LinkedIn Profile Protocol: A Guide for Professionals

Angela Guido

Why a great LinkedIn profile is essential for career success

You probably already have a LinkedIn profile, but if you’re like many professionals, you might not realize just how important it is, as a step in personal branding, to keep it updated and looking good. This article will show you how to create a great LinkedIn profile, which I highly recommend you take the time to do—even if you think your next job will come through other channels.

Do professionals need LinkedIn?

Many professionals wonder what the heck they’re supposed to do with LinkedIn.

It’s a good question, and one that many are still trying to figure out. Every professional needs a LinkedIn profile, but what’s the real value of all those connections?

I was one of the first million users of LinkedIn, because I was actually in business school when it launched.

This was even before Facebook, so everybody thought it was going to change the way we network and do business.

It’s been over a decade since I opened my account, and it hasn’t exactly done either of those things. The basics of building relationships remain the same—emotional connection, open communication, shared experiences—but LinkedIn has added new dimensions to how we connect professionally. It has become a critical hub for online networking, job discovery, and personal branding for professionals across industries.

In light of all that, you might think LinkedIn merely adds another item to your professional to-do list: “Well, it hasn’t helped me get a job yet, but I guess I’d better keep it up to date…” but LinkedIn actually HAS changed the working world in a meaningful way. Here’s why you’re better off keeping it on the “to do” list.

What is LinkedIn good for?

The word “networking” sets up a transactional paradigm that – let’s face it – feels smarmy. It’s much more empowering to engage in making genuine connections and nurturing meaningful friendships than to “network.” Friendship makes work more rewarding and enables us to fulfill our full potential.

Making friends as an adult is hard. If you consider yourself just barely an adult, you’ll soon understand what I mean. Without the shared experience of college or graduate school, without the large overlapping networks we traffic in as teenagers, and without the luxury of schedule autonomy and extensive free time to devote to budding friendships, building genuine new relationships is infinitely harder.

LinkedIn doesn’t really solve that problem – in that it doesn’t give you shared experience, face time, or schedule autonomy – but it does give you one important thing that makes it worth your time and energy: access to new people.

Building friendships takes time, consistency, and perseverance. To find one person that you want to spend time with, you’ll have to meet at least 10. If you spend the majority of your life working with the same people, your opportunities for social churn are minimal. Your sources of new social connections in adult life are effectively limited to four places:

Your morning or evening commute
Live networking events
Online dating
LinkedIn

These are the four primary sources of new connections in adult life. These are the places where you can come into contact with a large number of new people and decide which of them you’d like to turn into friends.

The smart way to make connections on LinkedIn

Most LinkedIn users aren’t interested in being contacted by distant strangers. If you’ve ever received a cold email on LinkedIn, you might have ignored it or sent a polite, “Thanks, but I don’t have time.” Those would have been appropriate responses.

This is because LinkedIn isn’t a live networking event where you can approach just anyone—it’s a platform that allows you to strategically connect with people through mutual acquaintances and relevant content.

LinkedIn’s true genius lies in its transparency and access. You can see how many degrees of separation exist between you and someone else, and ideally, find a way to get personally introduced. This ability to facilitate introductions, which can lead to meaningful connections on your professional journey through mutual connections is what makes LinkedIn so valuable.

Reid Hoffman understood that the best way to make a new connection is to be introduced by a mutual acquaintance. LinkedIn facilitates this while still giving you access to thousands of people who might one day become professional colleagues, mentors, friends, and collaborators.

It’s really not about quantity—it’s about strategic connection building.

Digging Deeper: LinkedIn’s true power

Anyone who has conducted an active job search outside of traditional channels understands the power of LinkedIn. It’s one of the best ways to discover and be discovered by people you might work with in the future. Used wisely, it’s also a powerful tool for career development, personal branding, and through personalized connection requests, a decent tool for effective networking.

LinkedIn offers transparency in your professional network, increases your visibility to recruiters, and provides a platform for you to connect with industry peers and follow industry leaders.

If you are currently in the middle of a job search, one framework I love and frequently recommend to my clients is the Two Hour Job Search by the charismatic Steve Dalton. Check out his book here. Or watch this YouTube video. Dalton suggests efficient ways to scan professional opportunities and connections to make a job transition easier.

