Getting on Their Radar
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
(From The Archives) EP 1311 Whether you are actively or passively looking for work, you need to do things to get on the radar of the differnt people who will be trying to hire talent. Jeff and David Perry, the head headhunter for Perry-Martel International and author or co-author of 5 books including, “Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters” discuss the mistakes people make with their LinkedIn profiles, how to make them stronger and an example of someone who David helped find a divisional President’s position for with a firm many times larger than his current one at a compensation at least 3 times larger than what he was currently earning that all started with powering up his LinkedIn profile.Jeff and David Perry discuss the mistakes people make with their LinkedIn profiles and much more.
This was one of the first episodes of Job Search Radio when I still did that show.
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This is episode 1311 of No BS Job Search Advice Radio. I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter and welcome. Now, today’s show actually was recorded as a podcast back in the early days of when I was doing job search radio.
That show was recorded initially over phone lines. And thus, the audio quality isn’t as good as it is now, but everything is audible. And I don’t mean that in the context of the service by that name.
There’s no issue with any of the audio quality. This is an interview I did with Dave Perry from Perry Martell about LinkedIn profiles. It’s about 30 minutes in length.
It’s very, very solid. Hope you find it helpful. Hope you give it a great review at Apple Podcasts.
And let’s just go into the show. Okay? When I think of LinkedIn, I don’t just think of a social network for business. I tend to think of the most important vehicle that professionals, nonprofessional labor has in order to find work.
You see, to me, the person who gets ahead isn’t always the smartest. They don’t always work the hardest, although those are great qualities to have. I tend to think of the person who gets ahead as the one who remains alert to opportunity.
Sometimes that’s internal to an organization, but more often than not, it’s external. And today we’re going to be talking with David Perry, who’s the head headhunter for Perry Martell International. He’s negotiated more than $200 million in salaries and completed more than 1,000 recruiting projects on three continents.
He has a bachelor’s from McGill and is the author or co-author of five books, including his most recent, Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 3.0. David, welcome to Job Search Radio. Good morning, Jeff. Thank you very much for having me.
Pleased to be here. You’re very welcome. I’m thrilled to have you on the show.
Like I was saying, people need to be alert to opportunities. And that translates for me as not just simply when they might need to find a job, but when just being open to other opportunities while they might still be happy in an organization. And that requires being found.
And LinkedIn is probably the most important place to be found by recruiters, both corporate and third party. Yet people make a lot of mistakes working with LinkedIn. I’m sure you see that all the time.
Every day. What sort of things do you see that people do wrong with their LinkedIn profiles and how they use LinkedIn? Oh, that’s a great question. Let me preface it by saying no one should ever go into a job search before they do one thing.
And the one thing they need to do is start with absolute clarity. And when it comes to LinkedIn, what I mean by that is there’s an awful lot of – actually, it’s limitless what you can put into LinkedIn. But really, the mere fact that you can change a tire on a car, do you think anybody cares? Well, maybe they do if you’re looking for a mechanics job.
So here’s the point. You’ve got all this information about yourself. If you start with clarity about the type of job you want to do or the type of organization you want to work at, then you fill your LinkedIn profile with information that relates to that.
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So it makes you easy to be found by a recruiter using a keyword search for the types of opportunities that you’d be interested in. And you and I both know all jobs are temporary now. Everyone’s going to change every 18 to 24 months.
It might be inside a company, but more than likely it’s going outside a company. So because all jobs are temporary, you need a billboard on the information highway, and LinkedIn is that. So with that said, when you think about the mistakes that people make, I’m going to translate what you said as being not getting clear about what you might be open to or what you might be looking for in your next organization, and thus not making your profile keyword-rich enough around those particular attributes that you want to draw people to.
Would that be a correct summary? Absolutely. Absolutely. Wish I had said it that well myself.
And you provided a lot of texture. What other mistakes might people make when they construct their profiles? Well, even people that start with clarity and understand what they want to be found for, the first place people normally go wrong, and it’s so funny that they do this wrong, is a bad picture. And what I mean by a bad picture is it’s a picture of you in a group of people.
Well, no one’s going to be able to pick you out because they don’t know who you are. Or it’s a picture of you standing somewhere so that on the screen you’re about a quarter inch tall. When you do a picture, you want it to be a professional photo.
