How to Optimize Your LinkedIn and Resume (Complete Guide) - Session 3

Session 3: Optimizing LinkedIn and Resumes. If your job search is a marketing campaign, LinkedIn is your top-of-funnel tactic. It's the channel for building awareness, generating interest, and establishing credibility rather than directly closing a deal. In other words, instead of focusing on job posting, think of LinkedIn as a platform to showcase your unique value, and create opportunities through relationships. In this session, you'll learn about crafting a compelling profile, engaging thoughtfully with content, and nurturing your network in order to draw attention and start having conversations with key contacts. Conversations that will make sure you're top of mind when the right role emerges.

All right, now let's hop right into one of my favorite and least favorite topics, which is the LinkedIn obsession. And you might ask like, why, why am I the person to talk to you about LinkedIn? Well, I've built my career on LinkedIn. I probably started in 2008. Uh, I've moved millions of dollars through LinkedIn. I've watched it evolve over the years. I have spent no less than maybe 3 to 4 hours a day on LinkedIn for the last decade. And that is way too much time to spend on LinkedIn. And I promise you. I would love to quit LinkedIn, but I just can't quit you, baby. It is just the only platform that has ever been there for me through thick and thin. I quit Twitter. I quit Facebook. I quit the Gram for a while. I'm back on the Gram, but, uh, LinkedIn, I can't seem to quit because it is so damn profitable and it's really built my entire career. I want to share a couple of common mistakes that executives make. Y'all share too much detail on your LinkedIn. And I think there's a reason for this. At the earliest part of our careers, we can't really put anything on our LinkedIn because we've never done anything. And then in the middle parts of our careers, we start to do things and particularly tactical things, and we start to have outcomes and dollar signs attached and, you know, just general impact we've had on companies. So we share all of that, like, look at this thing I did, I increased open rates or I was able to save our company X money, or I've been able to do these things. And we get really tactical in the details that we share. And so we tend to share so much, and we're usually at a director-level stage when we do that. And I think what happens to a lot of folks is they think that be— being at the VP or at the C-suite level is doing more of the same, right? Like, whatever you were doing in 40 hours a week, just do 60 hours and you're going to get there. Do it in 80 hours and you're going to get there. And People burn themselves out just repeating tactical things and doing more of the same. And so when they go to a VP level and they start to talk about that, they just hope their numbers increase, right? They hope those outcomes increase and then they share that. But I'll give you a quick story on why I think that's a bad idea. If you raised, you know, let's say you raised $10 million for a company, you might find that impressive. Some people might find that impressive. Some of the executives I talked to would call that a rounding error. Right? Like it's not impressive at all. So the perception of what you've done serves to kind of keep you in the same place, which is okay if you want to be doing more of the same. But I know there's a lot of folks on this call that want to be growing and want to be doing more. And what's difficult about oversharing all these tactical details is that it's a timestamp on who you were in the past and not necessarily an indication on what you're doing in the future. And so if you're really happy at working between $100 and $200 million in revenue, say you work between $100 and $200 million in revenue, but don't expect opportunities at $250 to $500, or don't expect opportunities to come your way at a billion dollars plus. So what you say serves almost as an anchor to where you are. And I'd argue that a lot of people on this call today are better on the phone than they are on LinkedIn. Show of hands, think that they're— who thinks they're better on communicating in person, meeting, networking, anything in person, not on LinkedIn, right? So we can't solve the problems on LinkedIn, but we can shoot ourselves in the foot by oversharing. If we can bring someone to a conversation with us, we can position ourselves however we want on the fly for whatever reason without being burdened with this information that people already know about us and our reputation. So I'm really going deep on stop oversharing. People use non-standard job titles all the time. This is where things get really wonky. Uh, at CMO of the Super Huddles the other day, we were talking about why it should be the Chief Market Officer instead of Marketing Officer. Like, I get that that could start a conversation, but nobody actually searches for that because it doesn't really exist. So you're probably not going to get found for that. It also happens when people get cute with