But most of the people I work with know exactly where they want to go – or if they don’t, they soon figure it out! LinkedIn holds unclear value for the already well-connected and well-resourced job seeker.

In normal times….

Remember that first and foremost LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. It allows you to keep tabs on your professional network, follow news about them, update them on your career, and connect them to each other. If you want to create a thriving network (which, of course, you do!), LinkedIn is a great tool for keeping in touch.
A strong LinkedIn presence increases your visibility to recruiters. The further you advance in your career and the more you specialize, the more your profile will be sought and scrutinized by head hunters. Apple, for example, doesn’t post its most elite and senior jobs. You won’t even know they’re hiring until you get a phone call out of the blue. It’s the ultimate “don’t call us, we’ll call you.” So keeping your profile robust and up to date ensures it will appear in the detailed searches professional recruiters do and enable them to proactively contact you. Even if you are happy with your job, don’t relinquish the option value of new opportunities!

In active job search times…

LinkedIn is one of the best ways for you to connect with peoplewho work for firms you’re interested in. It’s easy to search for people you already know at your target firms or even those who are one or two degrees removed. It’s simple: just reach out to your own contacts and ask them to introduce you to their contacts at target firms through LinkedIn. (Again, refer to the Two Hour Job Search to make this process easier to manage.)
Even if you’re recruiting primarily on campus, you can’t neglect the possibility that your target firms are scrutinizing your web presence as an additional screen. Though the downside risk of a crappy LinkedIn profile is small, competition being what it is, why would you leave any points on the table? Why not take any opportunity to enhance your professional persona and shine?
Finally, you can even use LinkedIn to search for open positions in your field of choice. Whether you apply online or simply use this research to understand the market, company values, and job requirements, it is a great launching off point for a search.

Make it easy for people to refer you to others by clearly conveying the relevance of your experiences and transferable skills. This also means you will need to do some of your own work to initiate contact with your target firms. The content of your LinkedIn profile is critical because it can be the first impression you make as a professional.

However you establish personal contact with your target companies, it can’t hurt to have a LinkedIn profile that really shows your experiences and personality in a meaningful way.

So now that you know why it matters – let’s do this! Here’s a really quick guide to sprucing up your LinkedIn presence.

10 steps to create a standout LinkedIn Profile

1. Get a professional-looking profile picture of yourself

It makes a big difference. It doesn’t have to be a professionally shot photo. I’m personally not a fan of those overly-staged, tilted-head, fake-smile pro pics. Just make sure it’s not a blurry selfie or a vacation shot. If you don’t think this matters, poke around in your network and see how the picture quality subconsciously influences your opinion of people.

2. Choose a headline that summarizes who you are as a professional

Your headline should go beyond just listing your job title. It should convey your value proposition and promote your professional identity. Think about what sets you apart and how you want to be perceived. For instance, instead of just saying “Marketing Manager,” you could say, “Strategic Marketing Leader | Driving Growth through Data-Driven Campaigns.”

Be creative, concise, and relatable.

3. Choose a custom URL using your name

By the time I got around to it, angelaguido had been taken, but firstnamelastname should probably be your default choice. As you can see, I chose a slightly cheeky alternative. To change your URL yourself, start at your LinkedIn homepage. Look for the Profile (“Me”) tab at the top of the page; click on that and choose the first link in the drop-down menu, View Profile. Once you are on your Profile page, look on the righthand side for the “Edit public profile & URL” link & click. In the top righthand corner, you should now see an option to “Edit your custom URL” with a little blue pencil icon. Click on the blue pencil below your LinkedIn profile URL to edit it.

4. Write a compelling summary

Your LinkedIn summary is your elevator pitch, the most frequently read part of your profile. It’s your chance to connect with anyone who’s interested in learning more about you. Tips:

Write in the first person, if relevant (everyone knows you wrote it yourself!)
Make it a mix of personal and professional.
Include the past – some things you have done; make it unique.
Include the present – where you are and what you are doing now.
Include the future – what you are looking to do in the future. Make this inspiring to read.

NO: I want a job in marketing.
YES: I am seeking to apply my creativity and love of consumer design to a product marketing role where I can influence tangible bottom line impact.

Be human and real. Be yourself. Make this memorable – a summary only you could write.

5. Fill out your profile completely

Fill out your profile entirely. Include each job you’ve had (at least the ones that are relevant.) It’s OK to include summer internships. Maybe leave out that one summer you spent bussing tables for the family restaurant. But as long as the work you did was relevant to your career, include it.

