Executives — Stop Optimizing LinkedIn, Start Networking

Hey, all, today I want to talk a little bit about LinkedIn. And I want to talk about LinkedIn specifically for executives and how I think most executives think about LinkedIn in the exact wrong way that they should be. So what I find myself seeing with most of even my clients is that they, they say, hey, Jacob, what's the best way to position my LinkedIn? How do I attract recruiters? What's the keywords we need to put in? How often do I need to be on it? And what I find is that a lot of executive leaders spend their time spinning their wheels on how do I make the perfect LinkedIn profile, which is ultimately not one of their strengths. I also see the same with resumes. How do I make my resume perfect? And what I would rather my clients be doing is having conversations, reaching out to their network, going more outbound instead of trying to make your LinkedIn perfect, or even worse, spending several thousand dollars to have someone else write their LinkedIn profile just to not notice any material difference. And the first thing we need to see here is one is a basic concept of negotiation, which is the information that you share with the world can and will be used against you. So if you're putting a lot of metrics and data on your LinkedIn profile, like I led a team of 25 or I led a team of, you know, they generated a hundred million dollars in revenue, and you're interested in positions where maybe you led a team of 50 and 200 million in revenue or 500 million in revenue, you sharing those numbers, while you might think they're impressive, other people won't. Other people will see a team growth size of 25 million as a rounding error. Like there are teams out there that are doing billions of dollars in revenue where a half a percent increase is massive to them. So if you said I grew marketing 300%, they're going to think you're full of crap or that the opportunity was so small they wouldn't even speak to you. So oftentimes, by oversharing information on LinkedIn, you turn off bigger opportunities. So much of this is designed to give you more of the same. So if you are going to share metrics, you're likely going to get positions that are more like what you've been doing. Other mistakes. I see a lot of executives become advisors and consultants and fractional workers and they put this as their top experience, or they'll be a member at a community and they'll say, hey, member at so and so community. It's the top of their experience. Well, in the experience section, that greatly influences how you're found. So if you have member instead of VP of Sales, you're now ranking with members within that community, not VP of Sales positions. So it actually hurts your search and you start to find yourself coming up in more searches with your competition that are also in similar communities. Most of these communities also tend to be focused on more of the same. For example, a group that's only focused on sales leaders or group that's only focused on product marketers or group that's only focused on product managers, you tend to be looped in with those folks when you're found in searches. So you don't actually stand out by having member there or advisor there or those types of things that actually can hurt your search. So that information is better suited in the volunteer section, not front and center. Also, people get really cute with their job titles like VP of Growth and Marketing and Sales and Go to Market and too much. And LinkedIn can't decide which one you are. And that means recruiters can't figure out which one you are either, as you might show up for VP of Growth, maybe VP of Go to Market, whatever. As we've tested this on the back end of LinkedIn Recruiter, the more simple and clean the title, the more likely it is we can control where you show up in search. Now, we don't want you to be deceitful and lie about what you've done, but you have to be really mindful that keyword stuffing doesn't really help you here. What is important is, like, the location that you put is going to greatly change the perception of how you're seen. So if you're in Sacramento, California as an example, but most of your jobs are in San Francisco, probably better to put San Francisco because the expectation and perception is that you will make significantly more because the cost of living is significantly higher. So that perception can also influence how much somebody's going to expect your value to be. So some of these little simple tricks, now what we don't want to do is try to change LinkedIn every 10 days and say, oh, did I get more recruiter attention? Did I do that? Like, am I getting inbound? First of all, there's a lot of macro things that change with how you're found. For example, like there's seasonality in hiring, where a lot of hiring picks up January 15 to about the middle of May, as an example. Like there's a hiring boom there and then there's a summer slowdown, then there's a Hiring boom again, and then there's a holiday slowdown. So if you're constantly obsessing over your inbound attention, sometimes it has nothing to do with you. And so if you think it's you and you try to tweak it again, you might just be spinning your wheels when again, that time is better suited re engaging with relationships and having conversations with people that have been there for you. Networking is really where the real power is made. And I'll explain a little bit why. So when a company goes to hire, the first thing they do is they look around their team and they say, do you know anybody that would be a good fit for this position? Right. Why do