titles and they might say VP of growth and operations and revenue. And the way that LinkedIn can decipher that could be VP of revenue or VP of growth or VP. It picks one. And when we've done testing with LinkedIn Recruiter, we can't actually tell which one it's going to pick. So you don't know what you're actually optimizing for. And that non, non-standard job titles can really kick you in the ass, especially when you're using advisor or consultant or fractional. People don't often search, I want a fractional, right? So those things can actually add friction, uh, including community memberships as your experience. Almost every community asks us to do that. Like, hey, say you're a member at X, say you're a founding member at Chief or whatever at Pavilion. And what happens is that becomes the top ranked thing in your experience and it changes the way you show up in search. The biggest problem I see is that people spend way too much time trying to fix their LinkedIn and not leveraging their real strengths. So they're trying to figure out the algorithm. They're spending a lot of time. Oh, this didn't work. They're doing a lot of A/B testing because I'm not seeing recruiter attention. I'm not seeing this inbound. I'm not like, and it's all this inbound focus. Like I'm not getting found. But what you need to be asking is, how can I go make myself found? Like you have to go to an outbound approach at the more executive levels, you instead of trying to optimize the, the most attractive honey to get all of the bees in, so to speak. All right, so I'll go through some must-haves, which everyone's heard this before. I'm not going to spend a lot of time. Your headshot matters a lot. It really does. Like, it needs to look very professional. I used to joke that I could tell how much money someone made based off of their headshot that they had, right? If somebody spends over $1,000 on a headshot, I can tell. And it's not that you're going to necessarily look more attractive or really stand out as this like total badass. It's just that you can tell that you care about your appearance, you care about your career, and people that care about their careers tend to perform better. So like we make that snap judgment. That is a bias that we have as humans. And through testing, we have found that the more attractive the picture, the better the outcome. Like I'll say perceivably attractive, right? We've done testing with Outbound where percentages of outreach will improve depending on how The picture is a lot of folks make this mistake with the headline, but they put so many damn buzzwords in it. They're like 4 or 5 different things at once. You can't be a master of B2B, B2C, GDM, everything, AI, ML, NLP, all at once. It doesn't make any fucking sense, right? You can't be all of those things at once. Now I understand you're trying to show up in searches for all those different things because you may be open to that, but it is a word soup that confuses more than it does align. And that hurts your chances. And I'll also talk about why the experience section is the most crucial for inbound. All right. I said keep it simple, right? Here's some examples of some folks that I know, right? You'll look at their— look at their headlines like Tammy, Executive Revenue Leader, Go-To-Market Builder. Not a lot there, right? You know, Kim, I know actually there's some folks here that know Kim, right? There's something that they also have in common. Dan doesn't even have a cover photo. What an amateur, right? Come on, Dan. I'll give him a hard time for that. Well, what I think a lot of folks would like to know is that all of these folks are multi-seven-figure earners annually. And that's really weird, right? Because it doesn't look like they're fully optimizing their profiles, does it? So it's interesting that you can rise and be a multi-seven-figure earner without perfectly optimizing your LinkedIn profile. And that always got me wondering, you know, why is it that they're doing that? So I argue very heavily, you need to keep it simple. Keep it simple. I have very strong opinions on the open-to-work circle, right? No, I don't think you're desperate. I just think it's like playing poker with some of your hands revealed. And it changes the way people think about you in the negotiation, especially at the executive level. If you're a mid-level manager, it's okay to say you're open to work. Like it's easier to find people that way. I get that. But as an executive who has the opportunity to go from $250,000 a year to $400,000 a year based off of perception. Or from $500,000 to $1 million based off of perception, this is shooting yourself in the foot. Like, it absolutely is. Even if it just slightly changes the way somebody anchors you, that's an uphill battle. You're adding friction that you don't need to have. I share quite a bit, don't overcomplicate your profile. Here's an example of somebody's job description where LinkedIn's features actually ask you, what skills do you have that are associated with this job? LinkedIn's user experience actually shoots you in the foot