How to dress up your LinkedIn profile so it looks smart
I Think Your Bayard Is Showing You What We’ve All Been Noticing - You Have Greatness Within. - Allura
Administrativia
There was a typo for the AMABR 2 on the about page, welcome letter, and first note of this newsletter of the publishing schedule (the AMABR 2 is on Wednesday next week at 1:10 PM PST, not Friday). I’ve since updated the welcome post and the other spots. I’ve also removed the add-to-calendar links - they were buggy and didn’t work consistently (not even for Google Calendar).
For Wednesday, I will be doing a panel interview with Dan Collins, head of recruiting for Affinity. Affinity is a fascinating CRM platform that uses signals within a company, such as an email, to determine the strength or “affinity” of a person’s relationship with a given prospect. The solution belies a robust platform with profound applications in other areas that one could imagine including but not limited to social networking.
The careers site for Affinity is here. Dan will tell us more about the company and how recruiters do their work, having held multiple heads of recruiting roles and various senior-level positions at Yahoo!, Apple, Upwork, and now Affinity.
For completeness, Affinity’s employee count and headcount growth by function are here:
Last month, Newsweek had a headline: Man’s Epic Resume Hailed As the ‘Greatest LinkedIn Profile of All Time, which you can see here. The reason? It’s hilarious.
As a Netflix account manager:
- Responsible for managing (and paying for) account shared by 5 globally distributed family members.
- Exceeded market benchmarks by typing password using Roku remote with 48% accuracy or greater.
- Multi-year recipient of suggestions for movies I’ve already watched.
As an Amazon Prime member:
- Increased order volume by 823% over 7 years
- Researched diverse product catalog, spanning departments from Simplehuman bag liners to cat food.
- Regularly reported on product quality using review portal.
As an uncertified Apple genius:
- Led remote tech support for older family members throughout the country.
- Maintained Siri comprehension rate of over 55% for three consecutive years.
- Once put off a software update for over 8 months.
As a Facebook advertising target:
- Recruited as early user for my experience with having an @edu email address.
- Received a “Facebook Beanie” award for performance in 2006 March Madness bracket.
- Consistently retargeted by F500 brands such as Samsung, Proctor & Gamble, and Verizon.
Beyond the comedic value of his profile, I was also struck by how Len Markidan, the profile owner, could transform the seemingly mundane things we all engage in and turn them into impressive work speak chock full of accomplishments. Len didn’t lie on his LinkedIn profile, and truthfully you may have accomplished even more than him in your role as a “Netflix account manager” or a “Facebook advertising target.” How you tell your story and what you say are everything, and it starts with the LinkedIn profile.
Most people’s resumes on LinkedIn are far from epic. If you glance around LinkedIn, you’ll find that most people share the following information on their profile:
Companies they worked for, and when
Job description of the role held (shockingly, many people don’t even do this)
An about section that follows one of the following patterns:
Overstuffed with keywords that say nothing really: “versatile,” “accomplished,” etc.
Regurgitation of their work history
Personal remarks that discuss the person
What’s missing more often than not is what they did and why it mattered. If a person like Len could turn the mundane activities of his life into a manifesto of accomplishments, we could all do better explaining the stakes in our profiles.
Truthfully, you don’t have to take my advice, and sometimes you’ll be fine. As a counter-example, there’s this one:
However, if you’re not Bill Gates, then read on.
Three sections to dress up in your LinkedIn profile
For a less famous person, I will borrow the profile of one of my skip managers from 20 years ago, Meg Bear, an incredible leader and someone I look up to, who is now President and CPO of SuccessFactors/SAP, as an example of what to do.
The three sections of your LinkedIn profile that I recommend you focus on are:
How do you describe previous work experience
How do you describe your current work experience
What do you say in the about section
Previous work experience
For each entry in your previous work experience, spend up to 1 or 2 sentences describing the scope of the role, but spend the rest of the space describing the accomplishment in specific terms. Here are two randomly selected entries from Meg’s profile:
Entry 1:
As SVP of Product and Engineering, I was responsible for building the vision, teams and products to deliver FiDaaS. Key accomplishments include
> More than doubling team size from 36 to 80
> 10X expansion of Financial Identities from 2M to 200M
> 400% transaction growth
> Helped grow peer and direct leadership teams adding capability and expertise at every level
> Expanded engineering globally with new offices in Singapore and Brazil
> Formalized and improved SLA achievement with > 99.9% service delivery
> Added global strategic and technology partnerships
Entry 2:
I delivered impactful leadership and direction to overall strategy, sales, marketing, engineering, and cloud delivery with oversight to 300+ global resources (direct/indirect) and 100M P&L.
