Buzzwords, Jargon and other LinkedIn Problems

One person’s Head of Procurement is another person’s Procurement Executive and another person’s Vice President of Procurement and Supply Chain. How do you ensure your LinkedIn profile isn’t confusing employers and holding back your career?

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LinkedIn currently boasts over 460 million users and two new signups per second. If that makes you feel like a very tiny fish in a very large pond, don’t worry, you’re not alone! But that doesn’t mean you can’t find ways to stand out from the crowd.

Some members are scouting for jobs, others are scouting for new hires, and some would like to consider themselves passive users, not placing much importance in their online CV. But, whatever your motivations or opinions, a vast amount of people will have their LinkedIn profile vetted by a prospective employer; it could be the make or break to getting that job. So you really ought to get it right!

How are people finding me on LinkedIn? 

Recruiters, headhunters and employers will visit your profile for a number of reasons. You might have been recommended or referred to them by a colleague or friend. Perhaps they searched for someone with your skillset or career history and stumbled across you by chance or maybe you’ve already applied for a role and they’re performing a final suitability check.

Whether you’re looking for a new role today or in five years time you need a LinkedIn profile that’s ready to go. Don’t take the risk of missing out on a dream role you didn’t know you wanted because a recruiter landed on your empty shell of profile.

Here are my top tips for making your profile shine.

Profile Summary

The latest LinkedIn update gives a huge amount of weighting to the top 2 lines in the summary field of your profile. This is the first thing anyone will see when they view a preview of your profile, which makes them the most critical. Keep it as engaging and informative as possible.

Keywords

LinkedIn searches work by users highlighting keywords. If you want to be found by the relevant people, you need to use the right buzzwords. Do some research into the market you want to be employed in; what sort of job titles and job descriptions are used? Which key words are used over and over again? What words would your dream employer use to try and find someone like you?

Job Title/Headline

Job Titles are an independently searchable field. You have 100 characters, make sure you use them wisely.

What would someone searching for you look for? Somewhere, somehow that’s what your job title needs to have in it.

Instead of having one searchable string, you can have more than one title in your profile:

The second example would result in the profile coming up in significantly more searches.

Company

It might sound obvious but make sure you are listed as working for the right company. Your company might have 30 or 40 subsidiaries, countries, brands associated with it. GSK, for example, has 514 results (and that’s ignoring GlaxoSmithKline which has another 350)!

But again, this is a searchable field so make sure you are on the one with the largest population or the most obvious one.

If you are a recruiter searching for a specific brand you might not take the time to make sure you’ve got exactly the right company. Don’t take the risk – get yourself on the biggest and the best (or most relevant).

Role

If you’ve been promoted within a business make sure you represent that explicitly on your profile. Adding a new position gives you the opportunity to tick the majority of these boxes again:

• Successful
• New summary box: more keywords and success
• New job title: more job title keywords

Jargon

If keywords are the No.1 thing you are searching for, jargon is exactly the opposite. If your company calls it one thing but everyone else calls it something different your current boss is going to be the only person that will find you!

Be aware, too, you might not be aware just how jargon-filled your job title is if you’ve worked in the same business for a while. So take some time to find that out. Search for someone similar to you and see what they call it. And then such for some more for verification!