How To Fix Your Boring LinkedIn Headline

This week I want to go through LinkedIn and talk about headlines. I see a lot of really bad LinkedIn headlines that are not descriptive or they're kind of boring or they just say someone's job title. I see some that are trying to be good and they're so close to being good and then there are some real bangers. So I wanted to go through some of those with you in real time. I'm going to say them out loud if you're listening to this, so don't worry. But if you are able to navigate over to YouTube and watch this, I'm going to actually show them as well. It might be a little more entertaining for you, but either way you'll get the goodies. So let's get into it. I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees. So I know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, you're in the right place to start this fun little exercise. I have just navigated to my little search tab in LinkedIn and I've put in the search term marketing and then I've clicked on posts. So I'm just going to look at all the posts that are sort of the top posts for today that are trending right now on LinkedIn about marketing and we're going to do this for a few different areas. I chose marketing because it's unlikely any biotech people are going to show up there and so we can sort of just see what's going on on LinkedIn. Also, marketers tend to make good posts, so there tends to be things with some, you know, engagement and that sort of thing. There'll be some for my network. You probably won't know those people. So it all, it all works out. So the reason I am doing it this way is that by looking here at the posts we're able to kind of see how the person's headline is actually going to show up in a feed. So in our homepage feed, when you're posting things, there's like a preview, there's a little preview of your Headline and that's what we're. And that's what's really important here. Your entire headline can be quite long but we want to make people want to click on you when they see your headline and the little snippet that's available here. So that's why we're looking here. So just to start things off, property manager, real estate broker, author and trainer. Okay, we know what she does. That is a medium tier headline. I would say that's a three out of five. All right, Social Media Trainer ranked number one for social media. That's pretty interesting. I'd give that a four out of five. I'm intrigued. If I'm looking for someone to help me with my social media, that would be something I would click on. All right, now I'm curious what the rest of the headline said. So I'm going to go ahead and open up in a new tab and we'll go see. So we've got Social Media Trainer ranked number one for social media marketing in the UK on free index. I don't know what that is, but maybe it's important or impressive. 800 plus reviews from Happy customers. All right, so this is a fairly strong title all in all. Yep, I'm going to stick with that. 4 out of 5 When I open it up. This is a little bit jargony so as a non marketer, I don't even know if that's impressive or not, but 800 reviews, that is clear to me. And you can tell that he's active on LinkedIn, he's got a nice follower account here. So all in all this is a nice profile. I also really like the profile picture. I love a smiling face. If you don't have a smiling face profile picture, you should get one. All right, moving right along. Let's see here. Experienced marketing leader. Three out of five. Right here. B2B. Product marketing leader. Another three out of five. Mission driven marketing and engagement strategist. That is like a four and a half or five out of five. Let's go see what this is. So I like that if I am looking for someone who is going to support my company's mission and their marketing, it's immediately going to click for me. Mission driven marketing and engagement strategist. I like that. Bridging, tech, storytelling and community impact. I like this a lot. This is a five out of five for me. If I am looking for somebody who embodies that for my brand, I'm going to want to follow her and want to reach out to her. So like this profile a lot. All right, let's move on to another category here, and let's see if we can find a few people in the biotech space. So let's look for biotechnology funding, and let's look for posts that have to do with that. All right, so here we are. So President at aase. That is like a two or maybe a one out of five for me. This is not a strong headline because it is a job title, first of all. And if you don't know what AASE is, you're going to just keep moving on. It could be something incredibly relevant to me, but I don't know that acronym. So putting that acronym right in there, it immediately is going to make this irrelevant for most people who read it. All right, that is a company founding partner, Imagine Health. Yeah. Two, three out of five. Just because. Again, again, it's a job title. It's not a value proposition. Okay. Fractional clinical operations, biostats, talent. It's like a two to three out of five. Again, this is more of a job title. I don't know what the outcome is. I don't know why I would care. Ex fda, ex nih. Biotechnology professional. Passionate about sell. So you can see here. This is why your beginning piece of your headline is really