YouMap
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LMS (Learning Management Systems)
List the all the systems you are familiar with as a teaching professional and student. Examples: Moodle, Desire2Learn (D2L), WebEx, and Blackboard.
Software
List the on-premise and web-based technology in your Personal Learning Environment (PLE). If your goal is to teach online, some courses come pre-coded, and others will require you to build or add additional online learning material.
Subject Matter Expertise
List at least fifteen courses you are qualified to teach. These will include courses you have previously taught and those for which you have significant subject matter expertise.
References
References are not listed on resumes but are included on a CV. Try to use references with a higher level of education when applying to higher level education institutions. If you hold a Master’s degree, list someone with a PhD.
These are a few sections and tips to help you build a winning CV. Keep in mind, CVs are comprehensive and the page length guidelines differ from resumes.
My hope is that most of your resume questions have been addressed. If you feel overwhelmed at the thought of writing your own resume, don’t have time, or lack the motivation, consider hiring a professional resume writer to save you some time and frustration.
All-Star LinkedIn Profiles
This section provides the information you need to create an all-star LinkedIn profile. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, I exhort you to create one, especially if you want to be found by recruiters. Recruitingbrief.com reports that 65% of LinkedIn’s revenue comes from recruiters looking for talent, and more than 90% of recruiters use LinkedIn to source candidates for positions.
According to Jobvite, 60% of recruiters believe culture fit is of highest importance when deciding to recruit and hire candidates (Read more at tinyurl.com/y9bfg26s). Your LinkedIn profile is a great place to showcase your personality and values—much more so than your resume.
Tip: Your LinkedIn profile should not simply reiterate your resume; a LinkedIn profile is not an online resume. Your profile is essentially a digital marketing platform, and you’re the featured product!
From a branding standpoint, the three most important parts of your LinkedIn profile are your photo, your headline, and your summary. I will share a simple formula to create your LinkedIn headline and summary, and then Donna Serdula, author of LinkedIn Profile Optimization for Dummies, will share her top tips for optimizing your profile and cranking up your job search!
Finally, Lisa Jones will provide a basic overview of some of the other LinkedIn profile sections Donna and I did not cover.
Let’s get started!
LinkedIn Headline
Your headline is your what. What do you do better than most people? Your My Unique Contribution statement in your YouMap® is a good starting point to craft your LinkedIn headline. You can pull out key words from your strengths and skills you enjoy as descriptive qualifiers.
Tip: If you’re a career changer, I recommend branding your LinkedIn profile for where you’re trying to go, not where you are now. If you don’t have any experience, you can craft a headline that showcases the top three transferable skills and strengths you have that best relate to your target position. Use ideal or target job descriptions as inspiration. What skills and phrases are used repeatedly in job descriptions that appear to be in high demand and are true of your skills or strengths?
Let’s look at an example for an operations process improvement consultant.
The headline for this individual will contain her title, some key skills or functional areas, and what she does best.
Sample Headline:
Operations Consultant | Six-Sigma Black Belt | Process Engineering | I maximize call center operation results
The key words and functional skills listed in her headline should resonate with job descriptions she’s interested in because the headline is searchable; therefore, she should seek to be found by the key words recruiters will most likely use in searches for people in her field. Make sure to include functional skills and areas of focus you enjoy and want to attract in your key words.
Tip: At the time of this writing, LinkedIn imposes a 120-character limit for a headline and a 2,000-character limit for the summary. Also, the “|” character (referred to as a “pipe”) shown in the previous sample headline is located above the Enter key on the right side of your keyboard.
LinkedIn Summary
Your summary is your why and how and should be more personable than your resume. Again, your LinkedIn profile is not an online resume. It might have started out that way, but LinkedIn is continuously evolving.
Here is a simple four-part formula for writing a LinkedIn summary:
1. A brief introductory paragraph expanding on the one thing in your headline you do best (focus on the core problem you solve; the why)
2. Proof to back it up in either a “Select Accomplishments” section or through a brief story that demonstrates what you do best; your how.
3. A call to action (optional) to request people connect with or contact you.
4. Key word summary of skills you enjoy and want to attract. It’s important to add key words in your summary as it is searchable, just like the headline.
Sample Four-Part LinkedIn Summary
Many moving parts, processes, and people participate in call center operations. The biggest problem I’ve seen in my 10+ years working in Operations Process Re-Engineering are the silos that create redundant processes and gaps that swallow up your customers. I help you see the big picture, close gaps, and delight—instead of frustrating—your customers.