because they say what skills are associated. Now, as a director of content strategy and brand experience. Now, one of the problems with this headline is they could be ranking for content. They could be ranking for brand. We actually don't know until we look at the backend of Recruiter. So they may be only getting brand opportunities or only content opportunities. The challenge here is they added their skills to it and LinkedIn just throws it all under the description. So when you open up the profile to try to read about somebody, it's just, it's basically buzzword soup. I can't actually learn anything. It just adds friction and more like time to understand it. And they're more likely to click off than they are to actually learn more. Right. I don't have a problem with this individual not saying anything about their job. Coincidentally, it's the problem of all of the skills being dumped under there. I also want to talk about that little circle or this is hybrid, like the hybrid piece. LinkedIn asks you, are you full-time? Are you contract? Are you hybrid? Did LinkedIn help you find this job? Are you remote only? You don't need to answer that. It's unnecessary to give that much detail. So for example, if you said, I'm in San Francisco, but the role is remote, people say, oh, maybe they're in Sacramento. Maybe I'll pay them 20% less, right? Or maybe they only want to work remote and we want somebody that's in the office 1 or 2 days hybrid. Like we just can't control the perception when we share that information. So it may be that Paul over here is a remote worker, but he'd be open to being in the office. Hell, he may even be open to full-time. But because he shared the detail of remote, as I click on his profile, I might have a vendetta against remote employees and I might say, you know what, I don't want to hire anybody that thinks it's going to be a remote role for an executive position. And you don't even get the opportunity for a conversation. Now, on one hand, if you're very firm in your, I only want to work remote, Go ahead and shout it, right? Because you'll do yourself a favor by turning off all of the people that won't hire you for that in the first place. I'd still argue that it's better to be more broad and then convince them through conversation and through the interview process to make you remote than it is to never have the opportunity in the first place. So it's something to think about here. Also, what I found, the state and the city that you're in greatly influences how much money someone's expecting you to pay. So for example, when I lived in Montana, I told people I was still in San Francisco because I charge probably greater than San Francisco rates. And I don't want people to think, here's some hoedunk hillbilly in Montana, right? Why the hell is he charging me $1,000 an hour? This is bullshit right now. I've changed right now to Incline Village, Nevada, because if you know, you know, right? If somebody can afford to live there now, I don't live in one of those big million-dollar houses, right? But the perception is, well, Wow, this guy can afford to live in Tahoe, not pay income taxes, and he is in the second most affluent area code in the country. So there's a perception there that if you know that area, you know that somebody is perceived to be more successful if they can be there, just like if you lived in the Hamptons or just like if you lived in Aspen, Colorado, where there are areas that change the perception of your value based on the location. That being said, for most folks in tech or healthcare or most major companies, You want to be most associated with the closest metropolitan area. It's like if you're in upstate New York, you say New York City, right? If you're in Green Bay, Wisconsin, you say Chicago area, right? So you get the perception of, I'm going to have to pay someone more for that location, even if you're not physically right there. So it's something to keep in mind as we talk about words matter. Everything that you share with the world can and will be used against you. All right, now I'll talk a little bit more about the LinkedIn algorithm, and I've done a lot of testing on this with LinkedIn Recruiter. With Discover Podium, we purchased LinkedIn Recruiter specifically so that we could target folks that were open to new opportunities. It gave us the opportunity to search for executives that had physically toggled the box, I'm looking for work. They didn't necessarily put the green circle, but they said, I'm open. So for us, that was an indication that they could be a client. So we reverse engineered LinkedIn Recruiter for lead generation for our company. And unfortunately, I'd rather use Sales Navigator because it's way cheaper than Recruiter. Recruiter is about $1,200 a month. But we use this to optimize and check, like, if we tweak our clients' LinkedIn profiles, how can we get them to rank higher than someone else? And we had tested this, and I actually tested this with the head of data science for Walmart. And this is an interesting use case because, well, lucky me to talk to