There’s some bad news…and bad news. But it takes us on the road to better news, so it’s worth the journey. Bad news number one: invisible unemployment is a real thing—a problem that someone reading this might already be facing, or is on the verge. How does invisible unemployment manifest itself? As Greg Boone, CEO of Walk West, described on VKTR in March:
Traditional unemployment metrics track people actively seeking work, but they completely miss what is now reshaping enterprise workforces — when someone retires or relocates or takes a personal leave, the default question inside organizations has fundamentally shifted from “who do we hire to replace them” to “can AI handle this instead.”
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 41% of employers worldwide plan to reduce their workforce by 2030 due to AI. How should individuals inhabiting invisible unemployment’s danger zone respond or prepare? That leads us to bad news number two. The best medicine for invisible unemployment is an endeavor that many of us struggle with (or despise): the dreaded “getting yourself out there”—building your personal brand. Yes, it can feel awkward or unnatural (or exhausting) to some of us, packaging ourselves for consumption.
But think of it this way: brand is basically just a slick synonym for identity. You already have an identity, and you can use that identity to help you battle invisible unemployment. The key difference is that your personal brand is what other people see as your identity—so no matter how strong your identity is, if it isn’t easily visible (or findable) to the outside world, it can’t help you battle invisible unemployment.
We’re here to say to all of you invisibles or on-the-verge-of-invisibles: we see you, and want to help you become visible.
The benefits of becoming visible are slightly different for each of those categories, but there’s upside to be had for all. And there’s a lesson here too for executives, who already have their own brand visibility (although it might not be doing its job/link to Executive Brand article) but should also embrace the value of their people cultivating personal brands.
For those already on the outside looking in—and finding not just empty chairs, but no chairs at all—the biggest benefit from building (or rebuilding) your visible identity is being able to change the narrative. Resumés and LinkedIn pages tell people where we’ve been and what we’ve done, but they don’t tell them who we are. Your hard-earned beliefs about your industry, the values you won’t compromise, the strategies you rely on—that’s what defines who we really are. And those are the parts of us that need to be aligned between recruiter and job candidate. The bullet points on your resumé are a starting point, but they’re not your identity.
Or they shouldn’t be. Unfortunately, if that kind of self-identifying data is the majority of your digital footprint, then it’s already become your personal brand by default. This also means that your current identity might be trapped in the shape of your previous self—not truly reflecting what all those previous places and experiences have changed you into. And just adding a stream of LinkedIn posts to help round-out that identity isn’t enough to change the narrative told by your digital footprint.
Like it or not, the mostly-AI-driven systems that scour the internet to produce some version of you for the seekers is creating that version on the basis of that digital footprint. According to a survey of business leaders by ResumeBuilder, nearly half of companies (47%) plan to use AI specifically to scan social media profiles and personal websites as part of candidate evaluation. So changing the narrative means changing that footprint—broadening it across platforms, making your full identity visible to the seekers. That means your LinkedIn post is a better brand courier if it can also lead the reader to another side of you—a substack, website, podcast (with a handy transcript to appease our machine-readers too).
Of course, you can’t lead people to somewhere that doesn’t exist. So if you haven’t already, you need to build things that showcase your skills, passions, beliefs, wisdom—filling out your identity beyond the what and where. You might take it for granted, but your experience has given you ideas and observations worth sharing, forged confidence in reliable methods and mantras—you don’t need to invent a new you, just reveal the real one.
You need to make visible who you are now. So when the seekers come seeking (in human or machine form) they’ll find the narrative that you want to tell about yourself. You might start by getting reacquainted with who you are now. Cataloging not just your current skillset and experience, but what you’ve learned about your field or specialty, what kind of thinking you can offer that sets you apart, what core values you’ve developed in your career, and why.
Once you’ve defined for yourself who you are now, you can get that identity out there through simple strategies like:
Embracing thought leadership. Thought leadership usually boils down to one thing: a willingness to tell people your truth, because that’s what readers value. Start small, but keep it real—maybe a LinkedIn article on one thing you’ve learned the hard way, a post that actually takes a position on something your industry is arguing about. LinkedIn can’t be your entire brand presence, but it should be part of it. And one piece that says something real will do more for your brand than ten posted just for the sake of posting.
Planting your brand far and wide. Being findable matters in both human and machine terms, which means diversifying where and how you plant your brand: profiles in different online professional venues that are complete and current, a presence at events and spaces where your peers actually spend time, and where relevant, the recognition markers that make you visible to new audiences: speaking opportunities, contributed articles, industry mentions. These aren’t vanity plays. They’re the citations that signal credibility to humans and machines alike.