Select Accomplishments:
• Increased customer satisfaction by 15% for a Fortune 500
• Reduced customer issue resolution time from 96 hours to 24 hours
• Streamlined processes to reduce annual overhead by $240K
If we have mutual interests, please send me an invitation to connect.
Expertise:
LEAN/Six Sigma, Process Mapping, Customer Experience (CX), Journey Mapping, Project Management
Voila! This example is short and sweet. If you’re comfortable using the available 2,000 characters, you can share two to three stories that explain how you add value.
In summary: What Why How
What: Your headline showcasing what you do best.
Why: Opening statements in your summary to emphasize the value you bring and why it matters.
How: Your accomplishments or a story to support your opening summary statements.
Multiple approaches can be taken with your LinkedIn profile. This is simply one method. Remember, you have 2,000 characters (including spaces), but it’s up to you how many you decide to use. Use the minimum number of characters needed to tell a compelling employer- or customer- focused story that illustrates what you do best that they need most.
I previously mentioned Donna Serdula, author of LinkedIn Profile Optimization for Dummies and the founder of LinkedIn-Makeover.com. I asked Donna to share some of her tips to create a compelling LinkedIn profile. You’re in for a treat!
Crank Up Your Job Search with LinkedIn by Donna Serdula
Your LinkedIn profile is just your online resume. Simply copy and paste your resume into the fields of your LinkedIn profile and be done with it. Besides, who really cares anyway?
STOP. I did that too when I got on LinkedIn back in 2005. I leaned back and waited for opportunity to hit and nothing happened. But from that experience, I discovered a deep truth— your LinkedIn profile isn’t your online resume. Your resume is your professional past; bu
t your LinkedIn profile is your career future.
Your resume should align you with a particular job, whereas your LinkedIn profile is your first impression, digital introduction, and online reputation to the world. It should be your elevator pitch and your professional story. Your profile needs to be conversational and interesting, but most important, it needs to be written toward your goal and target audience.
Who Uses LinkedIn
Everyone who is anyone in hiring uses LinkedIn at some point. And why wouldn’t they? LinkedIn is a database of professionals for professionals. That database is comprised of professional profiles that they themselves crafted (or copied and pasted).
Recruiters are often given a job description for a position they are hired to fill. They then use LinkedIn to find potential candidates who meet those qualifications. By performing searches on LinkedIn and stringing keywords together in a query, recruiters begin to narrow a list of candidates to those professionals who fit their target.
Hiring managers and HR professionals also use LinkedIn to learn more about candidates. Perhaps you submitted your resume to a company or applied to a job posting, and your resume stood out. That hiring manager or HR professional, intrigued by your resume, will search by name to find your LinkedIn profile, hoping to learn more about you.
Then let’s say the recruiter requests your resume, you send it on, and it looks identical to what they just saw on your profile. BOTH are going to be disappointed, huh? In both instances, they wanted to learn more. Instead they got the same thing. That hiring manager might just assume that’s all you offer and move on to another candidate.
The trick is to tell your professional story on LinkedIn and allow these two documents to build upon each other.
I’m not suggesting that your profile and resume are totally different but that the information on the resume and profile complement each other and provide additional information. The recruiter and hiring manager should come away intrigued, interested, and ready to contact you to learn more.
It’s also important that you recognize that your LinkedIn profile is public. You don’t want to share everything with everyone. Some accomplishments are better left to your resume and not stated in a public forum. “Saved current company from bankruptcy 3 times in the past 4 years” is not public fare.
How to Be Found
When recruiters are engaged to find the perfect job candidate, they are provided with a job description. The job description outlines the strengths and abilities the perfect candidate needs to possess. These strengths and abilities are keywords, and the recruiter will search not only his or her own database of resumes but will also search other databases like LinkedIn for those keywords in hopes of locating a pool of candidates that meet the job’s requirements.
If you want to be found by a recruiter, you need to think like a recruiter and you must determine those keywords that define the perfect candidate of your desired position and inject these keywords into your profile. You will never get found for keywords that do not exist on your profile.
Think about your YouMap®— What are your strengths, values, and motivated skills? See how your YouMap® profile overlaps with your targeted job description. Utilize these words as your keywords.
Not only must you have the right keywords in your profile, you must also have a robust, strong network of first degree connections. The biggest misconception in the LinkedIn universe is how LinkedIn’s search works. Most assume that when you search LinkedIn you are searching the entire database of users. This is true only if you are performing a name-based search OR paying for their premium recruiter corporate account (US$1,000 per month) for full access to the entire LinkedIn network.