You want to have a nice smile on. You want to be engaging. People like people that smile.
People like people that look engaging and interesting, not like a slob on a bad hair day. And the reason this is important is that even though it’s technology, the person that’s looking at your LinkedIn profile, the most important thing first, they’ve got to like you. And that’s a gut-level decision they make, like it or not, based on your appearance.
So get a great photo. Have it well lit. Potentially have even a photographer take it, but make sure it’s a well-lit photo.
You’re smiling. You’re dressed professionally. Or you’re dressed in a manner that people can see you in that role.
If you’re a mechanic, be dressed like a mechanic. If you’re a CEO, wear the appropriate attire. That’s where most people go wrong right out the gate.
You want number two? I just want to add on to that one and simply say that the tuxedo shot for guys and the ballroom dress for women isn’t the direction I would go. No, you know what? And I forget that. And you’re absolutely correct.
Because that’s not natural. That’s not you at work. You’re so absolutely right.
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I’m laughing because I’ve seen a couple of those lately, and it did make me laugh. So what’s number two? What’s the second mistake that you tend to pick up on? Number two is you’re boring. And what I mean by boring is you’re dull right out of the gate.
For example, you and I do a lot of project managers, sales guys. So when I do a keyword search, the first thing as a recruiter, when I do a keyword search in LinkedIn, I get a whole list of people that match that keyword profile. And what I’ll see is name, and next to them will be their tagline, which is the piece of text that’s right next to your photo.
But that line underneath your name, that good definition of real estate underneath your name, that kind of describes who you are, right? Absolutely. So what will a project manager put? He’ll put project manager. And that’s very good, except so did every other project manager.
So how do you differentiate yourself? I’m looking for a project manager in New York, and I do a search. I’m going to get, you know, like 4,000 or 5,000 results. And poor recruiter is looking at this.
How can he tell you’re any better than anybody else? Because it’s just a list that says name, project manager, name, project manager, all the way down the list. Well, if you take your tagline, which is that part just after your name, as you said, and you put something compelling like a question, you know, ask me how I saved my employer, you know, $100,000, or ask me how I finished a project in one-third of the time. Those kinds of questions are compelling because they actually look at the results that people would be looking for someone to produce if they were a project manager.
And if you put that into your title or your tagline, all of a sudden, you know, all the other 400 say project managers, yours says, you know, ask me how I did boom. And you stick out like a sore thumb, or in this case, you stick out like a four-leaf clover. That kind of reminds me of an interview that I did for a previous show with a gentleman named Hal Cleggman who told me that the biggest mistake that people make with their resumes is that they kind of sound like job descriptions instead of talking about accomplishments and defining accomplishments by metrics like earned more, earned such and such, saved such and such, increased or decreased as a way of defining the success that you had in the organization, not just simply talking about role and responsibilities.
Correct, Jeff. And everybody knows, every recruiter knows what a project manager does. You don’t have to tell us what your responsibilities and duties were, you know, because that’s just saying, hey, you’re an idiot.
You don’t know what I do. Tell us what you accomplished. It’s like your resume.
It’s like you go for an interview as a project manager or anything. Nobody has ever asked you, so what were your duties and responsibilities as a project manager? It doesn’t happen. They’re interested in what you did for that employer to push the cause forward.
And we both know employers are interested in one or all three, only three things. Can you make me money? Can you save me money? Can you increase my efficiency? That’s it. Until they actually get to know you and meet you, they don’t care about anything else.
So you have to deliver the whiff them. What’s in it for me? Whiff them. And for employers, it’s curious, what’s in it for you? So tell them what’s in it for them in the summary of your LinkedIn profile by using the accomplishments that you know they’re going to be interested in because they’re relevant to the job you’re looking for.
That’s great, David. And I want to cover one or two more mistakes that people make with their profiles, if you have that, and then talk about a profile that we discussed last week where you help this CEO really beef up his search and get great results. So let me just pause and come back to mistakes.
What else do you see that people don’t do correctly? Well, they don’t take advantage of all of the different types of file formats that you can use inside LinkedIn. For example, when we were kids, and we’ve been doing this, you know, like I’m 53, so I’ve been doing it since kindergarten, right? Kindergarten, the most important thing, the most interesting part of my day for me and everybody else in the class was show and tell, right? Because it got us out of cut and paste. So show and tell.
