How to Build Credibility with Original Content

I was talking with a college-age friend of the family yesterday about the hiring process for graduates in finance in 2024. One thing that was immediately clear is that the traditional model of replying to job postings is laughable broken. Then again, it always has been. I once called a New York bank to verify that they had received my resume and the HR representative acidly replied, “Well, we got about 25,000 of them. What color paper was yours on, again?” That was in 1993. A 2019 CNBC article claimed that “70% of all jobs are not published publicly on jobs sites and as much as 80% of jobs are filled through personal and professional connections.” The best resources to any job search candidate are the social media platforms they are already using daily. The critical distinction is to understand the need to change from a passive consumer of content to an active participant in trending topics within your areas of interest and, whenever possible, relevant content creation. I know people who have gotten trading jobs because of their subject matter expertise on Twitter. I have personally gotten several professional opportunities at institutions who had seen one of my LinkedIn posts. The process is relatively straightforward: 1. Research the thought leaders in your area of interest and follow them. 2. Note who the thought leaders follow and engage with and follow them. 3. Start to respond to recent posts on areas where you have something relevant to contribute. An insightful early response to a post by an account with 200k followers may be seen by a few thousand people, some of whom will like your reply and follow your account. 4. Post and re-post interesting industry-relevant content with your thoughts attached. 5. Engage with anyone who comments on your posts, if they are contributing to productive discussion. 6. If you have original content, share it, but be prepared for opposing viewpoints and criticism. The goal is to slowly build up a productive online presence within your area of interest. It takes time, but leveraging a social network is one of the easiest ways a student or recent graduate can demonstrate to an audience of potential hiring managers subject-matter expertise and real interest in a career in finance.

Communicating your results to practice (or getting outside of your typical academic process). While serving as a mentor in a workshop, a Ph.D. student asked one of the best questions I've heard in a while. Rather than asking, "How do I publish in a top journal?" They asked, "What is the best way to communicate my results to practice?" The question caused me to pause. I offered a bit of a glib answer. But, it left me thinking "What strategies can an early career researcher employ to share their work with practice?" As loathe as I am to suggest posting about your work, I encourage early career scholars to learn how to talk about their work online. Here is how I would go about it doing it. First. Engage offline. Attend meetings of practitioners and listen. Attend workshops. Meet-ups. and more. Make friends. Learn the issues they are concerned with. Learn the language they use. Second. Share. Share your work with practice. Take some time to share what you study with your new practitioner friends informally or formally. If you luck out, you can give a short presentation of your work to an applied audience. Third. Evaluate. Ask practice for feedback on a) your problem, b) your question, and c) your findings. See Roseman and Vessey's work on applicability checks for guidance (https://lnkd.in/dh9WtMdm) or one of the 563 papers that cite them for Fourth. Learn. If your contacts in practice find value in what you've done, consider taking your work online in more than a humble brag. Join the conversation on LinkedIn, Reddit, or other places in practice and learn the themes and language used in relevant conversations. Fifth. Establish. Establish an account. Post to it periodically relevant information. Comment from that account. Establish credibility. Focus on your topic of choice. Do not pollute the channel with too many off-topic posts. Sixth. Engage online. Weave your work into the conversation. Weave more than I published a paper into the conversation. Focus on either a) short bites of what you've done or b) crafting a longer blog post or newsletter on the topic. Seventh. Persist. If you want to be part of a space, you must be more than an occasional tourist. Post on the topic consistently. Post about your work. Post about other people's work - positive, negative, and neutral. Become an educated, judicious content creator. Most of all, it will take time if you choose to go down this path and do more than rely on your university to promote your work. It can take months and years to reach a broad audience. But. If you post content in the language of your audience, you will find the connection to practice that you seek! Best of luck!

You know how I can tell content is actually original? When it includes specific examples of what you did. What you tried. What worked. What flopped. Not just “a POV” that could have been written by anyone with a keyboard and ChatGPT prompt. I was working on a piece about product marketing the other day. My first draft was all opinion, with no meat. It had mediocre tips and scored about 5 out of 10 for actionability. Sure, it sounded nice. But it could’ve been authored by literally anyone in B2B. So I stopped and asked myself: What happened in real life that taught me this? What’s a moment only I would remember? That’s when the content started to hit. Because it wasn’t generic, it included a story, and that story was unique to me. A conversation with a sales rep who hated our old pitch. A launch I ran that completely missed the mark (and what we changed the next time). A framework we built from scratch because nothing else fit our business. That’s the stuff that makes people feel your content. That builds trust and credibility with your audience. TLDR - If you want to sound like a real human, not a robot: Get specific, personal, and real.