When clients come to me, they're often simultaneously embarrassed by what's in their LinkedIn profile and hesitant to engage on the platform. But if you're one of those people, let me urge you to adopt a bit of a mentality shift so you can successfully leverage the largest professional networking platform in the world.
🚀 Get on with it.
Stop thinking about LinkedIn as a space for self-promotion and instead as an opportunity to describe what you do all day. People are already checking you out on LinkedIn, why not make it easy for them to understand your professional role, interests, and skills? Here's the problem if you don't:
Taking the moral high ground looks bad. Not engaging on LinkedIn means you're asking your reader to figure out what it is you do based on very spare facts that you've provided on your LinkedIn profile, like your title and your employer.
❄️ Get over yourself
Sometimes, a shorter, more targeted story is more effective than one that goes into every detail of your (wonderful, unique, fascinating!) backstory. When you start thinking of the types of readers you want to read your profile (i.e., a recruiter or decision-maker for that perfect job) then you can start to home in on what exactly needs to be included on your profile. Top mistakes I see made in LinkedIn profiles:
Too much information. We are all special snowflakes. We all have had twists and turns in our careers. They make us who we are. But, if you're a job seeker, the number one thing that you need to convey is that you can do that job. And if you take the reader, if you are confusing, twisting path of your entire career, you're going to confuse them.
Too general of a theme. If you're trying to find one single common theme that covers your entire professional trajectory, you're going to dilute your message.
My recommendation: Create a focused narrative that is responsive to your next ideal role. Once you get an interview, you can describe all the unique ways in which you will do that job even better than the next candidate.
Are you a minimalist on LinkedIn or a maximalist?