A 20-Minute Peek Behind LinkedIn Recruiter

If you recognize the musical reference depicted by this image, you may be entitled to age discrimination compensation. By Stemonitis – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14499898

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).

From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melanie-woods-3b406226_jobseekers-hiringandpromotion-careers-activity-7193606989250252801-mSLB/

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.

LinkedIn Recruiter view of my LinkedIn profile, Monday, May 13, 2024, 1:30 pm PDT.

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.

“She’s a 2022 graduate; she’ll love our late night code marathons.” From https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/11/us/90-year-old-woman-graduates-college-trnd/index.html.

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.)
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4QSYx4wVQg.

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.

John Bredehoft LinkedIn profile, public view, Monday, May 13, 2024, 1:30 pm PDT.

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.”

My (Sort Of) Financial Identity Fraud Experience

I refrained from discussing this for a couple of days, but I was recently a victim of attempted financial identity fraud.

Well, SORT OF attempted identity fraud. I don’t know if this really counts, since I don’t know if the fraudster had my identity.

But the issue was resolved in less than 48 hours.

By the way, I have purposely changed the names of two of the companies I mention, to protect my PII. Which is a shame, because “Wildebeest Bank” went above and beyond in correcting the issue.

That doesn’t look right

Among its other services, Wildebeest Bank (not its real name) sends me an email whenever a purchase is made on my card, but my card is not present.

This is a fairly common occurrence. Among other things, my website, my business insurance, my business address, and my accounting software are all billed to my card.

But less than 48 hours ago, at 3:30 pm on Wednesday afternoon, I received an unexpected notice.

Your card was not present during a recent purchase

Your card was used to make a purchase at enron*publications us

We noticed your check card ending in 1234 was used to make a $8.48 purchase at enron*publications us today. The card wasn’t present at the time the purchase was made.

If you did not make this purchase, please call the nuber listed on the back of your card.

Log in to your account to review this transaction.

I didn’t recall making any $8.48 purchase, and once I looked up enron*publications us (not its real name), I realized that I definitely DIDN’T purchase anything from that company.

Before calling the bank, I double checked my account and found NO transaction for $8.48, even in a “pending” state.

So I called Wildebeest Bank

I called the number on the back of my card and connected with a woman in a call center who investigated why I got an email for a transaction that didn’t appear.

This is obviously not the Wildebeest Bank call center woman who helped me. But I’m sure she had a computer. By Earl Andrew at English Wikipedia – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17793658

After accessing several internal systems, the woman discovered that the purchase was attempted, but declined. The fraudster had my card account number, but didn’t have the correct expiration date.

Frankly, I’m not even sure if the fraudster had my name. Did the fraudster just punch in 16 digits and hope they would work?

Anyway, after this conversation, the woman from Wildebeest Bank transferred me to the fraud department.

The Fraud Department

So my call was transferred to the Fraud Department.

Not the man at Wildebeest Bank’s Fraud Department. And I bet the man who helped me didn’t have a cool beret like this guy. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=245337

The man at the Fraud Department advised me to cancel the card and get a new one.

I was wondering how long this would take, since one of bills was going to be charged to my card in the next two weeks, and I didn’t want any hiccup from a denied card purchase.

Anti-Fraud Man explained that if I could go to a Wildebeest Bank branch by the next day (Thursday), I could get a new card immediately.

“Could I go today?” I asked.

“Sure,” he replied.

It was about 3:50 pm by that time, or 20 minutes since I received the initial email.

So I drove to the bank

I hopped in my car, drove to a local bank branch, and went to a desk.

Not the real person who helped me at my bank branch, but the real person was nice also. By Melwinsy – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35660323.

You may recall that I started Bredemarket in the fall of 2020, right in the middle of COVID. When I opened my account, the bank WOULDN’T let me go to my local bank branch and I had to open the account remotely. Since then I’ve been in the bank branch several times; it’s a nice place.

Anyway, the fraud department had already cancelled my compromised card, so the man at the bank branch only had to issue me a temporary card and guide me through its activation. This temporary card would last me until the new card arrived in the mail. It had the same card number as the new card so I could temporarily use it for purchases, but the permanent card would have a different expiration date and security code.

I could have provided the temporary card’s number, expiration date, and security code to the company that was going to bill me in two weeks, but I preferred to wait until I received the permanent card. I asked the man at the bank branch how long that would take.

“I can expedite it,” he said.

I get a present at Box 259

Less than 48 hours later, on Friday morning, I was notified that I had a package at my business address.