DELIVERED RESULTS:
> I fueled bookings growth by 40% YOY to $100M global run rate.
> I drove rapid cloud growth expansion for Incapsula, Skyfence, and Threat Radar product lines.
> I expanded cloud delivery to 30 points of presence—2 Tps capacity with 99.999% uptime.
> I generated 200% reduction in time and 15x reduction in monetary risk through reengineering operational processes across legal, finance, services and delivery functions.
> I defined and implemented enterprise-wide vision and strategy that integrated multiple acquired groups into the broader Imperva group, leveraging technology and resources to support overall business goal.
In both examples, her achievements were objective, numerical, hard to argue, and had an “oh wow” quality to each point. She did state the scope of her role, but she spent most of the space discussing impact.
Meg built her profile over time, so there are slight differences in formatting and narrative style. If I were advising her, I would adjust to stay consistent. Hiring managers who are sticklers for attention to detail may note that. But ultimately, if you led product and engineering and grew it by 40% to a 100M run rate, anyone interested in meeting Meg isn’t going to care about the formatting issues.
Current work experience
For your current work experience, state the job description and scope of responsibility, and describe the company you work for in context. You can also add accomplishments as you achieve them, but there are two reasons folks avoid this practice:
Generally, separating your contribution to outcomes from the broader team is essential, and framing that perspective takes effort. If you do this haphazardly, you will hurt people’s feelings, which can be a distraction.
Unless you’re actively looking for a new role, doing this takes work. If you're updating your LinkedIn profile suddenly with a list of accomplishments, your employer and colleagues may take this as a sign that you may be looking for new work.
For her current role, this is what Meg says:
At SAP SuccessFactors, we launched the new market category of Human Experience Management (HXM) in 2019, redefining how HR technology can make work better. As an established leader in the Human Capital Management (HCM) category, we’re expanding the impact of HCM solutions by putting people at the center of business.
As Chief Product Officer, I lead the product strategy, design, product management, engineering, and cloud operations teams creating the HXM market category. We are building secure and reliable business services, establishing new standards and models for engineering excellence, and prioritizing customer satisfaction every step of the way. By leveraging SAP's market-leading Business Technology Platform (BTP), we are the creating a market-leading worker experience for the Intelligent Enterprise.
Together with our more than 8,000 customers, we are co-creating the future of work one that is more dynamic, adaptable and human.
About
When authoring your about section, you’ll want to cater the narrative to the types of roles you aspire to by highlighting those accomplishments that shine and are consistent with your bildungsroman. It needs to tell a story about where you’ve been that draws a credible straight line to where you want to go.
My expertise is developing and scaling next-generation enterprise cloud businesses from concept to profit encompassing business strategy, product management, product development, mergers and acquisitions (M&As), and market acceleration.
Strategic, tactical, and operational leadership that fuel growth and profitability is my passion. As a Global C-Level Executive, I am committed to delivering shareholder value through launching disruptive technology solutions, driving global expansions, building high-performance systems and teams, and steering high-value acquisitions to position technology companies on a growth trajectory.
A few recent accomplishments include:
==> I grew bookings by 40% YOY to $100M global run rate.
==> I successfully built new $15M ARR SaaS product line.
==> I led and completed 5 successful company acquisitions.
Throughout my professional history, I managed 2B+ ARR and led 2,000+ global resources (direct/indirect). In addition, I created 6 technology patents with 5 pending and several publications in HRM Today, Workforce Solutions Review and Forbes. I have been cited as a thought leader in Fortune Magazine, Huffington Post, ZDNet and the KQED Blog. I have been a Keynote Speaker for Tech Women and Oracle Open World and have been appointed in multiple Executive Board positions, including TEDx San Jose, CA.
Activity for today
Revisit your LinkedIn profile
Look around at other profiles of people you know to get inspired by how they tell their stories
Revisit how you describe yourself in the about section and how you describe each of your job entries