Those who know me know that I am a huge believer in networking. I am constantly nagging those I know – my recruitment team, my customers, my candidates, my friends, anyone I meet who is looking to build a business or who has an idea of any kind to get out there and BRAND themselves and their company BETTER. LinkedIn is without a doubt one of today’s best business cyber tools (other better ones will come along be assured of that) and what’s great is it’s available to everyone and anyone at minimal cost. But here’s the thing – it’s all about using it right….and most people use LinkedIn to about 10% to 20% of its capabilities. That’s a bit of a shocker.

No matter where you are at this particular time in your life – You love your job, work for the best company in the world, you’re launching your own business idea, taking a sabbatical, open to consulting offers, having a baby…whatever.  Don’t ever let your LinkedIn profile lie dormant or collect dust or worst of all sit there incomplete. Why you ask? Because you never know who or what interesting, fascinating opportunity might be looking for you and boy, it would be a real heartbreak if it just couldn’t find you.

So this is it, time to take a hard critical look at your LinkedIn profile. As a Recruitment expert, my biggest peeve is not being able to source the right talent when I need to. You would think that a LinkedIn – as powerful as it is in its ability to connect each other to thousands – would put so much more talent at a Recruiter’s fingertips. Well, it doesn’t. Why you ask…Because most profiles come across as VANILLA and vacant. A dated job title just doesn’t cut it!!!  A profile lacking the sufficient information about what someone specifically does in their job, juice about their accomplishments, detail about what makes them stand out as better than their peers – that is the stuff of real significance in a search.

A LinkedIn profile filled with the right keywords (for Argentus’ vertical we get very, very excited when we see Procurement or Demand/Supply Planning and Strategic Sourcing with Marketing Spend and IT software Category Management and such) – will always bubble up into a useful search and those who take the time to tweak their profiles regularly will get the calls for the interesting opportunities.

Here’s an example – a Category Manager in Retail. Be specific about the size of the Spend and what specifically are your categories of focus – Cosmetics, OTC, and HABA. Without this level of detail how do you think you will find the plum opportunities? It makes good sense and worth going back now to that profile and fleshing it out so that the words most commonly searched on appear on your profile.

The same can be said for buyers in Manufacturing as well. It’s very important to know specifically what commodities you buy. Electrical components? Fasteners? Steel pipes or Real Estate Services? Here’s one we recently tackled for a client with a great deal of difficulty. If you have done Vendor Management make sure to be specific. A useful thing to know is that Talent Specialists use LinkedIn with increasing specificity so as to narrow searches with keywords for “Vendor Performance”, “Vendor Performance Management”, “Scorecards”, “Performance Metrics”. Time and again, profiles come up as empty and really bereft of information about what someone actually does. In essence, if that is the case – one might as well not bother posting a profile at all!!!

To summarize, the profile on a LinkedIn is on its way to replacing the conventional resume. Already it’s frequently used to supplement the resume so a profile rich and robust and packed with information about what you do is critical. Never miss out on anything exciting – an expertise request, a job opportunity, a business idea or a networking gig.  Brand yourself better with detail and meaningful well crafted keywords. Kill the meaningless blah, blah  – Hard as this sounds, no-one cares if you’re a hard working professional who is a mentor and great coach…this is cyber searching and become part of it and see the results increase exponentially for you.