important. Because it gets cut off. Right? So we want to get the message across before that happens. I would not lead with what you are. Not anymore. Ex fda, X nih. I would actually lead with the positives if I were going to include that in my headline. So I would say FDA NIH veteran, something like that. So I would make it a positive thing. Does that make sense? Not a negative, but a positive. All right, let's keep going. Vice President, Life Sciences and Healthcare at New York. So I don't know even what this person really does. So I would make this a one or a two out of five. Business development Manager at Zeta. Okay, so again, just a title and a company. Not super compelling. Agriculture Inspector at Department of Agriculture. Okay, fine. Maybe like two, three out of five. Do you see where I'm going with this? Right. I want to know what you do. I don't care what your title is. Ooh, I like this. Helping Molecules become medicines. That's a strong title. I like it. Let's go see what this profile is all about. So I think there's an opportunity for more here. There's a lot more headline real estate that he could use to kind of flesh out this title and really tell me what he does. I really like the beginning. That's Very strong. So I'm going to give this a 4 out of 5. I really want more here though. Now this is making me say, oh, tell me more. Tell me about yourself. Right? All right. I like that. Good title. Advancing AI Solutions in Healthcare. That is strong. Let's go ahead and look at that. So we've got X. Unicorn Startup Startup Advisor, Investor Relations Connector, Speaker, Mentor. I like that. This has all the things right. And this is not a resume headline. This is a LinkedIn headline. So I am totally fine with this not being full sentences. I'm great with it. Having our little vertical lines here to kind of break up the themes. My only notes here is, again, I would make something more positive. So unicorn startup founder, something like that, or exited. Unicorn Startup Founder. So you can make that a little more positive as opposed to the X, which is. Which makes it feel a little bit negative. Right. Other than that, it's a strong headline and I like it a lot. Okay, super Professional Services Leader. This is maybe a 1 out of 10. I don't know what they do. Professional services encompasses quite a few things. It's really not descriptive. Founder and Managing Director. This is a two or a three out of five. It's just the job title. Lead Delivery Executive. I don't know what that means exactly. So again, I'd love some more description here. I'd love to know a little bit deeper. What is the outcome that this person gets for their companies, their clients? And let's see. Founder and CEO at KKH Advisors. I don't know what KKH Advisors is. What is the outcome you're getting? What is the result? All of this is to say you have a lot of cool stuff you can do with your LinkedIn headline. But what I really want to know is why should I care? What's the outcome you get for a company, for a client, for a group of people, for a patient population? What do you do? Not what is your job title? And you can use a lot of real estate in there to kind of sneak in all of your strengths or the things you're passionate about. This comes into play a lot when I work with candidates applying for a couple of different types of jobs. So maybe they're applying for program management and research positions. So to get that into your headline, you can use those vertical lines, you can put some of those big concepts into your headline. And I just recommend making it very clickable by remembering that you only get part of the headline. That front part maybe like the first six, seven words to make your impact statement around the platform. So if you're commenting, if you're posting, you're not going to get your full headline in there. You want people to click through, so you want it to be a little clickbait, a little bit intriguing, so that somebody thinks, oh yes, I am interested in that, and clicks through like I did to see the rest of your profile. So tiny episode, really short, but I hope very impactful. I wanted to go through the things that work on the platform and I love to help you with your headline. If you want to join our school community, you can pop your headline right into one of our chats for feedback from me, from the rest of the community, and we can help you to make sure that you're getting the message across that you intend to get across and not something that you're not intending or that is boring or that would make me think, well, I don't know what they do and just move right along. So you don't want that. You want a recruiter, a hiring manager, somebody who wants to network with you, someone who wants to hire you to click on your profile. All right, that is all for now. I hope to see you in the community. See you soon. Have a great week. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach podcast by the Collaboratory Career Hub. Join our school community to get access to support resources and materials and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn Pro Tip. When you you connect with me on LinkedIn, you get instant access to my entire network of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. Have an amazing week and we'll see you back here next Friday.