This is an excellent, must-read article from the Harvard Business Review. Check it out!

via How to Use Your LinkedIn Profile to Power a Career Transition – HBR.

Personally, I think that too many people shoot themselves in the foot with obvious ‘BS’ in their LinkedIn profiles.

Let me give an example from my former career as an independent interim executive. A few years ago, I noted that everybody was calling themselves a ‘C- level expert’. Here are a few examples:

• Chief Marketing Officer
• Chief Information Officer
• Chief Financial Officer

I came across many contractors, who had never reached board level, calling themselves ‘C-level experts’.

Of course, top-quality recruiters can read a CV and a LinkedIn profile in seconds, as the HBR article implies but it would be good to flag the ‘BS artists’ and perhaps they might retire or retrain and not just populate growing ranks of professional people on the bench? Perhaps, a cull is required to clear out the dead wood and the ‘BS artists?’

In my own case, I retired as an interim executive nearly five years ago, and on a daily basis I still get people rating my skill profile. I now only publish overview data on LinkedIn and have cancelled most of my group memberships.

Sadly, most people on LinkedIn are ‘me too’ players, trying to copy the latest trend. The experts are totally focused, I sense.

There is another side to the story. Recruiters actually have zero expertise and are searching on ‘key-words’, so this perpetuates the time-wasting and the tendency for people to populate their CV and LinkedIn profile with buzz words.

I’m old enough to remember when head-hunters had little black books and would know the names and profiles intimately. Those were the golden days.

This brings me to an open question:

With latest technology, surely there’s an opportunity to design out 90% of people employed in the recruitment industry?

Thoughts?