Dynamic Resume/CV and Static LinkedIn Profile

I teach my job seeking clients that they should consider as if their LinkedIn profile is virtually stapled to each CV that they send out. Ignoring this is a grave danger; recruiters will find your profile on LinkedIn if they invest a small amount of time, and believe me, many do!

If the LinkedIn profile positively complements your resume, everything is wonderful. However, if your persona on LinkedIn is somehow different or adds confusion for a recruiter, you can be eliminated from contention for a job without even being aware of it.

Most job seekers create multiple versions of their resume because they have more than one objective in their job search, and/or decide to emphasize different elements in their background depending upon the specific targeted job. In such real-world situations, the static nature of the LinkedIn profile that is associated with these various versions of the resume creates a problem.

And, since LinkedIn currently gives no means to a person to create the equivalent of multiple profiles, one to match their different resumes/job targets, there is no satisfying solution.

With such an obvious inherent conflict, some people choose to make the LinkedIn profile all-encompassing, essentially a combination of all versions of their resume. Another approach is to use LinkedIn to supplement their primary job search objective, and lose the benefit of LinkedIn as a complement for the remaining career goals.

Either of these solutions is imperfect at best, and until LinkedIn allows for the equivalent of multiple profile functionality, there is no way for many job seekers to fully support their job search efforts using this otherwise excellent employment search resource.

Headhunter’s Lament: Why Don’t Job Seekers Use LinkedIn Correctly???

Maybe you've heard before that employment recruiters use LinkedIn in the same way that web surfers use Google: to search for the information they need. In the case of recruiters, what is needed are candidates that match the profile being sought. I am one such recruiter.

Sounds simple, right? Well in reality this is fraught with problems, most of which could be solved to the benefit of the job seeker and recruiter at the same time in a simple way. You see, if I can’t find you, then you have no visibility for the job that I know about.

First, let’s take a step back. LinkedIn is a large (more than 100 million members worldwide) professional networking site. It is free to use, and for anyone seeking work now, or expecting to do so in the future, this resource is simply gold! I won’t recount the features here; anyone that wants more detail is welcome to read this article: http://jobsearchinisrael.blogspot.com/2009/12/linkedin-tying-it-all-together.html.

People use LinkedIn for a variety of reasons. I am addressing now those of you who consider job search one of the objectives for maintaining a LinkedIn presence.

Recruiters use LinkedIn in two general instances:

1. A candidate sends a CV, and the recruiter would like to check for even more detail about them than can be found in the confines of a short document. In this case, the recruiter will do a LinkedIn people search on the specific person of interest, and view their profile. If you don’t have a LinkedIn presence, or your profile is weak (no detail, recommendations, achievements…), then this is a lost opportunity for you the candidate to impress the recruiter.
2. The recruiter has the job requirements for a specific role, and is searching for qualified candidates. Again, if you don’t have a LinkedIn presence or it is weak OR you haven’t included your contact details, then you are missing an opportunity to be available/reachable to the recruiter.

This is a case where recruiters and job seekers have identical objectives, to be known to each other. I, as a recruiter, am ready to do my part, but if you the job seeker don’t do yours, then you will remain invisible or undervalued by me, which doesn’t serve your purpose. We would all be better served if LinkedIn morphed into an international comprehensive CV/resume bank, up-to-date and in real-time. It has the potential, but job seekers can use it much better than they do today.

If you are searching for work and are not on LinkedIn (and you reading this sentence), I cannot understand your logic. LinkedIn is free! Maintaining a LinkedIn profile does NOT indicate to your current employer that you are seeking employment (in fact, your boss/colleagues are probably already using LinkedIn) – there is no risk! I can’t find you if you’re not there! You can’t use the power of networking if you don’t have access to others on LinkedIn. For all of you that may know job seekers that don’t have a LinkedIn profile, please send them a link to this article!

If I find you on LinkedIn, and you match my requirements, but I have no way to reach you, then the opportunity is once again lost. In LinkedIn as it exists today, if two people are connected directly, then it is possible to send a message within LinkedIn to the other person. Also, if two people are in the same LinkedIn group, then it is possible to send them a message within LinkedIn (although this became more difficult on LinkedIn recently, and requires inconvenient steps). However, many of the people that I find interesting are not connected to me nor do we share a group. You as the job seeker don’t want to leave this to chance. In your profile, include your contact details (email, telephone, whatever you want) in the summary and/or personal information area. If you don’t make it easy for me, then I am going to go on to other candidates.

