Why Your LinkedIn Comments Matter: A Wake-Up Call for Professionals

So I have some breaking news about LinkedIn. Yes, people read your LinkedIn comments. Who would have thought that going on to a fully open public platform, that by writing horrible comments, negative thoughts, things that people don't want to add to the dialogue, that everybody could see it. Yeah, now I know some. Sometimes you guys, you might post angry or you might have a chip on your shoulder, but remember, it's still public. Now, I'm not complaining, I can take the criticism, I'm used to it and things. But this came from this week's newsletter which came from a conversation, as I do each and every week I draw it from a conversation with a client or a candidate or mixture of both. This started from a treasurer who's based in the uk. I can't say who, where, because you'll probably guess. So, Mike, I'm quite an opinionated person. I was like, yeah, you are. I don't mind his opinions. Sometimes they're a little bit strong. But he said, do you think HR will look back through my LinkedIn profile when I apply for a role or my next job? I'm like, yes, they will. What? Yeah, it's a public forum. You put the comments on there, people are going to look at it and if they're hiring a treasurer, you will want to know someone what their mindset is like, are they someone that is quite strong minded or someone that's more collaborative or wants it my way or the highway? That's the kind of thing I was saying to him. Now I actually get on well with the guy, but I know that he is a little bit Marmite, as we say. Some people will really enjoy his company, some people won't enjoy his company and that's fine because the world's full of different people. But the fact is you want someone that's going to come in and do a good job but not maybe one day explode in the office. That's where I saw that as well. That also came back to one of my previous newsletters. Just a couple of weeks ago I had a comment that was made about. I talked about one of my candidates who had Python the scripting language down in buried down in his cb. He moved at the top, got a job, did really well. This guy said, oh, and what probably happened to him then was they got rid of him, they implemented it, saved the money on him and got him out the company and everything else. And this guy was a professional business coach, very negative. And I'm like, whoa, okay, maybe the guys had a bad day. So I actually broke back to him and he realized he had a bad day and he thought better of his comment and so he deleted it. I didn't delete it. I gave him the choice. So I was going to comment. I thought that must be the first knee jerk reaction. I thought, no, he didn't. The guy, as I explained to him, I said, actually the guy, the boss, you know, actually gave him credit. He got promoted. He then at later stage did move internally was headhunted because they really enjoyed what he was doing. But it shows to me all this stuff guys, is public and you need to think about this. It all goes reminds me at an intern at one of the Chicago parties for the Windy City Summit and I said to this guy and he said, actually I'm all right, I've locked down all my social accounts, I'm really careful. So fantastic. So I said, can you grab me a beer? Would that be all right? Because when after intern came back, I said, how was Tijuana? He said, what about when he was a little known? Search engine called Google looked up his name, looked at his details, did a bit of background research and the time that it took him to just queue for a beer, two minutes, he literally went, his face went pale and he was like, I'm applying for internships at some of the top corporates, blue chips. I went, yeah. He was tagged in a friend's photo. It wasn't his fault, he'd cleaned that up. And he was immediately reaching out to his mate that night saying, look, can you just get that down? As I've said before, people said, oh, but you do Facebook. I said, I do, but you see the odd photo. Me, rugby, a couple of family, but don't very little because that's. I don't do social media public stuff. But you need to be careful. What is private for you is private. Keep it private. What, what is public on LinkedIn is public. This is one of the reasons I do this stuff. What should you do? So number one, easy, Google your name now, chat GBT your name, do some research, then go back through your history, look at your comments on LinkedIn. If there's any low value snarky, perhaps not quite stuff, don't. You don't have to remove it, you don't, it's your choice, obviously. But if there's something with, when you disagree with people, you can do it in a respectful way. You maybe have a different angle or something. So express, that's fine. But if you don't want people to read it, then don't post it. This week's podcast, moving on to that solo podcast this week was made to do it by Kevin Michael, podcast coach. He actually said, mike, you've got to do some of this, tell people some of your opinions. I do on the video and everything else. 2025, pretty rubbish year to be honest. There was lots of turmoil in the markets, tariffs added to that and everything else. Outlook for 2026 much better, really improving. It seemed that a lot of people had delayed retirement or delayed moves. Treasurers, as I've said, are risk aware, not risk averse. They'll make a move when it's right, but they've been delaying and I think the risk meter's gone up a little bit now. It's still starting to come down and people are starting to move around and be more open to a move and there is movement happening and in discussion with a number of clients as well about stuff that's going to happen in 2026. I also covered on their mistakes you might make in your resume or CV, LinkedIn, visibility, AI and technology and what's hot air and what's not and what I'm seeing. Across treasury we talked about real life connections from actually some of our conferences and from our treasury career corner lives. And one of the other things that came out, I was listening to my favorite podcast, My First Million with Sam Par where he said the differentiator now is about real life, about actual human connection. He said AI is one end and then real life and meeting people. And that was proved to me just last week. We were in Amsterdam. Amazing com amazing Treasury Career Corner live. Looking forward to probably doing two in 2026 because it was so warmly received. We've got a great community there and the week before we had our London event so the events are going well. We're gonna have a load more. You can look on our web page. I'll put a link in the show notes to our our schedule for next year, but looking forward to it. Thanks very much for seeing these. Share this with your friends and anyone and as I say, if you've got comments to make, your online voice is part of your professional reputation. That's right. What you say is heard and is out there in the public domain. So make sure it reflects, you know, how you want to be perceived. You can control that. Again, as always, if you want to talk about treasure careers or the market, reach out anytime. Thanks very much.