I want to tell you about two conversations I had, one over coffee and one over lunch.
When I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, I had regular meetings in the Westport Starbucks with a friend who ran his own market research company. They were the type of meetings I love—no agenda. We appreciated one another’s conversation and curiosity.
One week, my friend raised the subject of his profile photo on LinkedIn. It was taken by one of his kids. I’d noticed it before and liked it because it was different. It looked like a photo taken by a child—or by an artist. My friend was blurred enough to make him abstract, yet he was still recognizable. It was a good fit for his creative personality.
It turned out, not to my surprise, the profile photo unnerved a lot of his network. Why didn’t he post an appropriate portrait like everyone else? People said this in passing, but with regularity. No doubt they want a professional sitting in a shirt and tie or at least a regulation passport picture “sized such that the head is between 1 inch and 1 3/8 inches from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head.”
I’ve learned over the years that creative opportunity is an imposition for many. You wouldn’t think openness would be a burden, but that’s how people see it. Give them a pencil and a sketchpad and they blush. Force the matter and they get angry.
We get angry because we don’t want to make decisions or take action in front of others without guidance, some historical precedent, or a set of instructions. People have a difficult time job hunting for the same reasons. Writing and submitting resumes produces stress levels similar to moving to a new home because both actions are too open-ended.
They are real life decisions and there’s too much creative chance we will mess them up.
This is why LinkedIn is still laden with stodgy old resumes and passport photos. The stodgy old documents have rules. Looking for a job is hard enough; we don’t want to disrupt the resume too.
Which brings me to my other conversation, over lunch, that came about because my companion made a LinkedIn search for a specific kind of expertise and found me. She was an aspiring filmmaker in Fairfield County developing a project around interviews and cancer patients. I had experience shooting interviews and I had survived a cancerous tumor.
Nowhere on my LinkedIn profile is there a connection between the two though. The only reason the word cancer is there at all is because I wrote an article about my experience for Newsweek. She, or rather her search, made a connection within me that I hadn’t made myself, which struck me immediately as a benefit of LinkedIn I wanted to benefit from more.
We had a great, curious, unexpected conversation about lighting equipment and death over tacos, by the way.
There’s nothing wrong with rules and there’s nothing wrong with a professional atmosphere, but too often our formulas for both persist at the expense of improvement.
A resume is a timeline of recent experience and relevant qualifications delivered in a timely manner. A good resume is tailored to the specifying job opening and the specific recruiter in charge of filling the job.
A good LinkedIn profile is also current and focused, but it’s not for a specific jobhunt or interview or time. It’s an online document, which means someone could happen upon yours anytime and make those unexpected connections you’ve never made in yourself.
LinkedIn is an opportunity to compose and expand our personal narratives through writing and interaction. We should be open to its possibilities, searching for them, and LinkedIn should help.