What’s the Point of LinkedIn? Should I Even Bother to Have an Account?
What’s the point of LinkedIn? Should I even bother to have an account?
When I first started recruiting in the early 1990’s, there were no computers, voicemail, nor internet. Contact information was shared via a standard 3½” x 2” business card, which business people purchased by the thousands and then handed out with wild abandon.
Fast forward thirty years and everything has gone digital, and in today’s world, a LinkedIn profile is the must-have business card.
How to Make Changes: If you’re unemployed (or your employer doesn’t monitor employees’ LinkedIn accounts) then update your profile as needed.
If you need to stay below the radar, you can go to your privacy settings and select the option that your network will not be notified when you make changes to your profile. Another option is to make incremental changes over a few weeks or months, in order to help avoid unwanted attention.
Another option is to just describe what your company does by using keywords that are pertinent to your specific role.
Contact Information: If you are actively job searching, make it easy for recruiters to reach you by listing your contact information in the Summary section of your profile.
Your Resume and LinkedIn Profile Need to Match: When you submit your résumé to a company, the recruiter, screener, or hiring manager will likely compare the dates on your résumé to those on your LinkedIn profile. If the dates don’t match, it can make you look careless, so make sure to double-check that everything is consistent. It’s your profile and your responsibility to ensure accuracy.
Be Diligent About End Dates: Make sure to add end dates to those roles you’ve already left. If you purposely leave a previous employment as “current'' when you've already left the company, that’s dishonest. Having several entries that show “current” when you’ve left all them just makes you look sloppy.
Hiring managers are noticing that employees who either were laid off during the pandemic or who quit before finding a new gig (The Great Resignation, as they say) are leaving their most recent employer as “current” for an extended period of time. This is a bad idea because at some point you’ll have to explain yourself; you’ll be on the defense and that won't make you look good. If you are actually working multiple jobs simultaneously, then having “current” is totally accurate and no problem at all!
So, to answer the original question in the title of this blog, there is a huge point to LinkedIn and, if you’re actively conducting a job search, you should have (and maintain) an updated profile. It is an amazing tool and well worth the time and effort you put into it.
Stories from the trenches...
A European CEO was interviewing one of my candidates in the US. During the interview, the CEO mentioned that his company’s products utilized "vegan" technology. The candidate admitted he didn’t have any experience with that.
It turned out ok, though. The company had Wiegand technology. It was just a pronunciation hiccup.