Bredemarket’s mailing address is 1030 N Mountain Ave #259, Ontario CA 91762-2114.

As I guessed, it was the permanent card, which I immediately activated and provided to the companies that auto-bill me via my card.

Here’s the short version:

  • My bank (“Wildebeest Bank”) notified me of a questionable “card not present” purchase (from “enron*publications us”) at 3:30 pm on Wednesday.
  • By 3:50 pm (20 minutes later), the bank told me that the attempted purchase was declined, but cancelled the bank card anyway.
  • By 4:15 pm (45 minutes later), I had a new temporary bank card.
  • By Friday at noon (less than 48 hours later), I had my permanent bank card.

So everyone be sure to bank at Wildebeest Bank. No confusion when you bank with them!

Black wildebeest. By derekkeats – Flickr: IMG_4955_facebook, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14620744.

The Pros and Cons of Age Estimation

By NikosLikomitros – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136366736

I just published the latest edition of “The Wildebeest Speaks,” Bredemarket’s monthly LinkedIn newsletter.

To be honest, “The Pros and Cons of Age Estimation” repurposes some content I’ve already published in the Bredemarket blog, namely:

The net result? An article explaining both the advantages and disadvantages of age estimation.

Take a chance to read the article, published by LinkedIn’s Bredemarket account. And if you’re a LinkedIn member, subscribe to the newsletter.

Cutting Through the Fog


Buonasera • CC BY-SA 3.0

How can your productmarketing message cut through the fog and get results vs. your competitors’ me-too messaging?

Two tips when planning and creating content:

  • When planning, the first question to ask is why. Once you know your product’s (or company’s) why, everything else just flows naturally.
  • When creating, call your first draft 0.5. Don’t show it to anyone. Between draft 0.5 and draft 1, take the razor out and cut ruthlessly.

Age Estimation Via Dorsal Hand Features? Wait and See.

Vendors and researchers are paying a lot of attention to estimating ages by using a person’s face, and all of us are awaiting NIST’s results on its age estimation tests.

But are there other ways to estimate ages?

But how old is the tree shrew? By W. Djatmiko – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1239588.

As Biometric Update reports, a recent Experimental Dermatology study (“Predicting human chronological age via AI analysis of dorsal hand versus facial images: A study in a cohort of Indian females“) looks at hand features (specifically from the back of the hand, not the palm side) as an alternative method of age estimation (as opposed to using face features as many vendors do today).

From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/exd.15045.

But before you declare dorsal hand features as the solution to age estimation, consider:

  • As the title states, the study only looked at females. No idea if my masculine hand features are predictive. (Anecdotally, more males work at tasks such as bricklaying that affect the hands, including the knuckle texture that was highlighted in the study.)
  • As the title states, the study only looked at people from India. No idea if my American/German/English/etc. hand features are predictive. (To be fair, the subjects had a variety of skin tones.)
  • The study only had 1454 subjects. Better than a study that used less than 20 people, but still not enough. More research is needed.

And even with all of that, the mean absolute error in age estimation was over 4 years.

Before taking a headline as fact, you have to know which questions to ask.

LMM vs. LMM (Acronyms Are Funner)

Do you recall my October 2023 post “LLM vs. LMM (Acronyms Are Fun)“?

It discussed both large language models and large multimodal models. In this case “multimodal” is used in a way that I normally DON’T use it, namely to refer to the different modes in which humans interact (text, images, sounds, videos). Of course, I gravitated to a discussion in which an image of a person’s face was one of the modes.

Document processing with GPT-4V. The model’s mistake is highlighted in red. From https://huyenchip.com/2023/10/10/multimodal.html?utm_source=tldrai.

In this post I will look at LMMs…and I will also look at LMMs. There’s a difference. And a ton of power when LMMs and LMMs work together for the common good.

Revisiting the Large Multimodal Model (LMM)

From https://zapier.com/blog/multimodal-ai/.

Since I wrote that piece last year, large multimodal models continue to be discussed. Harry Guinness just wrote a piece for Zapier in March.

When Google announced its Gemini series of AI models, it made a big deal about how they were “natively multimodal.” Instead of having different modules tacked on to give the appearance of multimodality, they were apparently trained from the start to be able to handle text, images, audio, video, and more. 

Other AI models are starting to function in a TRULY multimodal way, rather than using separate models to handle the different modes.

So now that we know that LLMs are large multimodal models, we need to…

…um, wait a minute…

Introducing the Large Medical Model (LMM)

It turns out that the health people have a DIFFERENT definition of the acronym LMM. Rather than using it to refer to a large multimodal model, they refer to a large MEDICAL model.

