A 20-Minute Peek Behind LinkedIn Recruiter

Of all the technologies I don’t know about, jobseeker technology is the most important. Between July 2000 and today, I’ve spent over 30 months searching for full-time employment. So it helps to know how employers search for potential employees.

And a lot of those 30-plus months have been filled with self-styled experts advising people “how to beat the applicant tracking system (ATS)” (as if there were only one) and “how to access the hidden job market” (because of course employers don’t want anyone to know that they’re searching for talent).

So when Melanie Woods of CGL Recruiting offered 20 jobseekers the chance to see how their LinkedIn Profile appears to users of LinkedIn Recruiter, I really wanted to win one of those 20 slots.

I won a slot, and in our 20-minute session Melanie Woods imparted a great deal of knowledge, including the 7 LinkedIn Recruiter tips highlighted at the end of this post.

If I could boil all 7 tips down to 1, I’d emphasize that recruiters have limited time, and something a recruiter can understand in 0 seconds is much better than something that would take a recruiter 5 seconds to understand.

Melanie’s offer…and what she wanted in return

A few days ago, I ran across Melanie’s post that described her offer. It opened as follows:

Instead of spending money on advertising, my team is going to be taking a different approach and it involves YOU #jobseekers!

Sounds like a plan, since a word-of-mouth testimonial converts more effectively than copy written by a marketing hack. (But what if the testimonial is FROM a marketing hack?)

The offer

She then described the offer.

We are going to be offering 20 free 20 minute sessions to job seekers who are currently out of work. During your session I will pull you up live in LinkedIn Recruiter and test your profile to show you where you are coming up in searches and where you are falling out. I will help you adjust your profile so you can appear in more searches for the jobs you are targeting.

What is LinkedIn Recruiter?

As you can probably guess, LinkedIn Recruiter is the premium-priced service that recruiters use to search LinkedIn for job candidates. The top-tier package (“contact Sales” for the price) includes:

• Unlimited LinkedIn network access: Find and engage anyone on LinkedIn
• 150 InMail messages/month per license and bulk messaging
• 40+ advanced search filters, including “Open to work” and “More likely to respond”
• Multi-user collaboration tools
• Prepaid slots to rotate job postings in and out as needed

A comparison of all of LinkedIn’s talent solutions is provided here.

If your company is recruiting more than 4 positions a year, the high-end version of LinkedIn Recruiter could be the tool for you.

But when recruiters use LinkedIn Recruiter, they don’t look at a candidate’s LinkedIn profile—they look at the LinkedIn Recruiter view of the candidate’s profile, optimized for their purposes.

Hence Melanie was offering job applicants the opportunity to see how their profile appears to a recruiter. Valuable information to have.

What CGL Recruiting wanted in return

But remember that the lucky winners had to provide “advertising” to CGL Recruiting in return.

Here is where the advertising piece comes in….if you feel that the 20 minutes was helpful to you and your job search, we would appreciate you doing a review of our services on LinkedIn and one other social media platform (your choice), sharing how the time spent was useful to you and your job search.

After I indicated my interest, and after Dee Daniel provided a boost to my application, I was one of the lucky 40 winners. (Yes, they increased the number of winners due to high demand.)

Melanie’s top 7 LinkedIn Recruiter tips

Melanie and I met via Zoom early Monday afternoon Pacific Time (late afternoon Central Time), and I received a firehose of information during the 20-minute session. I’m not going to cover ALL the information she provided; instead, I’ll confine myself to the top 7 tips.

1. The first job on the LinkedIn profile is the most important.
2. Use all 5 “job title” slots.
3. Some employers AREN’T 1st and 2nd degree connections.
4. You can have 6 on-site job locations, not just 5.
5. Consider listing at least one college-related date.
6. Ampersands are bad.
7. Temperamental writers shouldn’t fall in love with pet phrases.

Tip 1: The first job on the LinkedIn profile is the most important

For my job search for a Senior Product Marketing Manager role, my Incode position is (maybe) more important than my current Bredemarket position. On my resume, I take care of this by listing Incode BEFORE Bredemarket. But because LinkedIn profiles are chronological, and Bredemarket is my current “employer,” I can’t reorder like that.

The LinkedIn Recruiter view of the profile doesn’t show all the positions, but only the top 3. And the first position takes great prominence.

In the default view, the recruiter can’t see my fourth position (Strategic/Product Marketing Manager from 2015 to 2017), but only the first three. And only one of those three positions is product marketing-related.

Melanie zeroed in on my “Sole Proprietor” position, which tells a recruiter nothing about what I actually DO at Bredemarket. Sure the recruiter could click through and read about the marketing and writing services that Bredemarket provides…but recruiters have limited time.

I thought about her advice after the call, and for LinkedIn (and resume) purposes I’m changing my Bredemarket job title to “Product Marketing Consultant.” My work for my clients is all product/service-related, so the job title makes sense.

Now recruiters will see that two of my three most recent positions were product marketing-related, which makes me more attractive to the one position that I’m targeting.

One position? Wait a minute…

Tip 2: Use all 5 “job title” slots

That’s right. In my “job preferences,” my only listed job title was “Senior Product Marketing Manager.”

I can list up to 5.

Why not use all 5?

So now my job titles include the following:

• Senior Product Marketing Manager
• Product Marketing Manager
• Marketing Content Manager
• Global Product Marketing Manager
• Product Marketing Consultant

So I have the position title from Incode, the consulting title from Bredemarket, two product marketing title variants, and a content marketing title for good measure (Bredemarket readers know why).

