Chapter 8
Getting Your Experiences Ready
IN THIS CHAPTER
Detailing your career trajectory
Deciding what to include and what to omit
Dealing with job gaps
The Experience section on your LinkedIn profile is where you explain your career path and highlight your background, successes, qualifications, and abilities. Most people immediately jump in and start adding experiences without thought to where they’ve been or where they are going in their career. Before you dive in and start adding your past positions to LinkedIn, it’s important to take a step back and look at your complete career trajectory.
Many people, looking to save time, simply copy and paste their resume experiences directly into their LinkedIn profiles. Although copying and pasting from a resume does save time, it is also a huge mistake. The time you save will be made up in lost opportunity.
Not everyone is on LinkedIn for job search. It’s important to make sure your Experience section matches your goals as well as your career trajectory. As soon as you paste in your old resume, whatever LinkedIn goal you have suddenly looks like you are desperately looking for a job.
However, when your goal is in fact job search, your LinkedIn profile and resume shouldn’t be a one-to-one match. Instead they should work in tandem. The resume and profile should build off of each other.
When a person starts off reading your resume, he or she should want to check out your profile to learn more about you as a person. That profile should provide even more information and compel him or her to reach out directly to you. Conversely, if a person starts off with your profile, he or she should want to request your resume to learn more about your accomplishments and history.
When the resume and profile are a carbon copy of each other, the person reading them may ultimately become disappointed because you haven’t shown them anything new or different, and he or she may suspect you have nothing more to provide them. In this chapter, I show you how to determine the career trajectory you want to showcase on LinkedIn. This chapter is all about the important strategic planning you must do before you begin the actual editing of your profile’s Experience section.
Referencing Your Resume
As you sit down to work on the Experience section of your LinkedIn profile, it’s a good idea to print out your resume. Your resume serves as a reference or outline — a tool to help you flesh out your experiences. If you don’t have a resume, don’t fret! It’s easy to create an outline of your career arc. Simply get out a sheet of paper and create four columns with the following headings: Company Name, Job Title, Start Date, and End Date, as shown in Table 8-1.
TABLE 8-1 Career Template
Company Name |
Job Title |
Start Date |
End Date |
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Then, fill in the chart with your current and past job positions. Start with your most current experience and then move backward in time. If you can’t remember a date, don’t worry! Skip it and keep moving, recording other positions. Once the list is completed, go back and research the dates and titles you can’t remember.
The reason to get out your resume (or create an outline) first, is that it’s important to have a master list. With a one-sheet overview of your career arc, you see how your career has unfurled and where it is heading. As you look back on your career, do you have any gaps in which you weren’t working? If you were out of work for a year or longer, make sure you provide context around that time off. (See “Dealing with Employment Gaps” later in this chapter for more information on dealing with job gaps.)
Determining Which Experiences to Keep and Which to Merge
Remember, your LinkedIn profile is not your resume. Resumes are targeted for specific positions that you apply for. Your LinkedIn profile is your digital introduction, online reputation, and first impression. It should tell your professional story and compel your target audience to take a specific action.
I often see profiles that list a single company multiple times just to show career progression, similar to what is shown in Figure 8-1. Although this is a great way to spotlight promotions, it can look like you jumped around from one company to another, especially if the reader does not notice that all those positions were at the same company.
FIGURE 8-1: Keeping experiences separate.
On the other hand, listing a company multiple times provides you with more opportunity for keyword optimization and potential for higher ranking in search results. The more job titles you have, the more keywords you use, the higher your profile will rise in the search results for those keyword combinations. You have to decide what makes the most sense for you. Do you want to have a high-ranking profile? Or do you want to showcase the time you spent with a company?
How you trace your career trajectory differs depending on your LinkedIn goals. If you are a job seeker, you want to make sure your profile echoes your resume closely in terms of positions and time periods. Recruiters and hiring managers often compare the two, and if they notice a difference, that’s a red flag. If you are on LinkedIn for reputation management, highlighting each promotion with a new experience reinforces your successes.
It’s less important to dredge up every success when you are on LinkedIn for sales and prospecting or even if you want to be seen as a thought leader. Think in terms of your target audience. What’s important to them? Do they need to see every promotion, or is it enough to know you spent time at one company and rose through the ranks?
Once you have an idea of what is most important to your target audience and your goals, go ahead and delete and merge experiences (see Figure 8-2).
FIGURE 8-2: Combining experiences.
Keep your target audience in mind
When you are on LinkedIn for sales or branding reasons (such as reputation management or thought leadership), having a profile that echoes your resume isn’t necessary. Certainly, you always want to make sure that the information you share on your profile is accurate. But always think in terms of your target audience. As a salesperson looking to prospect and network on LinkedIn, does your target audience of potential clients care that you were promoted three times or made President’s Club or that you closed $1.5M in Q1 of 2015, a 25% increase over the previous year? No! They want to know about the services and products you sell and how those services and products help them. In this situation, you don’t need to fill your Experience section with a long list of accomplishments and job descriptions. Instead, you want to write for your target audience explaining your role within the organization and how you help your prospects and clients.
