Why I think it’s a must to include your LinkedIn profile on a résumé
Yesterday, I posted a status on Twitter that asked (pleaded, really) people applying for jobs to include their LinkedIn profiles along with their resumes, and this tweet had a couple people wondering why I would want that. So, I figured I’d give a little more explanation in a forum that allowed for a little more (a lot more) explication than Twitter and start it off—as is my style—with a story/analogy that seems to have no relation to the topic at hand.
Back in the days when MySpace ruled, we all still hated it, but for music geeks it was actually a godsend. Official band sites were trainwreck sites, where it was too difficult to find even the simplest information like show dates or something to listen to through all the unnecessary Flash and hidden, mouseover navigation. But if you went to the bands’ MySpace pages, you knew exactly where the music was, where the tour dates were and how they’d be formatted, where the basic info about each band was, etc. It standardized those things you needed from a band and did away with the inconsistencies and pretensions of the official sites.
This is how I feel about LinkedIn profiles vs résumés. Paper, PDF or (worst case) Word résumés are massively inconsistent, usually way too long, still usually have an objective section, and have widely varying layouts. If I have to go through a stack of resumes in one sitting, I find I first have to acclimate myself to the format and styling of each individual résumé before I can really start to take in what they’re trying to tell me.
That’s not the case with a LinkedIn profile, where I know exactly where to find everything I’m looking for: experience, specialties, recommendations. Plus, the section that shows what groups they’ve joined and their status updates/tweets indicate their true interests vs what they’ve chosen to highlight in their résumés.
In short, I find that a decently-maintained LinkedIn profile to be much more useful and informational than most of the résumés I receive. Plus, if social media is going to be any part of the job, I don’t think it’s too much to expect them to be on the social media network devoted to jobs.