the data science guy at Walmart, like phenomenally talented, and he kicked my ass for 6 months while we tried to figure this out. And what was interesting is that Walmart has 3 brands. They have Walmart Retail, they have Walmart eCommerce, and then they have Walmart Labs, which is another type of kind of techie side of Walmart. And so originally we tested Walmart as his most recent job position as head of data, and he got ranked alongside executives from Home Depot and executives from other retail stores. When we did Walmart Labs, he was ranking alongside other tech companies in Silicon Valley. When he did Walmart e-commerce, he was ranking with Amazon executives and other e-commerce platforms like Shopify. So we're like, interesting, we changed the company. And it changes the bubble that you're found in from recruiters. And he didn't want to get found with Walmart employees. He wanted to get found with tech employees. And so when it comes— this is most relevant to you who have worked in an early company that has been acquired. Do you use the earlier company name or do you use the acquisition company name? I worked with a gal who was. The chief information officer of the Dollar Shave Club. And the Dollar Shave Club was owned by— it's not Procter Gamble, but it's one of those, right? I can't remember the— someone can fact-check me on that. Um, but we were trying to decide, like, if you're the chief information officer of Dollar Shave Club, she was ranking it with Gillette and other shave companies, which was funny. And it's not like she was particularly interested in men's shaving, which is traditionally what that that was about. But when we listed it as the main company, the Fortune 500 company, and it looked like she went from a C-suite at a startup to a C-suite at a Fortune 500 simply by changing the company name, all of a sudden her income potential was almost 4x. So when we had the opportunity to negotiate on her behalf, when they're saying, oh wow, she is an executive leader at a Fortune 500 company, The perception of her value skyrocketed. So the company that you work for is very important, right? Now I know there's folks like, I've never worked for a sexy company. What do I do? Right? We need to work on that. And there'll be other areas where we can focus on, on that. So the company size prestige impacts your visibility and outbound. And then again, title standardization is very important. Don't get too cute with that. So this is another problem that I see. The which goes first here. So this is from a client of mine who is a VP of product and design, and he's also started being a partner at Reforge, which is a community in the product world. Now, he'd been at Metabase since January 2021, and he started this executive partner role at Reforge in May 2023. So when you update your experience on LinkedIn, what happens is the most recent thing pops to the top. So when he updated this, executive partner went above his VP of product role. And what happened was recruiters stopped reaching out to him. And you can't figure out why, like he's still a VP of product that's still current. But with the way the algorithm works, when we were testing this with clients, the most recent experience dominates the inbound. For those that are familiar with SEO, this is like your title tag, like what is the page about? And so now I'm going to have to give him a hard time because is he product or is he design, right? Like, which one is he trying to optimize for? Because those two things are technically different and can shift the way he's found. Now, originally that executive partner showed up. I asked him to shift it and then inbound attention returned. So these are the little things, the little nuances that not a lot of people understand, because I don't think they've reverse engineered Recruiter to try to see how it works. I hope they fix this and can read better. But in our testing, no matter how many keywords we put in the summary, no matter how much bullshit fluff we put in the headline, no matter how much we added skills, it did not impact the search materially. But when we changed the title or the company, everything changed. One other piece that I actually don't have in the deck, but it's really important. The industry you choose to associate yourself with. Changes how you're found as well. So in the— when you're on your profile and you click the little pencil to edit things, it gives you an opportunity to, to test what industry you're in. So it's like computer software, healthcare, manufacturing, whatever. And that particular piece actually influences your search quite a bit, and you wouldn't even know it because it's hidden. And in some cases, somebody changed it. You probably changed it 10 years ago and didn't change it again. And so sometimes you need to shift that to computer software. Sometimes you need to shift that to healthcare, whatever it is, maybe AI. If you're running into a situation where you haven't been found by recruiters for a long time, I like to toggle that and just change the industry. Because there's a lot of very