As you can probably guess, the GenHealth.AI model is trained for medical purposes.

Our first of a kind Large Medical Model or LMM for short is a type of machine learning model that is specifically designed for healthcare and medical purposes. It is trained on a large dataset of medical records, claims, and other healthcare information including ICD, CPT, RxNorm, Claim Approvals/Denials, price and cost information, etc.

I don’t think I’m stepping out on a limb if I state that medical records cannot be classified as “natural” language. So the GenHealth.AI model is trained specifically on those attributes found in medical records, and not on people hemming and hawing and asking what a Pekingese dog looks like.

But there is still more work to do.

What about the LMM that is also an LMM?

Unless I’m missing something, the Large Medical Model described above is designed to work with only one mode of data, textual data.

But what if the Large Medical Model were also a Large Multimodal Model?

By Piotr Bodzek, MD – Uploaded from http://www.ginbytom.slam.katowice.pl/25.html with author permission., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=372117
  • Rather than converting a medical professional’s voice notes to text, the LMM-LMM would work directly with the voice data. This could lead to increased accuracy: compare the tone of voice of an offhand comment “This doesn’t look good” with the tone of voice of a shocked comment “This doesn’t look good.” They appear the same when reduced to text format, but the original voice data conveys significant differences.
  • Rather than just using the textual codes associated with an X-ray, the LMM-LMM would read the X-ray itself. If the image model has adequate training, it will again pick up subtleties in the X-ray data that are not present when the data is reduced to a single medical code.
  • In short, the LMM-LMM (large medical model-large multimodal model) would accept ALL the medical outputs: text, voice, image, video, biometric readings, and everything else. And the LMM-LMM would deal with all of it natively, increasing the speed and accuracy of healthcare by removing the need to convert everything to textual codes.

A tall order, but imagine how healthcare would be revolutionized if you didn’t have to convert everything into text format to get things done. And if you could use the actual image, video, audio, or other data rather than someone’s textual summation of it.

Obviously you’d need a ton of training data to develop an LMM-LMM that could perform all these tasks. And you’d have to obtain the training data in a way that conforms to privacy requirements: in this case protected health information (PHI) requirements such as HIPAA requirements.

But if someone successfully pulls this off, the benefits are enormous.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

Robert Young (“Marcus Welby”) and Jane Wyatt (“Margaret Anderson” on a different show). By ABC TelevisionUploaded by We hope at en.wikipedia – eBay itemphoto informationTransferred from en.wikipedia by SreeBot, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16472486.

Do As I Say…

I have worked with demand generation and growth marketing leader Gene Volfe, both as employees of the same company and as independent consultants working for other companies.

I asked him to review a short technology piece that I wrote, and he immediately found two gaps:

From https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/3-takeaways-from-start-with-why.
  • My piece did not explain the “why.”
  • My piece did not adequately differentiate the product in question from other products.

Hmm…if only there were things that I could read that could help me do these things.

Oh, wait…

Differentiating Your Company and Your Products/Services (April 9, 2024).

Do as I say, and not as I DON’T.

HubSpot Content Marketing (Re)Certification: An Achievement, A Game, or Both?

I have just renewed my HubSpot Content Marketing Certification for another two years.

John Bredehoft Content Marketing Certification, now expires June 5 2026. See https://app.hubspot.com/academy/achievements/s17pbsb4/en/1/john-bredehoft/content-marketing.

So perhaps this is a good time to ask the question: do certifications matter?

Does my HubSpot certification, or my graduate degree, or my undergraduate degree, or the super-secret certification that I’m still pursuing (more later), anything more than a (digital) piece of paper to hang on the wall? Is this a substantive achievement, or does it just show that I was successful playing the certification game?

My HubSpot certification only has true meaning if I use the knowledge while creating content.

If I don’t use the knowledge, then it’s just like some of Enron’s corporate awards:

  • “100 Best Companies to Work for in America,” 1999, 2000, and 2001
  • Fortune’s All-Star List of Global Most Admired Companies — 2000
  • Ten Stocks to Last the Decade

Now back to my super-secret certification…

Defeating Synthetic Identity Fraud

I’ve talked about synthetic identity fraud a lot in the Bredemarket blog over the past several years. I’ll summarize a few examples in this post, talk about how to fight synthetic identity fraud, and wrap up by suggesting how to get the word out about your anti-synthetic identity solution.

But first let’s look at a few examples of synthetic identity.