Let me give some recent examples that I encountered of candidates being poorly served because of lack of effective use of LinkedIn. These are the results of various searches I did on LinkedIn for candidates based in Israel that meet different professional criteria:

• The huge majority of these candidates of interest that I found that match my profiles did not have contact details in their LinkedIn profile, and I had no way to contact them. What a shame!
• The person was not connected to me closely on LinkedIn, so I didn't find them in my searches.  The results of searches default to being sorted by relevance, which is some combination of search criteria match and closeness of LinkedIn connection to you.  If everything else is equal, the closer connections appear first, then people that share groups, and finally everyone else.  So, if there are many people that match my criteria, and we are not closely related nor do we share a group, then probably I won't find you.  Think of this as LinkedIn candidate SEO.
• For people that I can contact directly via a LinkedIn message, either because we are connected or share a group, or because contact details are contained in their profile, oftentimes this email address is one that is not checked often by the person, a special-purpose LinkedIn email account. If you don't use an account that you check every day or two, in many cases the opportunity will no longer exist.
• I found candidates on LinkedIn that might have met my search criteria, but the information that they provided in their profile was so scant that I couldn’t understand much about them.
• I do candidate searches outside of LinkedIn as well because of the lack of universal accessibility. I found a number of prospects in this way. I then looked for them on LinkedIn, to try to understand why I wasn’t able to identify them directly. The results:
• A number of candidates had no LinkedIn profile at all.
• Some candidates gave their location as USA/Switzerland… on LinkedIn, so I had no way of knowing they were located in Israel.
• Candidate's LinkedIn profiles were out of date, not including new skills they had acquired nor new jobs that they had held. 
• People did not have the critical keywords in their LinkedIn profile. For instance, I found German speakers in Israel that didn’t include the word German in their profile. I found web analysts that didn’t include the technical terms SPSS and SQL in their profiles. In the same way that you should be thinking when creating your CV/resume, if a term, skill, achievement is important, whether it be language, technical or anything else, then you MUST include this in your profile. And as you add new skills to your portfolio, update LinkedIn. This is the way that recruiters search for candidates in LinkedIn, using keywords, and if you don’t include the relevant ones for your employment objectives, then you are invisible.

From the results of this exercise, I recommend the following to job seekers wishing to optimize their LinkedIn use for access to recruiters:

• Obviously, the first step is to register for LinkedIn.
• Ensure that your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and detailed.  Make sure you include all of the relevant keywords in your profile.  And don't forget to include your contact details.
• Make as many connections as you can, and join as many groups as are relevant.
• It is not enough to create a profile on LinkedIn, no matter how good, then forget about it. Every time something major changes, such as moving to a new job or acquiring a new relevant skill, your profile should be updated.

LinkedIn is a job seeker’s dream come true, and if you use it wisely, you significantly increase your chances of getting access to opportunities that you couldn’t find otherwise.

LinkedIn - How to Connect with Executives and HR Professionals

Do you know how to make meaningful connections via LinkedIn to HR professionals and/or company executives? I certainly don't, and so if you can inform me, I would be happy to learn. I have heard from no small number of people that are disappointed with their LinkedIn results, and in many cases, when you delve into the problem, the cause is a mistaken focus or understanding of what is appropriate to expect from this medium.

However, and I don't want to brag, when I send out short introduction messages to people on LinkedIn that I have never met, I get more than a one-third response rate. That is phenomenal as any sales person who has ever made cold calls knows. This is just one of the many reasons that I love LinkedIn; you can easily identify and reach a wide variety of professionals that can serve as excellent resources for you whatever your objectives are. For more information about LinkedIn and networking, click on this article.

However, LinkedIn is not able to change certain laws of nature. One of these is that it is extremely difficult to start conversations with HR people and/or company executives, especially when you are unknown to them. These are by definition very busy individuals, with a large number of people asking for their time daily. Do not think that simply because you are approaching by LinkedIn, they will magically become more accessible. It doesn't happen this way.

So, if your target is HR recruiters / executives, does this mean that LinkedIn will not be useful for you? Certainly not! However, you do need to consider your options:

• Is it really the recruiters/executives that are the best target for you? This of course depends upon your objective. If your employment goal is found in the HR or executive realm, then clearly the people suited to network with are those in similar roles. LinkedIn can be used to identify the relevant players, as well as their current employers, and sometimes other people that are connected to them that you also know. At this point, your HR/executive cleverness needs to be used to its fullest, finding a way to get to them by telephone via the company switchboard, or by gaining access through a mutual acquaintance. It is very rare that sending a message, via LinkedIn or otherwise, will get you a response.