adjacent similar industries where you could argue, maybe I belong in any one of these three. You can switch your industry in that section. Wait about 72 hours for LinkedIn to understand the change. We call that propagation, right? And then see if inbound attention returns. So there's like one little quick hit where you can change it and see, is anybody coming my direction? Again, I'd argue not to overly emphasize this because we don't want to wait for someone to find us, especially when people are waiting to take money for our mortgage. Like, we need to get active. So optimization things, uh, everything in the experience section should be high level. And don't worry, I'm going to walk through some use cases here. And then we also have a lot of details in the workbook on how to cover this. I'd argue to remove advisor, consultant, fractional from your job titles specifically, unless you want to only be an advisor or only be a consultant or only be fractional, right? If you are fractional, You should know that you're not going to get a lot of inbound attention. You need to sell your ass off to close more deals. Like, that's the reality of what we're working with here. So you can, in theory, shoot yourself in the foot by doing that. Really, the lesson here is only talk about things that you want to be doing more of, right? It's too much of a logic leap for someone to go through your experience and see all this stuff and then magically predict that you want a W-2 again. Magically say, oh, I'm going to give this person a shot at $500 million instead of $100 million. Like, that just doesn't happen. People don't do that. And I think there's a reason for it. It's that if you're an executive hiring another executive, you have to hire someone who's been there before to cover your ass. Because if it doesn't work out, you can turn to everyone and say, what did you want from me? They had all the experience on paper, right? Like, you get to cover your ass. I hired this job that's 10x what you were, and I took a chance on you, and then you shit the bed on me. Like, I'm getting fired too. 'Cause my dumb ass took a chance on you, right? So people don't do that. Most people play safe, right? So Paul has to be exceptionally persuasive to win me over to take that chance. And we'll talk about more ways to do that as well. And honestly, it's fear. And I think it's bad leadership to not take a chance on people, but that's the world we live in. All right. Now I want to go to a live demonstration, which means I'm going to have to stop sharing for a second. Um, oh, here's Dan again, right? Some of the things here, just simple, simple progression, one sentence per role, right? Because when you expand this out and if I'm trying to actually learn about Dan and I expand this out, I can actually very quickly scan, okay, Roku, 7, 8 years, ad council member, great. Cornell, great. Nielsen, right? This tells a story. He doesn't have a lot of data, but it shows like a chronological piece. And if it was packed full of 50 skills or if it had a ton of content here, you got to scroll and you got to scroll and you got to scroll. And then every one of those pieces that you have to read is a reason to disqualify you. So it's some, it's a, it's, I can't stress that enough that less is often more, especially for executives. It's okay if you're a director to say, I'm the email wizard and these are my email outcomes because the person that's going to hire you is an executive saying, I just need someone to solve this one problem. Right. Executives are more broad in their scope. I also wanted to quickly show what a good recruiter looks like. Right? You'll notice that all of these folks have great headshots, like front and center, like with Kate here. She does share a little bit more, but keep in mind, she's a business owner, right? This is more of an entrepreneurial profile. Talks about these are the things that she's focused on. This is where she starts to share some of her featured work because she's a business owner here, right? And then you'll see in the experience, she doesn't have to say much because her reputation is so good. Now, I might give her a hard time for the hybrid piece, but honestly, I'm kind of scared to talk to Kate negatively ever. Quality is more important than quantity, right? I have 90 recommendations and nobody really cares. Basically, I'll get people, can I talk to some of your past clients because I want to see if you're worthwhile? And I'm like, do you want to just reach out to any of the 90 people that are on my profile, please? I can do some digging. Right. Um, so people don't often see that, but if you have a powerful recommendation, like make sure it's somebody meaningful, right. And focus on those. Uh, one of the things I do like for recommendations, it's not really something that I think works against you or for you. You probably should have about 10 at this stage in your career. Naturally. What I like the most about recommendations is how do other people talk about you? Like if you ask other people what your superpower is, the value in