How Talent Development Professionals Can Build a Perfect LinkedIn Profile

As a public speaker and trainer, I get to meet a lot of talent development executives. In fact, I would say my close professional network is made up mostly of people who work in L&D.

Ironically, when I’m delivering a workshop on how to use LinkedIn to advance your career and deliver greater value to your team and company, the room is filled with professionals from throughout the organization – but rarely includes L&D professionals. It must be the cobbler’s children phenomenon.

In this post that I’ve written specifically for L&D professionals, I share a few key things you need to know about building your profile on LinkedIn and what you can do to make the most of this powerful personal branding platform. I also share some unexpected and wildly valuable tips – they’re unknown tips that make the difference between an acceptable profile and an exceptional one.

First, a few thoughts

• Although LinkedIn seems straightforward, it has become replete with diverse and valuable features. To make the most of all it has to offer, you need to become familiar with the enhanced functionality.
• Treat building your stellar profile like you would any learning program you build and deliver to your people. First, think about your objectives and the outcomes you seek to produce.

When you approach crafting your LinkedIn profile this way, you put into action all the brilliant people development skills you’ve learned throughout your career. And when you’re building any learning program, where do you start? With objectives.

Set Objectives

The first step in a campaign is to establish your goals. Answer these questions:

•  Why are you looking to build/upgrade your profile?
• How will you use your LinkedIn profile?
• What result are you looking for?
• How can you use this to build your personal brand? Do you want to become knowledgeable so you can build a corporate-wide digital learning platform? Are you looking to stand out among your L&D peers?

Attend my special webinar "How to Build a Social Savvy Organization on September 12th 2018 and noon EDT - or register and get the replay.

Assess Your Current Status

Then you need to establish a baseline by assessing the current state of your profile. This complimentary LinkedIn quiz created by my company CareerBlast.TV will help. It will identify areas of strength and those where you need to focus some effort. Do this before moving on and pay close attention to questions 1 – 12. Your responses to these questions will help you know where to prioritize your profile boosting efforts.

Then you’re ready to get clear on your audience and message.

Define Your Audience

Get clear on the people you want reading your profile. And remember, although your LinkedIn profile should be based in authenticity, it needs to position you for that promotion you’re seeking. So consider those decision makers that will help you move forward in your career as you define your audience.

And you need to go beyond writing for just “that audience,” and make sure you’re writing for one really important reader of your profile: Google! Remember that your LinkedIn profile has value beyond the LinkedIn platform. You want to make sure people who are googling you can find you. I’ll share ways to do this later in this blog post.

Clarify Your Message

What's your promise? Be clear about what you want to say about your offering. It must be relevant and compelling to your audience. Record your answers to these questions:

• What’s my offering?
• What separates me from everyone else who works in the field of talent development?
• What’s my secret sauce – what unique value do I create when I do what I do?
• Where do I want to go next in my career?
• What are the essential keywords with which I want to be associated?

Set the Tone

What elements of your personality do you want to shine through? What are your brand attributes? If you’re not sure, enlist the people who know you to provide feedback about your brand attributes and strengths with 360Reach – a personal branding feedback tool my company, Reach, created (this is not a sales pitch! Basic passwords are gratis!).

Your 360Reach results will reveal the words people would use to describe you. The great part of this tool is that you use the same feedback form your respondents use to describe yourself. So you will be able to do a comparison between how you see you and how others see you. You'll also be able to identify where there’s congruence between self perceptions and the perceptions of others.

Now with your audience, message and tone defined, it’s time to craft your profile. Let’s start with “the big three,” your Headline, Headshot and Summary – they’re the most important parts of your profile because they form your digital first impression.

Write a Winning Headline

The role of your LinkedIn headline – just like the headline of an ad – is to attract viewers’ attention and get them to want to know more. If you don’t write one, LinkedIn uses your current title and company, and that makes you a commodity – not a brand.

Here’s CareerBlast's proven formula for crafting a captivating headline:

Job title and company help you show your loyalty for your company and can provide some brand buzz when you work for a revered company or have an impressive title. Keywords are critical because the keywords in your headline play a major role in how search results are displayed. That means you need to know the keywords with which you want to be associated.            

Zing is something that makes you interesting. It’s often how you do what you do or the value you create when you do it.

Upload a Compelling Headshot

Your headshot helps make what you say about yourself real. Hire a professional photographer to get the perfect shot. It’s worth the investment. Here’s what makes for a compelling headshot:

+ Face forward – look at the viewer

+ Crop the image so most of it is your face (about 60-80% of the frame)

+ Avoid distracting backgrounds

+ Smile

You're looking at the LinkedIn headshot of my friend and bestselling author Gretchen Rubin. I tell her all the time she has the best headshot and she has kindly given me permission to use it. If you don't already, consider following Gretchen. Her content is filled with valuable tips to help you increase your success.

And one more thing... Name your photo yourname.jpg so it shows up in Google image searches when someone is looking for you.

