you? Well, I think the answer's in the question for that bit. So, no, I wouldn't. What you might do, though, if a role is relatively suitable for you or it's something that does interest you, perhaps it's not at the right level, then I would respond and say, look, whilst this isn't right for me, this is the kind of thing I would be interested in and it might be worth being on their radar for the future. So if that. However, if they are just sending you random mail shots, it's not long before you can block them. And that's what I would do because we're all very busy and you guys busier than me. Any other questions? Any final or more. That's it. Thank you very much.