You can use rich media. It’s called rich media. So you can add photos and videos and web links in your LinkedIn profile.
And very few people do that. It’s a bland, boring job description of what they’re responsible for. Throw that out.
Use accomplishments and add some photos, if you’ve got them, that are relevant. Photos of a project you did, photos of a product you produced, you know, you worked on, whatever, videos, same sort of thing. You can add a white paper.
You know, if you’re a writer, you can add a white paper. All of these things add depth and texture to who you are as an individual. And all LinkedIn really is is your first interview.
Recruiters will go and look at someone’s LinkedIn profile well before they’ll call them in for a first interview. So if you consider LinkedIn your first interview, what is it that you would like an interviewer to know about you that would make them want to meet you and find out more? So if you look at LinkedIn as the movie trailer for your life or your career, what are the most interesting scenes from your career that you could put into your movie trailer, if you look at your LinkedIn profile that way? Think about that, what would be most interesting for an employer, and go and get that kind of material and weave it into your profile. And when I think of that, David, I think of the summary area as a beautiful spot on the LinkedIn profile to really demonstrate that.
So I know recently I made some changes to my profile in order to bring in more video there, to be clear about the kind of searches that I’ve done, where they’ve been geographically, to give people a way to contact me, and a few more things that really distinguish me from the typical search professional that they might find on LinkedIn. And it’s right there. It’s the first field that I know how few people really take advantage of all that space that LinkedIn provides them with in order to really promote themselves effectively for a reader.
Correct. I actually noted that down in the course. Now I’m going to go and compare my profile to your profile and pick, well, this is what it’s all about, right? Exactly right.
And pick up some pointers. And there’s a great example. Why do people insist on inventing things from scratch? And what I mean by that is a lot of people that I know get stuck on their LinkedIn profile because they just don’t know what to say.
They don’t know what’s interesting. Well, instead of getting stuck, why don’t they take the title of the position they’re looking for, put it in LinkedIn’s search box, and see who comes up first. Ooh, why do they come up first? Because they have designed their profile to come up first, just like Google, like a Google search, right? Of course.
50 pizza outlets in the city, well, one of them is going to come up first because they’ve done their search engine optimization correctly. And that sounds like it’s hard. It’s not.
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So when people get stuck, what they really need to do is go and take a look at other people’s profiles and see how they’ve constructed them. And construct them in a similar manner. And one of the things that people can realize, in addition to that, is that there are signals that you get along the way, if you pay attention to them, that your profile just isn’t working for you.
And that is the notices that LinkedIn sends to you about the numbers of people and who has looked at your profile. If you’re getting one or two hits a week or a month, there’s something wrong with your profile. And you’ve got to fix it.
Correct. And to add to that, Jeff, if you’re getting people looking at your profile that have nothing to do with the industry you’re trying to target, you’ve done something wrong. And you’ve got to step back and analyze that.
And the easiest way to do that is go back to what I just said. Throw the title of the job you’re looking for in and see what the other person’s doing. And I’m going to pile on and say, and if you’re getting lots of people looking at your profile, and no one contacting you, there’s a message in that too.
You know what? I should have thought of that. You’re absolutely right. Once again, that’s a bigger problem, right? Because you’re saying something that’s turning people off.
Or you’re not saying something that’s making them want to follow through. Or you’re making their life impossible. And what I mean by impossible, and I know you’ve seen this, somebody sets up their LinkedIn profile, and then they make it impossible for you to contact them.
You either have to be a first LinkedIn connection, or you have to go through the whole big rigmarole to contact them this way or this way or this way. If you’re looking for a job, you want someone to find you, great. That’s the first step.
Next, you’ve got to get them to contact you. So I always tell people, if you’re looking, put your name, your phone number, and it can be a phone that you just read for job search if you want to. Put your name, phone number, and email address that you want to be connected at the top end of your profile, in your summary.
So it makes it easy. I mean, not that recruiters are lazy, but when you do a search for project managers in New York, you’re going to get like, I don’t know, 750,000. And you want to be the one that’s going to get called.
