A search might look like this:

Job title: Board Director

Industry: Aviation

Expertise: Cybersecurity

Keywords:  white-listing, containerization, sandboxing, threat cloud, peer-to-peer endpoint query, flight-planning computers, FMS software, advanced anomaly discovery and analysis.

These are four key areas on your Linked In profile that must be optimized. The words must be there to be found—if you are missing keywords relative to your industry or expertise, you are missing out on opportunities. This is easy to do and doesn’t take much time at all. As they say about flight plans in the aviation industry “course-correct as you go”. The most important thing is to update your profile today because the research on this tool is powerful.

According to DMR Stats Gadgets “21 Interesting LinkedIn Job Statistics for September 2017”, 94% of recruiters use LinkedIn to vet job and business candidates.

I am so honored to work with interesting and accomplished executives, but it always surprises me that these people are virtually invisible online and they have so much to offer and companies need them! Executives without an online presence immediately arouse the suspicion of recruiters and hiring decision makers.

And they are invisible! This is even more true if they are unknown outside their industry. Many industries besides aviation are looking for cybersecurity experts on their Boards.  

In this digital age, without a profile, no one can find you.  The chair of the corporate governance committee, the CEO, the corporate recruiter, the third-party recruiter is looking for a Director, CFO or COO and others with unique skills.

The hiring due diligence process (and resume vetting process) is more complex today than ever. Hiring decision-makers must sift through a high volume of available data to ensure they are choosing the best candidate for the role.

A recruiter to me: I will tell you why I use the Linked In profile as a tool for the selection process. With more than 50% of job applicants lying on their resumes, verification of data and resumes is a critical function of the hiring decision maker. Cover letters are notorious for embellishment and exaggeration.

Recruiters often explain to me that once they scour the resume for dates, business titles, the boss’ business title and geographical location, they want to verify the data. Linked In is a logical next step.

Their primary goal for their corporate client doing the hire is to ensure that the company is protected. The selection process is one of the most important functions that a Board and its company will undertake because there is a great deal of risk.

If the candidate claims to have specialized training in a unique skill, say, I will see whether the candidate has been endorsed for any of these specialized terms (SOX for a CFO for example or finite element analysis for an Engineering VP). Then I will read every recommendation listed in the profile as I want to see what others are saying about my candidate. You can be sure the recruiter is doing the same.

If you are an executive who is in job search mode and feeling ambivalent about creating or updating your LinkedIn profile, please rethink your plan. As business guru and sports enthusiast Harvey Mckay says, the closer you get, the harder they’ll look and the vetting process in today’s digital age is very comprehensive. Credit checks, background checks, reference checks are but a few of the due diligence checkpoints you’ll need to break through before a job offer is ever presented to you.

If you want to learn more about the background checking process, contact me for my recorded interview with Toronto-based background checking expert Marty Britton.

I hope this blog post was helpful for you. If you did find it helpful, I would be very pleased if you would share it with your friends. If you need help with your own LinkedIn profile, why don’t you contact me today for brief conversation.

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