Career Warrior Podcast #321) Here’s How Your LinkedIn and Resume Should be Different

Episode Transcript

Chris Villanueva 0:00

Again, we’re not getting too specific to one role if you are applying for multiple roles here, but that’s the benefit of LinkedIn again, is because you can include more information, you can go longer here.

And welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast!

How should your resume and LinkedIn profile be different? Today we’re going to discuss what your resume should look like and what your LinkedIn should look like, and most importantly, how should they compare and contrast.

With hiring ramping up in January, more and more job seekers are getting their act together. So I wanted to make sure that you have your best resume and also LinkedIn profile to go with that resume. This podcast is, of course, powered by my company, Let’s Eat, Grandma, we’ve been listed on the New York Post, US News, World Report, money.com, and many others as a top resume service.

Head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast to access all of our FREE resources for podcast listeners.

So moving on to the content, I had an event here in Austin, Texas last Thursday and I think that this was a point of contention here, I brought up the LinkedIn profile, and there was a lot of confusion. Folks had a bunch of questions on okay, if I have a LinkedIn profile, and I can only have one LinkedIn, but this resume is this thing that should be adapted and targeted. And I should have multiple versions of my resume.

Sometimes, I could see why this caused a lot of confusion so I wanted to create this podcast episode to set it straight with what the differences should be between your resume and your LinkedIn profile.

Your resume and your LinkedIn profile should not look completely different. I think that’s something that a lot of people get stuck on is if you have like this targeted resume or multiple versions of your resume, then can your LinkedIn profile look way different. And wouldn’t that bother people, of course, it would bother people. I want someone to bounce from your resume to your LinkedIn profile and vice versa. I want people to ask you for your resume after viewing your LinkedIn profile, or even to have version of your resume on that LinkedIn profile so they shouldn’t look entirely different.

Yet at the same time, I want to get the point across that the resume is best created and best served really, when it has that targeted approach. So you’re saving hiring managers time, by connecting the dots between your experiences and the job posting, you’re removing all of those extraneous things that don’t really have to do with the role that you’re going to be applying for or the types of roles that you’re going to be applying for so much to the point to where you can be transparent about the fact that this is a version of your resume that really hones in on your software development experience.

Just as an example here, your LinkedIn profile should be filled out and reveal many more personal and detailed characteristics than your resume. So I don’t mean personal and detailed, like “likes to party on weekends” and “snorts while laugh” but reasons perhaps why you changed careers from a CPG-based marketing role to a SaaS-based marketing role, or more things that you’re involved with that go beyond your professional experiences, things like volunteer work, and projects. Those are the things that I believe look really nice on a LinkedIn profile, there is no risk in having a fuller LinkedIn profile, especially when you compare to the resume, the LinkedIn user experience is way different than a hiring manager who has less time to look at your resume. So with LinkedIn, you can point and click and expand different sections and really decide where you want to put your attention.

And with a resume, it’s just a PDF in which you scroll from top to bottom, and are just reading typically putting more attention on what’s at the very top of the resume or what’s on that very first page. So keep that stuff in mind and know that it’s perfectly fine to have those differences to really get more detailed on your LinkedIn profile, and to let that be the unabridged version of your resume.

So I’m going to quickly go through different elements of your LinkedIn profile and talk about the differences between that in your resume.

Let’s talk about that About Section on your LinkedIn profile. The About Section is where you could fill in more detail about who you are as a person, what your story is, at least from a career perspective, that can be similar to the summary you have at the top of your resume in the sense that it summarizes the reasons why you are awesome as a professional and speaks a little bit more about your higher level accomplishments and things like that. But fill that sucker out on your LinkedIn profile. Don’t be afraid to really max out the amount of characters that are included in that section here, feel free to use first person compared to the resume in which I would recommend removing pronouns and articles and things like that. Be more personal in that LinkedIn About Section and let’s say for example, you’re applying to both Chief Information Officer roles and say Chief Information Security Officer roles, two different types of positions, then maybe you could draw some connection between both of those positions, maybe you can include, for example, some of the commonalities between those roles like strategic leadership, risk management, your ability to communicate with a team and get things done with different stakeholders, feel free to really zoom out and include both core requirements in both of those roles. And, again, we’re not getting too specific to one role if you are applying for multiple roles here. But that’s the benefit of LinkedIn again, is because you can include more information, you can go longer here.

Let’s talk about your Professional Experiences on your LinkedIn profile perfectly fine. If you want to include the same exact thing on your LinkedIn profile, I think a lot of people do that and I think it’s a strategy that works for a lot of job seekers, but then again, what happens if you are applying for multiple types of roles? Again, I would encourage going longer on that LinkedIn Professional Experience. Say you have five targeted bullet points that speak to just your CIO role in your resume so you’re getting targeted and cutting that thing down? Well, your LinkedIn profile, you might include eight, or possibly nine different bullet points that speak to your CIO. So types of responsibilities as well as your CIO responsibilities. I know, this can be different for a lot of different positions out here but the point I’m trying to make here is your LinkedIn is more unabridged, you can speak to multiple facets of a role. And your resume is targeted, and you cut out the things that don’t matter for the hiring manager. Your LinkedIn profile should have a nice picture.

Okay, we just took LinkedIn headshots here in Austin, Texas at our event last week, and there were some amazing photos that were taken. Take that picture off of your resume, if you have visuals and other things like that on your resume, those things belong on your LinkedIn profile. And I’ve seen such amazing pictures out there on the resume but I just think it’s a distraction from what really matters on that document there.

I want to talk about other elements of the LinkedIn profile that I might skip on the resume, for example, certifications, volunteer experience, and projects, they all have their place in a targeted resume, if those are directly relevant to the job posting. In some cases, I would recommend just removing them if that’s not going to be something that’s going to help you as a job seeker. But with the LinkedIn profile, I recommend just putting it all on the table and just including all of these things. LinkedIn is, of course, a social media platform so the more types of things that we can include the more of a chance we can have a commonality. For example, between someone who has that same certification or went to the same school or volunteered for the same organization, LinkedIn is creating this web of mutual connections out there. And so again, I recommend going deeper and more detailed on that LinkedIn profile.

Alright, so that wraps it up for today. These are some key differences between the resume and the LinkedIn profile. Tag me. Go ahead and post this episode on your LinkedIn and go ahead and tag me and let me know did I miss anything? Or do you have any extra questions based off of this episode, I would more be more than happy to help you out. And I always love hearing from fellow warriors again, you can go to our website: letseatgrandma.com/podcast if you want more resume help.

Thank you so much for tuning in and I will see you next time live Career Warrior Podcast! And before you go, remember, if you’re not seeing the results you want in your job search, our highly trained team of professional resume writers here at Let’s Eat, Grandma can help head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast to get a free resume critique and $70 off any one of our resume writing packages. We talk all the time on the show about the importance of being targeted in your job search and with our unique writing process and focus on individual attention. You’ll get a resume cover letter and LinkedIn profile that are highly customized and tailored to your goals to help you get hired faster. Again, head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast. Thanks and I’ll see you next time!