that is the perspective you're going to gain from there. Opinions right now, not all opinions are created equally. One of the things I did is I took all 90 of my recommendations and I put it into a— I put it in Claude, which is like ChatGPT, and I asked it, who am I based off of what you know from how people talk about me? And so there are— I know there's a lot of marketers in the room. Marketers use client testimonials to inform their messaging, right? We can do that for our careers. We think about going to market for ourselves and putting ourselves out there. How people talk about you when you're not in the room is part of your reputation. Now, psychologically, I'd like to guide how they talk about you, give them the words you want them to use and, and help them. And we'll talk about ways to do that as we talk about influence. But that, those are some of the elements that are most important, right? When it comes to that. So I wanted to real quickly talk about a, an example of like the influential an influencer profile like Ruben here, almost 450,000 followers. Influencers tend to have close headshot, colorful backgrounds so that every time it hits you in the feed, you recognize who it is. Right? So this is a marketing mastery type play, right? It is very quickly positioning them as thought leader in AI here. And you'll also see very simple master AI before it masters you. Very provocative statement. I'm not really sure what that means. I don't know, for some reason I feel like I can trust this guy with how pink everything is. Like all of his branding's on the same page. He doesn't share too much detail, but that's— he shares like impact statements, 8,000 to 400,000 followers. Like what I'm doing is working. There's proof points here. So maybe this is for Jared, right? As you're talking about your entrepreneurial efforts being your most recent, your positioning for your business is different than your positioning as an employee. And so the real takeaway here is you have to commit to the direction that you're going. Don't take advice from Ruben if you're not going that path. Right. Don't look at my profile. I'm like, Jacob seems to know a lot about LinkedIn profiles. Let me copy his profile. Right. I am an entrepreneur that pushes millions of dollars through LinkedIn. Job seekers and entrepreneurs are different in terms of their positioning. And we need to be mindful of that. Another example, like Ravi here, he's got this little subscribe to my newsletter, transform your influence so you can sell, impact, and inspire. Trusted by— here's some third-party validation, right? So this is an influence trigger. Got a nice headshot. I'd argue that you should be a little bit more zoomed in. You know, Ravi, you got a great face. Show it off a little more, right? Typically, the profiles with a closer headshot tend to perform better. Otherwise, you'll note he's telling stories here. He has featured— this is an entrepreneur's profile, different than how most folks will go to market. Um, also, if you don't know Ravi, I recommend following him. He's got some great tips on storytelling. I want to say this is where I would spend more time on LinkedIn, not publishing content like this per se, but this is an example of a post I did while we were at a conference last week. And actually it was one of my more higher performing posts of recently. So I don't want you to pay attention to the details of the post necessarily. I'm not trying to turn everyone into a broadcast journalist here. Instead, I want to focus on the conversations that are happening in the comments, because for a lot of folks here, I think publishing content regularly sounds like a chore. I guess pretty difficult, right? You need to come up with a perspective on something. You don't want to use AI all the time and look like everybody else. You want to kind of focus, like it takes some time and it's a lot of mental energy that you should probably be spending networking and having conversations. But what you can do is you can take folks that are already active, right? That already have followings. Um, uh, like Drew Neisser of, of, of CMO Huddles as an example, like always creates a lot of engagement. There's, you know, Sam Jacobs and Pavilion always creates a lot of engagement. There is somebody leading a community or somebody, some figurehead who is a subject matter expert or influencing larger swaths of people. You can also do more generalist. Remember if we talked about the types of people you should have in your circle in the first presentation we had, like you could go to a Chris Voss about negotiation and look at some of his content and engage in the comment section. Just having smart engagements and seeing what people are saying helps you find the right people to talk to naturally. So that helps you identify alignment. So rather than setting out like, here, here's my broadcast, please come to me. Like, it takes a long time to get your messaging really, really good. It takes a lot of effort. And I'd argue that just reaching out cold outbound, you might reach out to 100 people