Well, trust me, most recruiters will go through and take the easy road. And by the easy road, yes, you look qualified. Oh, yep, you’ve got a phone number.
I’m going to call them first. You mentioned having a job search phone number. One of the tools I love is Google Voice.
Oh, yeah, I know. You can use it. That’s great.
Voice.google.com, I believe, is the address, or google.com forward slash voice. And Google will provide you with a phone number that you can direct to connect with any other phone number that you have. So if you don’t want to be contacted after the search is over, which personally I think is a mistake, but that’s a different conversation, you still have a phone number that one phone number, instead of having them call you at your home, call you at the office, call you on the mobile while you’re commuting, one number that can track you to wherever you are, that will also forward a text to you, if you like, that will translate any voicemail message that’s left for you.
It’s a great little tool. Free, by the way. Yeah.
Isn’t it great? I love it. I happen to use it myself. When we spoke previously, you told me about this corporate or divisional CEO, as I recall, who just wasn’t getting responses with his LinkedIn profile.
And you mentioned that you had really helped this person improve their game on LinkedIn pretty dramatically and increased his number of connections by several thousand over a short period of time. Could you talk about some of the techniques that you used to help this person really increase their capabilities around LinkedIn? Yeah, pretty, absolutely. And it was pretty simple.
The guy that I met that I got to know fairly well became a friend. And he decided for whatever reason he wanted to be more engaged with LinkedIn because he wanted to look at other things. So he sat down one night over the dinner table at my house and I looked at his profile, which really, you know, there’s no other word for it other than sucks.
He was a vice president of construction for a company. So his tagline was vice president construction. Well, you know, we went through the rigmarole.
I said, how many vice presidents of construction do you think there are in your town? And so we did all this thing and I said, you don’t stand out. So what we did is we recrafted his tagline. That’s the first thing we did.
The first thing we did. And we recrafted his tagline from vice president of construction to vice president commercial development. Ask me how I turned a swamp into a billion dollars.
What a great attention getter. Oh, yeah. So he had like 12 connections, 12 connections.
And so I showed him how to use, you know, to try and connect with people. But so I showed him that. But we started with the title.
Ask me how I turned a swamp into a billion dollars. And then we went down and we wrote a profile. And his profile is, let me just read you the opening paragraph.
To remain a bulletproof market leader in an intense, competitive, and highly volatile global market, companies need optimized transformation at the root level across all areas of the company. It’s a zero game. Be bulletproof or be eliminated.
Now, to some people, they’ll read that and go, what the hell is he talking about? And you know what? That’s good. Because they don’t need to talk to him. He doesn’t need to talk to them.
But the people that read that that go, wow, and a lot of people did, are senior executives in the real estate and construction industry all over the world. And within a week, within a week, he was up to 500 connections. And these are connections where he took a very narrow focus.
I have a general focus. He took a narrow focus. He read every single request to connect with him.
And he only accepted it if they were senior executives or a headhunter in his particular space. He was at 3,000 by the end of the month. He has a very high quality, very targeted LinkedIn base.
And, you know, he took it from there. And he didn’t talk about what his accomplishments were. He talked about, or sorry, what his duties were.
He talked about what he had done. And he’s done things all over the world. And he ended up with, you know, interesting offers from India, Spain, many of them here in North America, one in Mexico, one in Brazil, all for senior executives in either construction or real estate.
And he’s accepted a new job a couple weeks ago. And he’s accepted the president of the western division of a $25 billion real estate conglomerate. And here’s the most interesting thing.
He’s currently VP construction of a, call it, $50 million company, $50 million company. But he’s built companies from the ground up that went as large as $250 million. And now he’s going to be president of this western division of a $25 billion real estate company.
That’s a wonderful lesson, I think, for our listeners to ensure that I think a lot of them tend to deal with the little picture in their LinkedIn profile, the details of role, responsibilities, accomplishments. If they’re in IT, it might include the technology that they’ve used. And that’s all fine, well, and good.
But your person dealt at a bigger level. I’m sure they included some of that stuff in their profile to ensure that the keywords came up for them when people were searching. And thus, that kind of message that they communicated really stood out by comparison to others.