Now some people question why I’d list all these similar titles, since anyone who takes a few seconds can figure out that I’d be interested in a global product marketing manager position or whatever.

That’s the problem. Recruiters DON’T HAVE a few seconds. When hundreds or thousands of people apply for positions, recruiters need to get through the profiles as quickly as possible.

So Melanie wanted me to make her job easier.

Tip 3: Some employers AREN’T 1st and 2nd degree connections

You can control the visibility of your email address and your phone number on LinkedIn. While I don’t list a phone number on my LinkedIn profile, I do make my jobseeking email address (which is separate from my Bredemarket email address) visible. In fact, I configured my email address visibility for viewing by my 1st degree and 2nd degree connections.

But there was a fallacy in that tactic.

It became obvious in the session because Melanie (not a connection since her LinkedIn connections are maxed out) could NOT see my email address. Therefore, if recruiter Melanie wanted to contact me, she could ONLY contact me via InMail.

If you want ANY potential recruiter to see your email, increase its visibility to all connections. Obviously there are risks to this, so you need to judge what visibility is right for you. (Especially for phone numbers.)

Tip 4: You can have 6 on-site job locations, not just 5

While all of Bredemarket’s work is remote, and my previous work at Incode was remote, I’m not averse to on-site work. As long as it’s within driving distance.

To help local companies, I listed a selected five cities (the maximum) where I am available for on-site work:

• Ontario, California, United States
• San Bernardino, California, United States
• Covina, California, United States
• Pasadena, California, United States
• Anaheim, California, United States

But Melanie pointed out that I didn’t need to list Ontario, since my profile already states that I live in Ontario. That freed up one slot to add another city. I chose to list Riverside, although I could have listed Brea or Fullerton or Industry or Pomona or Corona or many other cities. (LinkedIn, your on-site locations feature needs work.)

Tip 5: Consider listing at least one college-related date

Now let’s get into age discrimination talk.

If a company desires to discriminate against job applicants due to age, one effective way to do so is to look at the dates the applicants attended college. It’s pretty easy to quietly filter out the geezer applicants with no one the wiser.

Well, maybe.

For this reason I didn’t bother to add my college attendance dates to my LinkedIn profile. Why give the discriminating (in a negative way, not a positive way) firm the ammo they need to get the young, cheap workers they really want? (Of course those workers are inexperienced, but that’s another topic entirely.)

But Melanie pointed out one truth about companies that want to discriminate: if they don’t discriminate against you when they read your LinkedIn profile or resume, they can easily discriminate against you when they SEE you.

Oh, and there’s one more thing: if recruiters search for candidates based upon their graduation dates, profiles without graduation dates will never been seen by recruiters.

So I mulled over her advice.

• I decided not to list the date that I started attending Cal State Fullerton’s MBA program.
• And I decided not to list the date I graduated from Reed College.
• I certainly didn’t list the date I started attending Reed College. (But I will confess that this song blasted from the Old Dorm Block. And I’ll also confess that I could lose the last 4 1/2 minutes.)

But I did pencil in my 1991 graduation date from Cal State Fullerton’s MBA program. Since my LinkedIn profile includes ALL my biometric positions going back to 1994, this isn’t a shocking revelation.

Tip 6: Ampersands are bad

LinkedIn profiles can include skills. I’ve listed near the limit of 50 skills, some of which are tied to particular positions, LinkedIn Learning courses, and other education and certifications.

Among many others, two of my listed skills are “identity & access management” and “sales & marketing management.”

Technology experts immediately see where this is going. So why didn’t I?

Melanie immediately noted that the ampersand character in those two skill descriptions can wreak havoc with some computerized systems.

I swapped out those skills for some new ones: identity and access management, and sales and marketing management, removing the problem.

Tip 7: Temperamental writers shouldn’t fall in love with pet phrases

Melanie’s biggest concern about my LinkedIn profile involved the very first sentence.

The one that appears below my profile, name, and preferred pronouns, but above my city of residence.

Senior Product Marketing Manager in identity/technology who is expert in describing why customers benefit.

She read that sentence word for word.

• “Senior Product Marketing Manager”? She liked that.
• “In identity/technology”? I guess she liked that; at least she didn’t comment on it.
• The rest of the sentence? Not so much.

Regular Bredemarket readers are familiar with the last three words of that sentence, and realize that every one of those three words is critically important. Why rather than what, customers rather than producers, and benefits rather than features. I’ve devoted a post (plus another post) to those three words. If I only had a few seconds to explain the importance of those three words…

Um, yet again, recruiters aren’t interested in taking a few minutes to read everything I have written about Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, customer focus, or benefits. They don’t even want to watch a short reel on the topic.

So I have to rewrite the last part of that first sentence. As I write this post, I’m still mulling over alternatives.

CGL Recruiting’s expertise was highly beneficial

The 7 items above were just some of the tips that Melanie Woods imparted to me, all in the space of 20 minutes.

Again, the common theme is that recruiters have limited time, LinkedIn Recruiter lets them maximize that limited time, and jobseeker data also has to let recruiters maximize that limited time. If you can do something in 0 seconds, don’t take 5 seconds to do it.

I haven’t even explored some of the other features that CGL Recruiting offers, including Melanie Woods’ YouTube channel.

But the 20 minutes I spent with her were certainly valuable.

Now I just have to figure out another way to say “why customers benefit.”