On the other hand, if you are a salesperson who is looking to switch companies and you are hoping to intersect with job opportunities, your target audience is now recruiters and human resources professionals. In this situation, you want your profile to align with your resume and show enough information to get your target audience interested in learning more so that they request a full copy of your resume.
Ultimately, when you are on LinkedIn for job search, make sure your resume and LinkedIn profile align and that you include three to five achievements for your more current job experiences. If you are on LinkedIn for executive branding or reputation management, you may not want to concentrate on achievements, but rather showcase your career trajectory and provide a high-level overview of your accomplishments. By providing a high-level overview and not drilling into minutiae, you are differentiating yourself from most other LinkedIn users, especially job seekers. Remember, it’s all about what your particular target audience needs to know about you. If you are using LinkedIn for executive branding, your target audience isn’t interested in granular, detail-oriented accomplishments as much as your full career trajectory and background. By providing too much information, you may seem like you are in job search mode.
Salespeople should show at least three total positions, but they don’t need to go into detail as to their job descriptions or accomplishments unless they also have a desire to attract other job opportunities. Prospects don’t want to know that you can sell snow to an Eskimo.
Salespeople looking to use LinkedIn to prospect and sell more effectively can use their current experience descriptions to instead talk about their company and the benefits of their products or services. The job description is also a great area to detail a customer success story.
How far back do I go?
If you have been in business for the last 30 years, it’s not necessary to go all the way back to the 1980s. When you started your career, the Internet, technology, and business were different. Also, over 30 years, careers tend to shift and go in different directions. Look at your career path and decide what positions have helped you get to where you are today. Which positions continue you on a forward trajectory into the future? Those early, beginner positions can probably be merged into one position or discarded completely.
It’s important to be smart when you identify and document your career journey. Even though you can decide when to start documenting, you always want to be authentic and as transparent as possible.
At the very least you should have one current position and two past positions. This helps you achieve an All-Star profile ranking, a way LinkedIn rates profiles. I talk more about profile ranking in Chapter 4.
Creating a Work History for Recent Graduates
A complete LinkedIn profile contains one current and two past positions listed in the Experience section. What do you do if you are a recent graduate just starting out in your career or a young professional with limited professional experience?
Don’t worry; you can list internships and volunteer positions to flesh out your experience history. You may also consider grouping summer jobs together into one experience. By grouping low-level summer jobs together that are not relevant to your future job search, you are showing that you have employment experience, but you aren’t shining a spotlight on jobs that aren’t part of your career vision. It’s far better to showcase non-paying internships and volunteer experiences over a summer job scooping ice cream. As your career develops, you can delete these positions when you add newer and better positions. Figure 8-3 illustrates an example of how recent graduates might fill out their Experience sections.
FIGURE 8-3: An example of how a recent graduate might combine summer positions.
As a young professional currently working, you can break out your current experience to show any promotions you received so that it counts as two experiences rather than just one. By breaking out your experiences, you can achieve All-star profile ranking, which I talk more about in Chapter 11.
Dealing with Employment Gaps
The dreaded employment gap often keeps people up at night, but I have a foolproof way to deal with it successfully. Whether you took time off to raise your kids, went back to school, nursed an ailing relative back to health, experienced sickness yourself, or just needed to rest up and enjoyed a radical sabbatical, it’s best to explain the employment gap but not dwell on it.
The thing to remember is that employment gaps happen. Hiring managers and human resources professionals know that gaps occur; they just want to understand the reason around it. Mention the gap in the Experience section of your profile and provide context for your reader. It’s important to convey that during your downtime, you stayed active in your career and community. List courses you took, books you read, or organizations you participated in. This information can either go in the position listed prior to the gap, or you can create a new position for the gap.
For example, here’s how a person with an employment gap caused by a health crisis can explain it on LinkedIn.
- Company Name: Health Sabbatical
- Title: VP of Marketing
- Time Period: January 2009 to June 2009
- Description: It was in January of 2009 that I was diagnosed with cancer. The next six months were spent going through treatment and getting myself back to health. During this time, I stayed active in my career by keeping up with industry trends. I read marketing books and attended a number of online webinars. I also mentored a young professional I had hired prior to my diagnosis and am overjoyed that using my advice and support, she received a promotion six months sooner than typical.
- Lastly, I took an online course, “Leadership Communication in Organizations,” in which I earned a certificate. This four-week course delved into the different communication techniques innovative leadership uses within a corporate setting.
- Once my cancer went into remission, I re-entered the workforce in June of 2009.
In this example, the title states VP of Marketing. You can’t leave a job title blank; this field must be filled in. VP of Marketing is the position she held prior to her sabbatical and most likely is the title she holds upon reentering the workforce. By using her previous title, she reinforces her position and level and increases the chances of ranking highly for that keyword in LinkedIn search. Keywords placed in the job title hold greater strength than in other profile fields.
In the next chapter, I show you the structure of a powerful job experience and walk you through how to optimize your Experience section to really wow your reader and rank higher in LinkedIn search.