Synthetic identities pop up everywhere

As far back as December 2020, I discussed Kris’ Rides’ encounter with a synthetic employee from a company with a number of synthetic employees (many of who were young females).

More recently, I discussed attempts to create synthetic identities using gummy fingers and fake/fraudulent voices. The topic of deepfakes continues to be hot across all biometric modalities.

From https://www.candynation.com/gummy-fingers

I shared a video I created about synthetic identities and their use to create fraudulent financial identities.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDrSBlDJVCk.

I even discussed Kelly Shepherd, the fake vegan mom created by HBO executive Casey Bloys to respond to HBO critics.

From https://twitter.com/KellySh33889356.

And that’s just some of what Bredemarket has written about synthetic identity. You can find the complete list of my synthetic identity posts here.

So what? You must fight!

It isn’t enough to talk about the fact that synthetic identities exist: sometimes for innocent reasons, sometimes for outright fraudulent reasons.

You need to communicate how to fight synthetic identities, especially if your firm offers an anti-fraud solution.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=607428.

Here are four ways to fight synthetic identities:

  1. Checking the purported identity against private databases, such as credit records.
  2. Checking the person’s driver’s license or other government document to ensure it’s real and not a fake.
  3. Checking the purported identity against government databases, such as driver’s license databases. (What if the person presents a real driver’s license, but that license was subsequently revoked?)
  4. Perform a “who you are” biometric test against the purported identity.

If you conduct all four tests, then you have used multiple factors of authentication to confirm that the person is who they say they are. If the identity is synthetic, chances are the purported person will fail at least one of these tests.

Do you fight synthetic identity fraud?

If you fight synthetic identity fraud, you should let people know about your solution.

Perhaps you can use Bredemarket, the identity content marketing expert. I work with you (and I have worked with others) to ensure that your content meets your awareness, consideration, and/or conversion goals.

How can I work with you to communicate your firm’s anti-synthetic identity message? For example, I can apply my identity/biometric blog expert knowledge to create an identity blog post for your firm. Blog posts provide an immediate business impact to your firm, and are easy to reshare and repurpose. For B2B needs, LinkedIn articles provide similar benefits.

If Bredemarket can help your firm convey your message about synthetic identity, let’s talk.

Drive content results with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

Content Marketing and Proposals are Pretty Much the Same

I’ve taken a very small break from my identity blog post writing business to help a biometric company with a proposal. I am, after all, the biometric proposal writing expert, so I’m at home working on identity proposals. After all, I’ve done it before.

This is NOT a depiction of the bidders’ conference I attended in Connecticut 20 or so years ago. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15798710

Bredemarket’s services are grouped into two distinct and separate functions: content marketing (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and proposals (RFI responses, RFP responses, sole source letters, etc.).

My division of my services makes sense in the real world. After all, in some employment situations, content marketing and proposals employ distinct and separate sets of employees.

The last Association of Proposal Management Professionals Conference I attended, in Chicago in May 2014. From https://www.apmp.org/assets/apmp-annual_report-2014_final.pdf.

But other companies are different. In fact, I’ve seen employment ads seeking marketing/proposals managers. Sounds like a lot of work, unless the company submits few proposals or performs minimal marketing.

And in many companies there are NOT dedicated proposals specialists. Which is why Bredemarket makes its money by helping the salespeople at these firms get the documents out.

Time for the truth

And if we’re truthful with ourselves, content marketing and proposals are pretty much the same thing.

I know this angers some people, who insist that they are content marketing professionals or proposal professionals, with all the proper certifications that a mere mortal could never attain. Or they did attain it, but it lapsed. Or is about to lapse unless I renew it in time.

But hear me out. I’m going to list four aspects of a particular document, and you tell me whether I’m talking about a piece of marketing content, or a proposal.

  1. The document focuses on the customer’s needs.
  2. The document describes benefits the customer will realize.
  3. The document targets one or more sets of people hungry for the solution.
  4. The document shall be in Aptos 12 point, single spaced, with 1 inch margins, and shall not exceed 20 pages.

Guess what? From that description you CAN’T tell if it’s a piece of content or a proposal.

Yes, I know some of you thought item 4 was a dead giveaway because it sounded like an RFP requirement, but maybe some company’s brand guidelines dictate that the firm’s white papers must conform to that format. You never know.

And I know that when you get into the minutiae, there are certain things that proposal writers do that content marketers don’t have to worry about, and vice versa.

But at a high level, the content marketer already knows 90% of the things they need to know to write proposals. And vice versa.

Can we all get along?

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sONfxPCTU0.