Make sure you connect to the actual company’s brand for known organizations. As you type the company name, a list of entities will appear. Find the right one and select it, so that the corresponding logo of the company appears to the right of your job title.

Add Education, including relevant skills, coursework, community service and volunteering, and – again – make sure the logos of relevant schools and organizations appear.

Fill out the whole thing.

Be sure to make your entire profile public so anyone can learn about you. Edit this in:

Settings & Privacy > Visibility.

6. Highlight your experience and abilities

As part of completing your professional experience section, you will want to write short summaries that characterize your accomplishments in those jobs. A few tips for good experience summary sections:

Include a quick summary of your role. For a good example of this, check out the experience summary for each job on my profile. Write 1-2 sentences, and use lay speech so that anyone in any field can understand it.
Below that, add specific actions and outcomes you produced. Use the Resume Protocol to create a brilliant resume with bullets that focus on actions and results, and then copy and paste your top 2 or 3 of those into each position. So it might look like this:

BCG Women’s Initiative Captain

Working with firm leaders, I led recruiting and affiliation activities for the firm's women in the Americas region. I coached candidates to succeed in BCG's competitive case and fit interviews and created and executed the firm's annual learning and development conference for 400 senior women in North America.

Achievements

Created an inspiring conference for 400 women, which received 100% positive feedback, by designing the program and managing a team of 7 to execute every last detail of the event
Enabled 5% increase in women in the class of 2006 by conducting interview preparation workshops and hosting 12 women’s events at top US Business Schools

Include 3-5 and no more for each position.

Keep it jargon and buzzword free. Remember, you will be valued for your communication, leadership, and management abilities, and that requires you to connect with people across functions and cultures. Show them you can relate to others and communicate clearly by keeping jargon out of it. Again, for far more detailed guidance on conveying accomplishments in a way anyone can understand, check out the Resume Protocol.
That said, you might want to include technical skills and experiences that are relevant to your specific industry. Take a look at the examples below.

Banking example (accomplishment):

Facilitated successful acquisition of major clothing retailer by performing building detailed operating, LBO, merger models and running valuation analyses including DCF, accretion/dilution, and sum-of-parts to support business diligence.

Programming example (accomplishment):

Led 9 analysts in developing a mobile app using Java and C++ to display financial data for the company’s leadership team, reducing environmental footprint by eliminating usage of paper.

If you plan to stay in your current function or industry (finance and technology respectively for the examples above) or if you are transitioning into a job where your technical skills will be valued, it is a good idea to include the names of protocols and specific technical processes. Just be sure that the Role Summary is intelligible to any industry outsider.

7. Skills and endorsements

To make sure you get credit for your skills and abilities, be sure to fill this out. It will be more important if you are seeking a job where certain technical skills (programming experience, specific modeling skills) will be valued. Think carefully about the skills you want to be known for – strategically choose the most valuable ones for your career (Hint: Consulting, Marketing, Program Management and their ilk = Good; Microsoft Word = Useless). Then set the skill list to be open for endorsements.

For endorsements, think about three people in your network who can validate that you have certain skills. Again, if technical skills or esoteric coding abilities are part of your repertoire, they are all the more valuable.

8. Recommendations

If the kinds of jobs you will likely be seeking will require you to know someone at the firm before you are brought in for an interview, recommendations from unknown individuals will carry less weight than the recommendation of someone who currently works at the firm or even someone who is a company alum.

That said, if there are a few key people who can really vouch for your work, take the time to ask them to fill out a recommendation for you. This will further help facilitate new connections and headhunter awareness. Again, see mine for strong models of how you might like your referrers to speak about you and your work.

9. Location

Listing your location accurately can be important, especially if you’re looking for opportunities in a specific geographic area. This can help local recruiters find you more easily. Use the metro area or region most relevant to your job search, even if you work remotely.

10. Engage and Connect Regularly

After perfecting your LinkedIn profile, start connecting with people. Add connections from your email contacts and phone. The value of LinkedIn grows with the size and relevance of your network.

The more people you are connected to, the more people can contribute to your career advancement and the more value you’ll actually have to offer your own network by virtue of shared connections, referrals, and new opportunities.

So, take a moment now to connect with the people you already know!