How do you guys present your work experience on LinkedIn? To show up in searches for recruiters etc
At the moment, all I have is company name, team name, and date ranges. I’m debating if I should add bullets, particularly as I take internships off of my resume to make room for more recent experience.
I’d imagine doing a whole LinkedIn update is a bit awkward when you start FT and have coworkers/bosses added, so if this is something I should do, I’d prefer to do it sooner rather than later.
^ IMO the important thing is just always keep it updated and update it a bit frequently, that way any changes you make in preparation for looking elsewhere looks perfectly normal.
Sounds about right krazykanuck, does anybody have any more insights on this? Particularly relevant for me right now.
Resume style – more or less, yes. Picture – definitely (people will assume you are not presentable looking if you have a pictureless profile on LinkedIn. And no cheesy pics of you in casual clothing, or worse, a photo of you with others cropped out. Professional formal businesswear head shot only). Limit your associations to only those which you will actually follow; don’t be one of these people “following” 678 organizations, this makes you look diluted, in my opinion. Keep job descriptions to four sentences or less – two or three if you’re not that experienced.
As for updating your LinkedIn profile, if someone were to call you out on it after you are working FT (and I HIGHLY doubt that anyone actually would), so what? You should keep them on their toes. Moreover, people that have been in the business for a couple of years regularly update their profiles anyway – put a new photo up because they’ve changed their hair, clean up some items to streamline the appearance of their profile, etc. – even if they are not changing jobs.
In my area of the field, it is pretty common to find people checking out your background prior to meetings, after you give a presentation, etc. through LinkedIn. So while of course it is a recruiting tool, you have to understand that people are primarily also using LinkedIn for quick background checks on people. So, if you have any public visibility in your role at all, you want to make sure your profile is clean, presentable and relevant. And that has everything to do with helping the image of your present employer, wouldn’t you say?
DW - fantastic points, your post changed how I look at it… My thinking was that a larger update might lead to my boss silently questioning my commitment, which could hurt my prospects at the firm. Seems a bit paranoid in retrospect, though I’ll do the full update before I start. True enough with the background check point. Thanks for taking the time with the detailed response.
I actually have a non-suit pic in my linkedin profile. I suppose it matters less for me though.
^ Sure, I should have qualified the “professional formal businesswear only” opinion with the idea that there are some roles where just a clean button-up shirt or jacket, no tie are acceptable for a LinkedIn photo (you are a swashbuckling venture capital person who makes your own rules, you are an IT mogul, a professor, etc.). I was just saying that for most people with this question, it is likely that a suit and tie combo will appeal to the greatest number of viewers and is probably the optimal “default look” for a LinkedIn photo.
Which leads me to to vent about the idea that most people will judge someone in 3 seconds or less based on these types of markers – while I suffer from it myself, it still gets me p.o.'ed when I see other people do it. It would be much better if we didn’t have these ingrained notions of how to gauge someone’s “seriousness” in business just based on superficial b.s., but nonetheless, it is a mechanism that I can’t see going away anytime soon.
I used to have resume style and now condensed it to the bare minimum. I also have a suit pic.