I love LinkedIn — or maybe I have a love/grind-my-teeth relationship with the site. There’s no question that LinkedIn is a job-seeker’s best friend, a business-developer’s greatest tool and an amazing resource for pretty much every working person. And hey, if my 86-year-old dad can use LinkedIn effectively and with aplomb, so can you.
One of the biggest branding elements in your LinkedIn profile is your ‘headline,’ the line just under your name on your LinkedIn profile (and anywhere your name is displayed – in the roster of Group members for any group you belong to, for instance). It’s part of your online brand — which is to say, part of your brand anywhere. So why not make hay with it? The default setting for your LinkedIn headline is your current job title, but what kind of brand is that? Does the super-exciting term “Accounting Analyst III” really define you? I hope not. We can do better. We can get your LinkedIn headline to sound a bit more like you, and to bring some of your sparkling personality across to whoever’s reading it.
So how do you use your LinkedIn headline to brand yourself? Well, let’s start with your function. Tons of people say things like “Savvy problem-solver” in their LinkedIn headline (or on their resume, or in their LinkedIn summary) and that’s a shame, because that kind of personal brand is nearly useless. Newborn babies solve problems, and so do mudwasps and pretty much every other living creature on the planet. We need to tell the reader, right out of the chute, what you do professionally. No employer ever had the kind of business dilemma that makes a CEO wake up at night, sweating and thinking “I need a savvy problem-solving, and fast!” We need an ace marketing person, or an incredible CFO, or a great front-desk receptionist. So we need to get your function across.
What about industry – does that need to be part of your headline? It’s up to you. If you really care about staying in your industry, then sure, include that in your headline. Lots of people can move from industry to industry, and if that’s you, why box yourself in by calling yourself a Natural Foods Marketer (for instance) rather than a Marketer for B2C Startups? You can see that your LinkedIn headline is a really important part of your branding. That headline is going to screen you into and out of search lists that headhunters and hiring managers compile. The words you choose for your headline will put you into some databases and keep you out of others. So writing your short 120-character LinkedIn headline is a big step — because it requires you to answer the question “What do I really want to do in my career?”
Let’s say you’ve settled on a professional arena, and for illustration’s sake, let’s make it Human Resources. Here’s where things get interesting. We’ve all known Human Resources people, and we know that there are all kinds of them. There are hyper-quant types working in Comp and Benefits and there are wise, warm coaches and counselors doing Employee Relations and of course, because people and their jobs don’t always line up in neat rows, there are linear, left-brained Employee Relations people and warm, wise Comp and Benefits people and everything in between. There are as many types of HR people as there are HR people, in fact. If you’re an HR person, that’s fine, but we still have to ask: what kind of HR person are you?
You may be tempted to list your HR sub-functions in your LinkedIn headline. I hope you don’t make that choice, because lists are death to anyone’s brand (or any organization’s brand, for that matter). Think of all the companies you know with lame taglines like Service, Integrity, Dependability. If you’ve heard one of those things, you’ve heard them all. They’re about as memorable as a piece of dry toast, and they say nothing distinctive about the organizations that chose them. Let’s remember what a brand is: it’s a differentiation mechanism. It’s a few words that say “I am not everyone.”
You could use your 120-character LinkedIn headline to tell us a bit about how you roll. You could tell us how you got into HR. We call that an Origin Story. Here’s a LinkedIn headline of that type:
Susan Smith
HR Manager with a Sales background & in-house search focus
Susan has way more than enough spaces in her LinkedIn headline field to get her mini story into it. We learn that she was in Sales before she became an HR person. That’s highly relevant information to lots of employers. When we learn that Susan is all about building a search/recruiting engine internally, we’ll be very interested if that’s what we’re trying to do ourselves.