and hear back from one. That sounds like a miserable experience, but if you can go read on folks, find the conversations and comment, start to get your face more familiar with certain publishers. That's going to be a significantly stronger use of your time on LinkedIn than tweaking your profile and trying to attract recruiters through inbound or going straight outbound and trying to sell everyone and get on the phone. Like, that is where we found the most impact that moves the needle. So conversations in here, tagging other folks when relevant. Um, Sima here had some questions. She also got 5 engagements from her question. So she got 5 people to at least understand who she is to a degree, or at least get some recognition of her face. And you'll notice that, that short about section or that short headline, it's very easy for her, Chief Marketing Officer at Expel. Right. I know a lot of folks say don't use the company title or, you know, like, do more. This is your opportunity to sell, right? Well, they only show a few characters. You better hook them right there or people aren't going to know what you do, right? Same Kimberly here, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Officer. Not sure which one it is, but then we can't read the rest of it anyway. So we only have this much space to make Yeah, Sammy, chief marketing or growth-focused CMO, chief marketing officer. That's it. Right. So some things that at least understand, oh, this person's coming from an executive position in marketing. That's all I need to know. It sets the stage and the frame of which you will be judged. I wanted to have a list of ideas that could be a takeaway. So everyone feel free to take a screenshot here. Uh, this is really some metrics you can follow, some tactical ways that you can look at it. Like just spend 15 to 20 minutes a day on LinkedIn and make that a habit. Comment on a couple things, follow a couple folks that make sense to you. Just get in the habit of doing this, but don't stress out so much on doom scrolling LinkedIn, waiting for a recruiter to find you kind of thing. Um, so just a few tips here and I'll move on to resume. All right. Now we want to simplify your resume and. When I think about, when I think about the last 2 years of my clients, I cannot think of a client that was, that got a job based on their resume. I can't think of a client who got a job through applying for a job online. The last 2 years of my clients, I cannot think of somebody who went to a job post, applied for their job, submitted their resume and cover letter, and got that job. In fact, even my clients that tend to be multi-seven-figure earners don't get interviews when they apply for jobs the traditional way. So I want to just simplify, simplify the resume. I, similar to LinkedIn, we often focus too much on tactical details. Some of the data is too, like, it's outdated, right? You're sharing stuff from 20 years ago that's no longer relevant. That stuff tends to be more tactical than the leadership that you're doing. Most folks really struggle to quantify the strategic impact that they've had. So if you're going to include stuff that's older on your resume, think about it with what you know now about business and what impact you actually had. Like, it's important to— like, I've probably updated my resume well over 2,000 times, and I don't apply for jobs. I'm just always interested mostly in how do I think about what it is I've done and the impact that I've had. It's almost a reminder to help you with storytelling more than it is a marketing material that's out there in the world to close a job for you. So the purpose of the resume is to start a conversation, not get the job. You can't sell yourself immediately in a resume. You just need to be interesting enough for someone to say, yeah, I want to talk to that person. Well, that looks great. Tracy says she's this badass executive. Sometimes they only read the first line in 6 seconds and say, yep, I want to talk to her. Right. And if you think I'm full of shit by saying the goldfish attention span on this stuff, you've never hired anyone before or you've never sifted through 250 resumes. Like, you won't do it. Like, maybe there's a future where we throw all that into AI and it says, look, here are the 3 people based off of these factors. Like, maybe that's happening. I don't really know how to optimize for that. I do know how to control network and have conversations and bring deals to you. Um, really focus on being concise, 3 to 5 important bullets per role. And then the framework that I like to use is an adaptation of the STAR interview framework. Um, if anyone's familiar with STAR, when you're interviewing, it, it stands for the situation you were in, the tasks you were assigned to, the actions you took, and the results. Now, I don't know the difference between situation and task, so I just shortened it to CAR. Which is context, action, result. So what is the context of what you did? What's the action that you took and what's the result? So here's an example of writing a bullet for your LinkedIn. We