they do that? Well, they probably already get along well with each other. So that collaboration, that cohesiveness is already there when they make that hire. Second, it's cheaper. They don't have to market, they don't have to hire a recruiter. They get to see basically free leads on friends of theirs to hire other friends and then have that cohesiveness. It's a lot more cost effective. You can move faster. When a company doesn't have resources internally, then they start to look for a recruiter if they're in a position that they can afford one, hey, we can't find anybody. Let's pay a recruiter x percentage of this hire to make that happen. And so in some cases, that number can be as high as 33%. So if an executive team is looking to hire another executive and that executive is going to make 500,000 to a million dollars a year, that recruiting firm might make a quarter million dollars to place that person. So at all costs, they'd prefer not to do that right now. In some cases, time is, in essence, they need to do that. Time is easier than money. Those types of things they might push through recruiters, right? Then if the recruiter's not finding it, they might go out and start publicizing it. So they failed at the networking, they failed or couldn't afford the recruiting, and now they're publicizing it publicly. And that's typically when you see the job, oh, like, let's apply for this. So everybody's rushing to this job. That's quite literally the dregs of the positions that are left. And then wondering why there's so much competition. And as job seekers, the first thing we tend to do is to go and say, let me see what's available, who's publicly listed. So we're actually searching the exact opposite of how companies hire. And then we say, hey, let's optimize LinkedIn on resume. Let's have recruiters come find us now. We're still in the middle piece here right now. If we could build the relationships and create the role before there's a need, that's where the big time opportunities are. That's where we have the opportunity to expand the pie and create opportunities that weren't there previously. So it's best to work through your network, start a conversation, understand where the pains are at a company and then start asking questions. How can I best show up for you here? What about my background excites you? What are some of the challenges that you're going through? Starting to understand the lay of the land now notice what I'm not talking about is, hey, I led a team at 25 million before. It looks like you're at 25 million, maybe we should talk. Like that is a gross understatement of what's actually happening. You will never be able to talk your career into a higher position if you're leaning on the past of what you've done. Like there would be no opportunities for anyone to grow. And that's where LinkedIn starts to become a problem. So if everything, everything on your LinkedIn is, I did this thing for 25 million or 100 million, or let's say on the other end you do billion dollar deals and multi billion dollar deals and then you're hopping on the phone to talk to somebody in your network about a startup opportunity because you're tired of living leading big teams and you want to have a different perspective on your career and you want to build and grow something from scratch and they go to your LinkedIn profile and they say, look, what the hell man, You've only done billion dollar things. What do you know about startups, right? You've overshared, you've overplayed your hand and now that opportunity doesn't even come to fruition. You never even have an opportunity to. So I would rather you share less on LinkedIn, spend less time spinning your wheel, spend more time having discovery conversations and meeting people and then saying in that instance, I might say, look, I've been a big company guy or gal for most of my career and what I really miss is that hands on experience and that feeling of building and growth and being able to come in. But I've also seen what good and great looks like at scale and I suspect someone like you would value my experience in developing that maybe business acumen or maturity necessary to get this startup to the next level. And that's ultimately why we should talk again. If you overshare, you let other people make that judgment call before you have the chance to explain your position and you lose the deal. So we don't want to focus too much on inbound. We want to focus on creating and networking and having those conversations. And so I really think about LinkedIn in a completely different way than I would say most people. Now this advice does not apply to early stage and middle manager type leaders. Okay. Oftentimes you do need to spell things out, the tactical details and get hired for more of the same and just a little bit more. So we might be looking at senior managers and directors. And senior directors. This advice doesn't necessarily apply to you, so I want you to be mindful of that. Now my team has created a free tool to do this and it's over on Freelinkedinreview.com, totally free. Send it through our system. We'll get back to you in 24 hours, review your profile and give you some tips on ways that you can dumb down your profile but really get to the meat and potatoes of what it is you do. Strip out a lot of the detail intentionally so that you can expand that opportunity once you're on the phone. If you have any questions or you don't agree with this approach, I'd love to see it in the comments below or reach out to me on LinkedIn and give me a hard time. I appreciate it. That's it for today. Thanks for dealing with a long video.