Networking. There’s no substitute for introducing (or re-introducing) who you are now to all those contacts you’ve made over the years. You don’t know where an opportunity might be hiding among the branches of your network, or where a key new contact might be one connection away. Accessing those opportunities requires keeping yourself in their sightline—a note to a contact when something relevant crosses your desk, a comment that adds something to their work, a coffee that isn’t purely transactional. When those opportunities arise, the contacts who hear from you consistently are the ones who mention you specifically.
The problem with the landscape created by invisible unemployment is that there are fewer roles, requiring updated skillsets, and being filled using systems that rely heavily on not-person-to-person methods of finding and judging candidates. So both the digital footprint and real-world presence that is assembled into your identity—your personal brand—has to be visible, demonstrate alignment with those new skillsets, and tell a compelling, specific story about you.
It’s not an ace-in-the-hole solution, but it’s a way to become one of the visible among the invisible, which is the first step to getting back on the inside.
For those on the verge, but still on the inside, the most obvious benefit of building your personal brand is that it provides you with the perfect “go-bag” that you can carry with you out the door if necessary—giving you a portable set of the tools you’ll need to make (or keep) yourself visible out there.
It’s important to remember that without establishing an identity that can travel with you, even a strong identity established within an organization can disappear as soon as you walk out the door—quickly reduced to a mere what and where. A 2024 study published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology—“Work does not speak for itself”—found that for knowledge workers, doing good work and being entrepreneurial inside your organization is no longer enough on its own to secure your employability—personal branding predicts career outcomes above and beyond those traditional factors.
That conclusion also supports the less obvious benefit for those on the verge: building your personal brand while still gainfully employed can actually move you away from the verge. Building a strong visible identity outside of your organization can also raise your profile within the organization. And when invisible unemployment’s reaper begins to cull the ranks for its bounty, having a higher profile (particularly one that demonstrates alignment with those new skillsets) is a decent strategy for being identified as an asset worth keeping.
Which brings us to the lesson here for executives, and the benefits they can gain from encouraging their people to build personal brands. For a good (read: human) executive, the decisions they need to make in this landscape of invisible unemployment are not easy. There’s the weight of the cost to the people they’ve committed to lead, and there’s the weight of getting it wrong. Letting the wrong people go, losing institutional knowledge that you should’ve kept, implementing systems that don’t actually make up for what was lost.
Knowing the full identities of those people you’re making decisions about, having a way to view them that goes beyond their day-to-day productivity can help executives to make better decisions about someone’s real value to the next endeavor. Which can help you avoid getting those things wrong about people, knowledge, and systems. It can also help you to identify sources of those new skillsets in people who might not’ve had the chance yet to demonstrate them specifically in their current role.
So that’s the better news. There is a way to become visible amongst the landscape of the invisible. And if you think about it as a way to lay claim to the identity you’ve built, an exercise in establishing who you are now—for yourself as well as others—then you should be able to see “building your personal brand” as something that can both ground you and free you, instead of something akin to creating a little box that you need to squeeze yourself uncomfortably inside, then ship out to the masses.
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FAQ: Invisible Unemployment and Your Personal Brand
If I already have a strong reputation at my company, why isn’t that enough to protect me?
Because that reputation doesn’t travel. An identity built inside an organization tends to stay there — the moment you walk out the door, it gets reduced to a résumé: where you’ve been and what your title was. A personal brand that exists independently of your employer is one you can carry with you, and one that’s working for you before anyone even picks up the phone.
What’s the difference between a LinkedIn profile and an actual personal brand?
A LinkedIn profile tells people what you’ve done. A personal brand tells them who you are — your point of view, what you care about, where you’re headed. If your entire digital footprint is a profile and a job history, then that’s your brand by default, whether it reflects you accurately or not. The goal is to make sure what’s out there is the version of you that you’d actually choose.
Why does it matter where I build my online presence — isn’t LinkedIn enough?
LinkedIn is a starting point, not a destination. The AI-driven systems that assemble a version of you for whoever’s looking aren’t confined to one platform — they’re scanning the broader web. A Substack, a personal site, a podcast with a transcript: these create more surface area for the right version of you to be found. Your LinkedIn post does more work if it leads somewhere that shows more of who you are.
As an executive, why should I care whether my people have personal brands?
Because their visibility is data you can use. When the hard decisions come — and in this landscape, they will — knowing the full identity of the people you’re making decisions about gives you a clearer picture of their real value, their actual skillset, and where they fit in what comes next. Encouraging your people to be visible isn’t a threat to the organization. It’s a hedge against getting those decisions wrong.