But you also have to include the big picture of what your accomplishments were in order to really stand out from all the others that you’re competing with. Correct. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
And the keyword, he didn’t do keyword stuffing, which nobody wants to do. But what he did do is make sure the types of things that CEOs or recruiters that were looking for someone at his level were interested in would be seen in his profile. Like he used ROI as an abbreviation and return on investment.
Very few people, even executives, ever talk about return on investment. This guy did. He talks about C-level management suite.
Well, a recruiter is going to type in C-level, C-level executive. So all of the keywords that a recruiter or an executive search professional or a CEO or the owners of a real estate or construction company would likely use, and we have to give this some real thought. We need a list of all this, were naturally woven in to the profile.
Now, here’s what’s interesting, for me anyway. A lot of people will go to the trouble of putting together a list of all of the keywords that they think someone’s going to search on, and then they’ll just make a bulleted list and put it in their summary. That’s clever.
They’ll get pulled up. But really, it doesn’t tell anybody anything about you or your abilities, other than the fact that you’re pretty clever or somebody did this keyword stuffing for you. To actually take the keywords that you want to be found for and craft sentences and entire paragraphs around that to give it some depth and texture is difficult.
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Well worth it, but difficult. And when I was talking to him last week, his base salary, just the base, which is well into six figures, has been tripled. And his upside has gone from low six figures to low seven figures.
So it might have gone from $175,000 to a base of $450,000 now, and an upside of just slightly over a million within the first 18 to 24 months. That’s a substantial change. And this doesn’t just happen at the executive level.
This happens at every single level. I’ve done this with my daughters who are on LinkedIn. And they’re 21, 20, and 18, and instead of getting your regular $10 an hour minimum wage job while they’re off in university, they’re getting $15 and $20 an hour because they were able to articulate their value correctly to an employer who had a solution that these guys could solve.
And at the end of the day, you and I both know, nobody gets up on Monday morning and says, oh, I’m going to hire someone today because I’ve got extra money. No, they get up on Monday and go, oh, it’s Monday, and I’ve still got this problem and this problem and this problem. They’re looking for people to be solution providers.
And if you come across that way and build it into your LinkedIn profile that way, you’ll get phone calls. And, by the way, he made it very easy to connect with them. Beautiful story.
And thus, for our listeners, I just want to remind all of you that these are strategies that work whether you’re aggressively looking for a job today or passively open to something in the future, which you really need to do because, as David said so well, jobs, unfortunately, in the modern era are temporary, whether they call them permanent or not. These are the least permanent things I’ve ever seen. So you need to put yourself in the position to be found in order to have opportunities present themselves to you.
It doesn’t mean you have to respond favorably to everything. But the easiest way to find a job is when you’re not looking for one. Absolutely.
The opportunity just gets presented to you that you can go any meeting. Hey, that one looks pretty good. Let’s go into that one.
I know there’s one mistake that job hunters make all the time. What do you think? What do you think? I’m sorry, David. I may have interrupted you.
I apologize. No, sorry. I was just saying what do you think that one of the biggest mistakes is that people make on LinkedIn profiles? The biggest one I find that people make with LinkedIn in general is they never lock back on.
They get a profile. You’re right. Yeah, you’re right.
You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. And I see it happen all the time.
Jobs change jobs and never update their email address. They never provide people a way to reach them once they’re on LinkedIn. And it’s bizarre to me.
Well, it’s like people who never send out Christmas cards until they’ve lost their job and then they realize they need a network. Well, you know, the last you need to, as Harvey McKay said, you need to dig your well before you’re thirsty. It has to be part of your life.
And LinkedIn is so easy, even if you only log in once a week or once every two weeks, just to make sure things are refreshed and you remember to put your email address and your phone number in your summary. It’s a whole lot easier for recruiters to get hold of you. And when a recruiter has two choices, you can say yes or you can say no.
How much easier can it get? I’ve got to tell you, it’s a lot easier than trying to make people on the other end of the phone pick it up when you’re looking. So, you know, this is a great show today because you’re adding tremendous value to these people’s lives. And I hope they take it all very seriously.
I’m sure they will. And, David, thank you.
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS Career Advice globally because he makes many things in peoples’ careers easier. Those things can involve job search, hiring more effectively, managing and leading better, carer transition, as well as advice about resolving workplace issues.
He is the producer and former host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 3100 episodes. 
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