won't go into too much detail here, right? But it's led reorganization of 300-person team during a downturn, implemented this territory-based structure resulting in X, right? So that's the framework for things. Here's the context, here's the action. Here's the result. We have this stuff in the workbook too. So again, won't go into too much detail, but I want to cover it just to show we can keep it simple. A lot of folks ask, should I have a one-page resume? Should I have a two-page resume? Should I have a three-page resume? It honestly doesn't matter that much. Most of the times you're sending a resume that's going to impact you materially in the search, it's going to be sent through email to somebody asking for it specifically, not necessarily through an ATS. At this level specifically. It's important that we set the stage with the executive summary right off the bat. We focus on the last 10 to 15 years more heavily than others. Now I want to go, I'll share my resume real quick, which everyone can have kind of as a template just to take ideas, whatever. People steal stuff off my resume all the time, um, just in terms of how to position things. And again, we've optimized this over. Over years of studying what works and what doesn't work. So I'll share briefly how I would think about your resume here. So there's a couple of things that are of note here. So name, easy, easy number, easy contact information. Great. When it comes to the headline, this is what sets the stage for how you will be judged the rest of the profile. This is similar to the headline on LinkedIn. And that this is what I want to be known for specifically. I will be judged whether that's true or not based off of everything else I see afterwards. So I think the, the headline section, the first third of the resume has to speak the message that you need. The rest of it, like I may or may not get to depending on how interested I am in you. We have a compelling bio. Uh, we call this a word cloud, things that you're best known for. Moving into executives have things like signature achievements or leadership attributes or Executive resumes tend to have a differentiation based off of a couple key areas where they're focused. I went deeper on this intentionally. I went deeper on this because the purpose of my resume is to educate, not to sell. So I'm giving different ways of messaging things. You don't have to use all of these ideas. It's specifically to see context, action, result in Working order, different ways to position different things you may do. The idea is for you to take this as a guideline, not as gospel. Okay. This is why I also extended it out to 3 pages, which it hasn't been in years. So signature achievements, different areas to bring things together. Most recent professional experience, why those things are important. Relatively straightforward here. Again, most of this is in the workbook for you to dive into. I also included consulting experience so that you can see how you can differentiate W-2 experience from consulting experience if you choose to market both of those things in your content. This is one way to do that. And then if you don't want to share the details, but you want to share the brand names you worked for, you do something like this, like, hey, here's some prior experience. It's really just there to note that I've worked in some other areas. The, the reason that I included this is that I think I've been on marketing teams that were acquired 5 or 6 times. And so there was some learning through that, that a lot of people tend to be interested in, in the software space. Oh, you've been on teams that have been successful enough to be acquired. That means something. Let's talk about that in more detail. Honestly, I never talk about any of this anymore. And if you go to my LinkedIn profile, I have hidden every company I've ever worked for. Which you think would be a benefit for me to have, you know, Jacob was a chief marketing officer once, or Jacob Warwick was a director at a Fortune 500. Like you think that would provide benefit, but instead I'm only focused on the future and helping executives find work. So positioning-wise, you want to be mindful of what you keep in here. And then I give an example of how to share thought leadership and influence. You'll notice that I don't have college education on here because I didn't go to college. So there's that. Um, if you want to know how to position college, it's usually right there. Hey, I went to Harvard. I got my master's. It looks like this. Put the dates on there. Relatively straightforward. Not something you need to obsess on.

Session 3 workbook. This week, your assignment is to turn your LinkedIn profile into a magnet for hidden opportunities. You'll take actionable steps to make it stand out. Like updating your photo, headline, and about section to highlight your professional story and leadership focus. Then, you'll create a simple strategy for creating and engaging with content. Remember, a solid profile is important, but meaningful networking is what will open the right doors for you.