An Easy Way to Build Your Personal Brand you may not have thought of.

Last week I was approved for graduation from the Flatiron School Software Engineering Program by my cohort lead. Coming off the high of completing the program, I decided that I would hit the ground running and immediately commit myself to my Career Prep work.

The Career Prep program was made available to me after I began work on my final project. While I have been completing the work, I’ve been connected with a Career Coach who has been guiding me through each chapter of the program via one-on-one Zoom meetings. The meetings are very constructive and after each one, I walk away feeling like I have a better grasp on my goals and how to accomplish them. This leads me to the point of this article.

The third module of the program is titled Personal Branding and highlights its importance when searching for a job in the tech industry. It explains that when Employers are reviewing resumes, they will begin by searching your name on Google to investigate the extent of your presence on the internet. If nothing comes up it raises eyebrows. So naturally, I googled myself and to my dismay, NOTHING came up. This made me want to hold off on applying for jobs because I didn’t feel like I was ready to put my best foot forward. I felt like a was standing at the bottom of a mountain looking up.

While trying to find solutions to my problem, I realized that part of my problem was the commonness of my first and last name. In the Latin world, Luis Castro is a very common name. It made me realize that after years of not using my middle name, the combination of all three of my names might actually help me stand out on Google. So a week after editing my name to include my middle name on my professional profiles, I am now the first 3 hits on google. Slowly but surely scaling that summit.

This information helped me and It might help you if you are encountering the same challenges. Culturally, most people have multiple surnames and at some point decide to identify publically with a first and last name. But because of the uniqueness of surnames, including more than one surname may help your ability to develop a presence on the internet.