Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses a major mistake people make when they are on LinkedIn.
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I want to talk with you about 1 of the mistakes I see time and again on LinkedIn. That way too many people are making with their profiles. It’s what I call, “the skimpy profile.”
Yes, the skimpy profile. The skimpy LinkedIn profile. Maybe you’ve written 2 lines underneath each employer and you have this enormous summary. Maybe. You have this profile I’ve seen all the time – – 2 lines in the region. Employer. 2 lines in the summary. How do you think people are going to find you?
Seriously, how do you think people will find you unless they already know you?
Part of what you use LinkedIn for is to attract opportunities to you. People knock on your metaphorical door and reach out to you to say, “hey, I have an opportunity. Let’s talk.” You say yes or no, after you hear about the opportunity. Not before; after. Then, if you think about it, if you have 2 lines there, there are probably no keywords there, there is no SEO (search engine optimization). There is nothing there that would be interesting to them. Potential employer or recruiter that would cause them to reach out to you.
If you stuff the summary area within enormous list of keywords and then have nothing to back it up onto your jobs, employers have no idea when you did this thing.
Employers are all trained by the resume experience and they will believe that job hunters are trying to con them in order to get an interview. When they see lots of summary stuff at the beginning of a resume, and relatively little later on (like the functional resume that tells you everything about a person in their life, their career and where they worked, but it’s all separated from one another). You will learn that this person did some of this stuff, but did 15 years ago. No value.
You have to look at your profile like it is an extended resume. I don’t mean a longer resume. I mean an extension of the resume. You have to have a good quality summary that outlines what you have done and how you went about doing and a few metrics. You want to have your contact information. There email address and phone number. This is true particularly if you are job hunting.
From there, underneath each employer or consulting assignment, depending upon how you have it listed, you want to have supportive information to what you have in the summary. That is also going to help you with your search engine optimization with LinkedIn because LinkedIn will see multiple instances of those keywords and help rank you higher.
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Do you really think employers are trying to help you?
You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
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