Make Your Summary Sizzle

The buzzword in business these days is stories (if you missed my interview with the father of branding, Dr. David Aaker, check it out - it's all about how to tell your signature story - and it's really worth a listen - he's brilliant!). Storytelling is a powerful element of most talent development programs and it’s a really important aspect of your LinkedIn profile too. You tell your story in the Summary section. It’s not the place to list your accomplishments – you do that in the Experience section.

Use your Summary to tell people who you are and why they should care. Pay close attention to the first few lines – they’re all people see when they’re checking you out. Melissa Janis, Head of Leadership and Organizational Development at McGraw Hill Education does an excellent job with hers:

“I love switching on light bulbs with people – facilitating those ‘aha moments’ that change mindsets and open up new possibilities. My passion is all about helping people, teams and organizations figure out where they are, where they want to be, and then helping them get there.”

The question I am asked most about the Summary is:

My response: Either is acceptable, but I prefer first person for two reasons:

1.   Transparency. Let's be clear. People know you wrote your own LinkedIn summary; so it's a bit disingenuous to be writing about yourself in the third person.

2.   Engagement. When you write in the first person, you set up a conversation between you and the reader. That creates a deeper, more emotional connection with those who are checking you out.

Now, if writing in the first person makes you uncomfortable because you think it will make you sound arrogant or self-centered, consider this: There are many ways to describe your brilliance and accomplishments without sounding all “Me. Me. Me.”

Use phrases like:

-      I’m proud to have been nominated one of the top 30 L&D professionals under 30 by…

-      It’s a privilege to lead a team of 6 accomplished talent executives who…

-      My team and I have created some of the most innovative learning experiences…

Save some of your 2,000 characters (that’s the LinkedIn limit for your Summary) for two special sections for that very important reader of your profile – Google.

1.  AKA/Common Misspellings: Then, list all the ways people would search for you – even those who have no idea how you spell your name or the fact that you have a nickname. Here’s how I did this in my profile. This way, Google will be better equipped to find you.

2.  Specialties: Then list all your keywords one more time. I’ve done this in my profile as well. This helps you get those essential keywords into your profile one more time.

Don’t Leave Anything Blank

Your Headline, Headshot and Summary are the most important elements of your profile for getting people to know who you are. The rest of your profile – Experience, Education, Accomplishments, etc. – allows you to provide more details and proof. Those sections are more straightforward - they come directly from your CV or resume. Don’t leave them blank. And remember to use your keywords as often as possible.

Now that you have the core of your profile completed, let’s focus on some elements that will help you truly differentiate your profile from the myriad other talent development professionals on LinkedIn. Let’s start with the two features of your profile that help you validate what you say about yourself with input from others - Endorsements and Recommendations.

Edit Your Endorsements

OK, you probably rolled your eyes when you saw the word endorsements. We’re all a little dubious about their value. If you’re like me, you’ve probably been endorsed for skills you don't possess and were likely endorsed by people who barely know you. But don’t let that prevent you from using endorsements to influence your target audience. Even though we think they are silly, they matter. Here’s an enlightening New York Times article that shows that people are making decisions about you based on the skills for which you’re endorsed.

The new LinkedIn format shows just your top three skills (based on the number of endorsements you received for them) when someone checks out your profile. Make sure those position you for how you want to be known and where you want to go next.

Reel In the Right Recommendations

Testimonials help you validate what you say about yourself – making your self proclamations more believable. There are three components to powerful LinkedIn recommendations.

• What – What they say is critical. It needs to validate what you say about yourself and position you for future roles. If your brand is all about innovation, what they say about you needs to back that up.
• Who – Who they are is key. Pick people who are respected in the L&D community or who have important job titles.
• Where – Where they work is also important. Choose people who work for a revered company or one that’s known for being a leader in talent development.

Now, let’s focus on my two favorite ways to make your profile truly unique so it stands out from the profiles of other talent development professionals.

Maximize Multimedia

You know that to keep people engaged, you need to grab their attention immediately. And you know that multimedia can be magnetic. LinkedIn allows you to add videos, images, infographics, presentations, etc. to the Summary and Experience sections of your profile. Don’t miss this opportunity to reinforce what you say with words and make your profile stand out. Take a trip down memory lane and choose the most compelling media you have to make your profile more powerful and visually interesting.

My L&D clients tell me all the time that their biggest challenge is making sure learning is turned into action. To ensure your learning about upgrading your LinkedIn profile is turned into action, here's my challenge:

Once you've applied the lessons from this post, add a comment below including a link to your brand spanking-new profile. Your fellow learning professionals will be able to provide you with feedback, and you'll start to get known by others in your field.

Are you down for the challenge?

Let's stay in touch. Feel free to add me as a connection so we can continue the conversation!

About William Arruda

William Arruda's Website ... William Arruda's LinkedIn Profile William Arruda's Forbes Column CareerBlast.TV

Here are couple of additional resources to support you as you amp up your LinkedIn savvy:

• How to Write the Perfect LinkedIn Summary
• Nine Myths about LinkedIn that Will Impede Your Success