Another HR person might be on the opposite end of the spectrum from Susan. Let’s consider Conrad, an HR guy who has always been in HR, and whose strong suit is managing HR for manufacturing organizations. That’s all Conrad wants to do, so he’s not going to be shy about it in his LinkedIn headline:
Conrad Larsen
HR Director in Manufacturing — Quality & Process zealot majoring in Global Sourcing
Conrad, like Susan, gets a ton of useful information across in his LinkedIn headline. We see exactly what sort of sandbox Conrad thrives in. He uses a bit of vernacular — slang — which tells us something else about him. Conrad has enough confidence to talk about himself casually, using the word “zealot” and talking about “majoring” in Global Sourcing – and that will be a factor for lots of search folks and VPs of Operations. “Accounting Analyst III” as a headline would attract some readers to your profile too, but because that kind of headline is so common and so undifferentiated, the chance of making it high on anyone’s list could be very low.
Let’s think about one more LinkedIn headline. This one belongs to Carla, who’s an Office Manager. Carla doesn’t tell an Origin Story in her LinkedIn headline, the way Susan did. She doesn’t talk about the topics she focuses on in her job the way Conrad did. She goes in a different direction, and paints a picture for the reader in her LinkedIn headline. She wants the reader to actually see her in action at her next job (or any job she’s held) and so she puts a right-brain image in our minds with her headline:
Carla Sanchez-Worthy
Office Manager/business Air-Traffic Controller looking for an overbooked CEO to make sane
We have learned that Carla is an Office Manager; we’ve learned a few volumes about her beyond that, and that’s why her LinkedIn headline is so strong. It won’t attract every single company in search of an Office Manager. Some of them won’t like her headline (and some may not understand it). That’s fine. Branding doesn’t mean “I must appeal to every taste.” It means “I need to reach the people who should know me and vice versa.” We don’t want our personal brand to attract everyone (do we know of any person, place or thing that appeals to everyone — outside of air and water? Okay, maybe a couple of others exist, but we won’t go into them in this column.)
Carla’s headline has a lot of punch because it does four important things:
It tells us what kind of Office Manager Carla is. She sees herself as a business air-traffic controller. Planes are flying in and she’s directing them left and right. Of course, they’re not real planes, they’re phone calls and appointments and customers with problems and who knows what. She’s sitting there keeping things humming. We can see her in our mind, in action. Carla’s headline tells us what she plans to do in her next job – she’s going to make an overbooked CEO sane. What a wonderful message! All CEOs are overbooked. Some of them are thinking “Sure, I’d love a dedicated admin assistant, but we can’t afford it right now. I have to have an Office Manager. That’s a must. Our Office Manager retired and we’re up a creek. Geez, if I could find an Office Manager who could manage my schedule also, I’d be over the moon.” Most people wouldn’t mention keeping CEOs sane in a LinkedIn headline. Carla does, and she gets the headhunter calls as a result. The headline tells us that Carla is awake, that she knows what her job is at a level higher than “I type and file and answer the phone.” She knows the purpose of the job, and its value to the company. That is huge. We call it business acumen or emotional intelligence or savvy or insight or perspective — whatever you call it, employers want it. Carla gets this quality across right in her LinkedIn headline — we don’t even need to click through to her full Profile to see it. Lastly, Carla’s LinkedIn headline does one more fantastic thing. It shows the reader that Carla is a confident person who can have fun at work. She jokes with us — she’s talking about keep a crazy CEO sane. We know that Carla is kind of free and breezy and sure of herself. She’s telling us tons of important things in one line on her LinkedIn profile. That’s personal branding gold. We can all do what Susan, Conrad and Carla did, and put a human voice in our LinkedIn profiles.
When we’ve got a chance to zero in on our personal brand and what we’re looking to do professionally, it’s a good thing, whether we’re job-hunting or not. LinkedIn gives us a massively important tool to get that brand out to the hundred-million-plus LinkedIn user community and anyone who might conduct a Google search on our name. Wouldn’t it be worth the ten or fifteen minutes of time this exercise will take, to bring some personality and punch into your own LinkedIn headline?