I will cover this in more depth in my book which should be available for sale on Amazon the week of August 24 (hopefully!). Your resume is a static format that is fixed and limiting. Social media, on the other hand, is entirely in your hands…you can do with it as you please. So, when you are on LinkedIn, you need an objective and a brand, and ideally your LinkedIn Brand should strengthen what you talk about in your resume and also offer additional information (for instance, a Slideshare presentation of your work? etc.) to help sell yourself to the potential employer.

It is because you can better show off your talent through a well-written LinkedIn profile (together with Recommendations, et. al.) that many people are telling potential employers to first go to their LinkedIn Profile. In fact, because employers will search for you first on LinkedIn anyway, I have a feeling that a resume is becoming more of a formality and the vision that people get from you comes from your profile.

Case in point: In the past I have negotiated employment opportunities where I was found on LinkedIn and not even asked to submit a resume.

Hope it’s all good food for thought. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Best,
Neal

I will cover this in more depth in my book which should be available for sale on Amazon the week of August 24 (hopefully!). Your resume is a static format that is fixed and limiting. Social media, on the other hand, is entirely in your hands…you can do with it as you please. So, when you are on LinkedIn, you need an objective and a brand, and ideally your LinkedIn Brand should strengthen what you talk about in your resume and also offer additional information (for instance, a Slideshare presentation of your work? etc.) to help sell yourself to the potential employer.

It is because you can better show off your talent through a well-written LinkedIn profile (together with Recommendations, et. al.) that many people are telling potential employers to first go to their LinkedIn Profile. In fact, because employers will search for you first on LinkedIn anyway, I have a feeling that a resume is becoming more of a formality and the vision that people get from you comes from your profile.

Case in point: In the past I have negotiated employment opportunities where I was found on LinkedIn and not even asked to submit a resume.

Hope it’s all good food for thought. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Best,
Neal

“Should a LinkedIn profile be as equally focused as a resume? Obviously you can’t tailor your LinkedIn profile to each job you’re applying for, since you may have multiple jobs applications pending at any time. If you’re open to jobs in different fields (e.g. engineering, teaching, writing) you could maintain multiple LinkedIn profiles, each with their own set of connections, but that seems unwieldy and against the spirit of LinkedIn. (I can’t imagine asking someone I know to recommend me on more than one of my profiles.) Should you not have a LinkedIn photo? Should you limit the groups you belong to on LinkedIn because they are related to hobbies, religious affiliation, Mensa, etc? Comments appreciated.”

Your blog post today suggests that the value of a LinkedIn profile is that it gives a better and broader picture of you than a resume. I agree. I also want it to serve as my introduction for all sorts of work opportunities, not just software engineering. In performing my current job search and networking, I’m pointing people first to my LinkedIn profile; my business card and domain name both link to it (click on my name above this comment to view it). When applying for work as an software engineer, I supplement it with a traditional resume document that’s tightly targeted to embedded software engineering, but the header of my resume still states: “A paper resume is necessarily brief. My full profile is available on LinkedIn via: http://www.endymionsystems.com“.

Neal, I’d like your feedback on my approach. If a potential software engineering employer sees my LinkedIn profile before or after they see my resume, will the broad nature of my LinkedIn profile obscure or detract from the capabilities I have as a software engineer? What about the idea of maintaining multiple LinkedIn profiles, each focusing on different achievements?