Just revise your LinkedIn Profile?

We are often asked to “just revise my LinkedIn profile,” but many potential customers are disappointed when they first see the price: pretty much the same as our CV Writing prices. I have learnt through some bitter experience that actually “just writing a LinkedIn profile” takes a lot more work than just writing a CV and adding a LinkedIn profile revamp to that work. I hence understand why the American “guru’s” charge $500 plus for a LinkedIn revamp, so let me explain why it takes more work than writing a CV.

What is a CV for?

A CV, short for Curriculum Vitae, which translates from Latin as “Course of Life,” is a fact based personal sales document, to engage an employer and get them to pick up the phone and call you for a Telephone Interview.

The focus in a CV is on – practically, from an HR professionals point of view – the last three/five years of your career history. Hence the approximate proportions over a two sheet typical professional CV are:

  • All technical job requirements covered and confirmed in the first half page
  • First page focuses on last 3 to 5 years
  • Page 2 adds additional career competencies, main qualifications/certifications, some relevant person details

To create a good Professional CV you need to collect all of this information, write it up in STAR layout, and then format it. A couple of cycles for client adjustment, and you have a Base CV Format. Then adjust for three jobs.

What is a LinkedIn profile for?

A LinkedIn profile is for what purpose? Three mainly:

  1. Networking: so you want all of your career history in there, yes every single employer/job and experience. This enables you to be engaged by as many old work colleagues, customers, suppliers and industry peers as possible
  2. Personal profile: your LI profile will rank quite high in Google, often it will be in the top three results when searching your name
  3. Opportunity: including recruitment

To write a LinkedIn profile you need: all the information that you need to create a Professional CV, with as much emphasis in every career stage as opposed to just the last three to five years.

Plus, if there is a fourth issue to a LinkedIn profile, then its Search Engine Optimisation. Are there not keywords in a Professional CV, you might ask? Yes, but you simply make a “clump” of them on the first page, you don’t have to subtlety litter them throughout the words and various sections, in the right proportions. LinkedIn ranks searches on platform as follows:

  1. Relevance of your profile to that search
  2. Ranking three level network between you and the searcher (ie: first level will outrank third level; but a more relevant second level contact will outrank a first level contact)
  3. Groups
  4. All other relevant profiles

There is another purpose to SEOing your LinkedIn profile. When recruiters and employers use boolean search strings via their favourite internet search engine (ie: Google), then the search engine will also use those keywords to rank the relevance of the LinkedIn profile results. So if you don’t SEO your LinkedIn profile, then much as though it might look nice, it won’t appear at the top of the searches. Hence you will miss both on (networking) and off (employment) platform opportunity.

Finally, you have a few client recycles!

Why do people revise their LinkedIn profiles?

There are various reasons to revise your LinkedIn profile. Yes, one is employment or a new job, but an on-platform trick is to adjust it and hence appear in your connections “News” list.

However, after employment the second major reason is publicity. People have read that LinkedIn is this great place to meet people online, and that LinkedIn profiles rank well in Google. So they revise their LinkedIn profile, and hope for more business.

What does this process involve? Well, its less about CV Writing and more about revision to support a defined PR campaign. This means more cycles of revamping and revising your draft LinkedIn profile with some PR representatives and marketing professionals, before presenting a final text. After the text is in place, its needs testing for SEO, and adjustment.

So if someone asks us to “just revise my LinkedIn profile,” we ask more about their motives than if they were just a job seeker.

 

In revising a LinkedIn profile you have to address all the needs of creating or revising a Professional CV, plus include details on your career beyond the last seven years, and finally SEO the profile to gain maximum effect. Add in the potential clients required outcome – and hence liaison with PR?marketing teams – and a LinkedIn profile requires more work and input than a Professional CV. Hence, adding a LinkedIn profile rewrite is relatively easy and modular work.

So if you ask us to quote to “just revise your LinkedIn profile,” you now understand the work and resultant reflective costs.

Good Luck!

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