• Many people automatically begin their networking by targeting HR people, since they should know which jobs are available and will be a part of any recruitment process. However, getting direct access to them in quantity is virtually impossible. Still, using LinkedIn can help you get access to them indirectly through your new found networking contacts. The easiest people on LinkedIn to begin conversations with are those that work in the same type of job/sector as you. For a computer analyst, scientist, accountant…, reaching out to those that have similar background, as one professional to another, is what I have found works well on LinkedIn. Once you are able to begin such a discussion and start to develop the relationship, only good things can happen. Sometimes a networking contact may tell you to send them your resume/CV and they will get it to the appropriate HR person. Or, that they know colleagues in the company that they can speak with about you.


• Networking is not only about speaking to a person about the jobs they know about at their current employer. The advantage of targeting people that work at roles similar to yours, rather than H/R and executives, is that you will have a much more likely chance to actually develop meaningful conversations with them. Oftentimes it will during these discussions that you will learn what is going on at other companies and in the sector in general which can lead to uncover new roles.

Networking is a numbers game; the more people you speak with, the better chance you have to make a meaningful connection. LinkedIn is the job networking site par excellence, and as long as you have the correct targets and put in a strong effort, you will generally find it a wonderful resource to meet professionals and learn more about job opportunities.

Does Your LinkedIn Presence Enhance your CV/Resume?

Recruiters are using LinkedIn to research employment candidates – study after study reveals this to be true, and in constantly growing numbers. The overall percentage of employers varies according to particular research, but it is generally understood to 75%, depending upon the sector. And, almost one quarter of employers have found information about a candidate via social networking which positively influenced them to hire someone.

In such a situation, maintaining an identity on LinkedIn that supports your job search persona is an absolute requirement for a job seeker in the 21st Century. For those that are new to LinkedIn, here is a guide to get you started: LinkedIn – Tying it all Together, and for those that want to learn about maintaining their online persona, see: http://jobsearchinisrael.blogspot.com/2010/01/your-employment-search-persona.html.

I would like to discuss some finer points of the process of fine-tuning your LinkedIn profile to serve as a positive influence on employers, or conversely not to act as a negative influence.

• Multiple Industries – This is a common concern for job seekers in Israel, those seeking a variety of positions. As hopefully most readers are aware, in Israel the convention in CVs is to send very role-focused documents, which means that people targeting different jobs create multiple versions of their CV. How can this be reconciled with the fact that in LinkedIn there is only the possibility to create a single profile? There is no perfect solution, but I advise people to create a more general purpose LinkedIn profile that incorporates their wide range of skills/experience/accomplishments. Employers know that your LinkedIn profile is not the same as your CV, that it enables more details and recommendations, so it is certainly acceptable to use it in this manner.
• Date Cleansing (education, jobs) – I encountered a semi-embarrassing situation recently. I was lecturing about CVs, and had discussed how it was a good idea for people in their 50s+ to cleanse from their CV anything that gave the employer an indication of their age (not to re-iterate this point which I have made in other articles related to CV, but my opinion is that for sensitive issues, including “advanced” age, it is better for the job candidate to hide their age during the CV stage and deal with this in person in an interview). Since I am approaching 50 (boy, that is difficult to write), I also made efforts to remove my age from my CV. Then, I moved on in my lecture to discuss the benefits of LinkedIn, how employers will find you there, and that your LinkedIn profile must be synchronized with your CV. Lo and behold, as I was showing my LinkedIn profile to the group, we discovered together that the years I attended university were listed there, making it simple to understand my age. Since then, I have gone through my profile on LinkedIn and updated what was necessary. I write semi-embarrassing because I am now living in Israel where embarrassment essentially has no meaning – in the US I might have even turned red.
• Search Targets – People that use LinkedIn best do not wait for potential employers to approach them, rather they take pro-active steps to find companies/individuals, and introduce themselves. The question is, who should be targeted in such searches to find suitable people? I have a hit rate of at least one third when I send a simple message to people that I find on LinkedIn, telling them professional-to-professional that I am researching the market and if I can ask them some questions, a pitch to start a conversation. A job seeker contacted me recently and said that he was not getting any responses when he approached people on LinkedIn. After we continued our discussion, I understood that he was targeting executives. LinkedIn is a wonderful resource to identify and reach out to relevant professionals, but it does not change certainly realities. One such reality is that when approaching executives (or recruiters), those in senior positions or those that have many people constantly approaching them, don’t expect LinkedIn to magically allow you full access to them. LinkedIn can be a wonderful resource to identify those in positions of interest to you, but if your target is to get to executives or H/R people, the path that usually produces the best results is to find someone that knows them and/or start conversations with others in the company that are more accessible and try to have these lead to your real objective.

LinkedIn is a fabulous resource; use it correctly and it can be a great asset in your job search.