Most users, and even most recruiters, who perform keyword-based searches are searching only their LinkedIn network. An individual’s network is comprised of their first, second, and third degree connections and members of LinkedIn groups they belong to. So, if you want recruiters or hiring managers to find you (or if you want to find people) you need to make sure you have a large network. No one can find you if you are not in his or her network. If you want recruiters to find you, start connecting with recruiters.
I’ve found that most LinkedIn users are scared to accept people into their network or send invitations to people they don’t know all that well. I don’t advocate aiming low and wide to connect with everyone and their brother. Instead, make a strategic, conscious effort to connect with the right people. Then when a person sends you a connection request, accept if they look professional. You aren’t connecting just to them, you are connecting to their connections and their connections’ connections. That first-degree connection you are adding might not be in your industry, but people they know might be looking for someone just like you!
The Importance of Your LinkedIn Headline
I’m sure you’ve noticed it: the LinkedIn headline, that little tagline that sits at the top of everyone’s LinkedIn profile. Sometimes, for some people, it looks interesting and eye-catching, but for most people it’s just their title and current company.
When you first create your LinkedIn profile, your headline is simply taken from your current job title and company name. Because LinkedIn initially creates the headline for you, most people don’t realize they can override this boring, default headline and add their own. In fact, most don’t even realize how important the headline is.
The LinkedIn headline is one of the most under-utilized, yet most important parts, of your ENTIRE profile. What most people don’t realize is that the LinkedIn headline isn’t just statically located on the top of your profile. It moves throughout LinkedIn with you—defining you, introducing you, and potentially prompting people to want to learn more about YOU.
That 120-character tag line shows up on:
• Your LinkedIn search result listing
• Invitations to connect
• Connection suggestions
• Status updates
• LinkedIn messages
• Group discussions
• LinkedIn published articles
• Recommendations
• Who’s Viewed Your Profile stats
• People You May Know section and more!
Because your headline is so visible, you want to make sure your LinkedIn headline communicates your value. When you are active on LinkedIn, that headline is often people’s first impression of you, and it determines whether they read your profile or click to the next one.
Your headline also plays a big role in LinkedIn search results. It’s no secret that when a person performs a keyword search in LinkedIn, profiles that contain those keywords in their headlines turn up higher in the search results. To enhance the likelihood that you will be found on LinkedIn, your headline should be chock-full of the keywords people are using to find someone like you.
Not only does the headline affect search results, it’s a key component of the search result listings. When a recruiter performs a search on LinkedIn, they pore through the search results scanning profiles that match their search criteria. The search results listing is comprised of the person’s profile picture, name, headline, location, potentially their current or a past position, and shared connections. The headline needs to catch that searcher’s eye and compel him or her to click on your profile to learn more.
A successful headline concisely states who you are, what you do, and the benefit you bring to others. It should also contain the keywords people are using to find someone like you.
Start your headline with either your current job title or the job title of the position you are targeting. Then add your top keywords. Finish the headline with a benefit statement or uplifting message.
Here are a few examples:
Accomplished Client Services Manager Team Leader Saleforce.com Super User Enhancing Customer Satisfaction
Collections Specialist Negotiator Positive Rapport & Dispute Resolution Ensuring Timely Payments
Telesales Agent Cold Caller Prospecting Finding Profitable Business Relationships Exceeds Sales Targets
A successful headline should act like a welcoming beacon, directing people to view your profile. I know it’s hard to come up with a headline on your own. If you need additional help, I created a free online application that walks you through creating a keyword-saturated headline. In less than ten clicks of your mouse, you’ll have a compelling LinkedIn headline you can immediately copy and paste right into your LinkedIn profile. The generator even adds symbols to your headline automatically.
You can access this app here: http://www.linkedin-makeover.com/linkedin-headline-generator/
Creating an Impressive Summary
Congratulations, you have successfully directed and lured a recruiter or hiring manager to your profile. Now it’s important to deliver the goods!
The LinkedIn Summary falls right below your name and headline and above the experience section. The summary area is where you introduce yourself to the reader. Your summary should be written in first person and should not be taken from your resume’s professional summary paragraph. Don’t succumb to the great temptation to write the summary in third person, writing as if you are telling a story about someone else, using pronouns like he, she, it or they. The problem with that narrative is that everyone knows it’s your profile. Because you log in to your account and write your profile, third person voice is inauthentic and disingenuous. By writing in third person, you are not only creating distance between yourself and your reader, you clearly are not owning your story. Write in first person to draw in your reader and show you are a real person who takes pride in your work and ability. Claim your story and tell it proudly in your voice. Don’t be afraid to use “I.”