Applying With LinkedIn vs Resume

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LinkedIn has risen to prominence over the last decade for candidates and recruiters alike. Some companies are even accepting job applications solely through LinkedIn. With the sheer number of applications they receive, employers leverage LinkedIn’s AI as a first filter. So, are consulting firms doing this as well? Listen to Jenny Rae as she shares insight on how consulting firms evaluate candidates, and which application asset matters more – the resume or your LinkedIn profile.

Applying With LinkedIn vs Resume- YouTube Transcription:

Applying with LinkedIn versus resume. This is a question that we got recently and somebody asked it, in first of all kind of an odd way. To apply on LinkedIn? I’m not even sure what that means but applying on LinkedIn versus with your resume, again, a little confusing. But it does bring up a question LinkedIn versus the resume. Where should the resident place be that holds the story of you. I’m gonna talk about this in this video especially as it pertains to consulting but also other top and super competitive fields.

I’m Jenny Rae Le Roux, the Managing Director of Management Consulted. I’m an ex Bain consultant and I work with an amazing team of McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants to provide corporate training, training at schools, and also one-on-one coaching.

Do You Need A LinkedIn Profile?

And this question, what should you do with LinkedIn and what should you do with your resume, where should your story reside, I think is a really important one. So first of all, do you need a LinkedIn profile? My ultimate answer is if you are applying for roles, you actually don’t really need one. And people at LinkedIn will not like it when I say that, but the reason is that if you’re applying for roles and they already have an opening, and they’re like please submit your resume, the last thing that they want to do is go and look up your LinkedIn profile on top of your resume. They should have everything, and more, that they need in the resume to see.

If you’re interested in becoming a dialogue contributor and using weak ties to let people on LinkedIn infrequently know about updates in your life and career, yes, you should have a profile. And so for most people we say good, build a LinkedIn profile it’s not going to be hurtful to you, and building a LinkedIn profile is a really important task.

Editing LinkedIn Profiles

Let me say however that when we’re editing LinkedIn profiles ,which we do, and also when we’re editing resumes, which we also do, we always start in one place. What do you think it is? The resume every single time. Because it LinkedIn you have a little bit less real estate and a much more focused process. And when we’re doing your resume we can really tease out the power of the story that you have. We can also focus on making sure that you’ve got metrics in every line. Details about projects, keywords. And then we can port that over and then sterilize it. Make it simpler and more focused and more detailed and pull out only the most important things for LinkedIn.

But if you try to go the other way if you try to write your story on LinkedIn and then expand on it out to your resume, you often end up with these like terrible terrible just lukewarm resumes that have nothing interesting in them. So that being said, which one should you apply with?

Should I Apply With LinkedIn Or Resume?

If you have the choice, here’s my LinkedIn profile can I work with you, versus here’s my resume. Resume every time! Do you want lukewarm, or do you want hot, hot, hot? You want hot, hot, hot! You want “caliente” every time. You want to make sure that you are in the zone with getting the full description of who you are. So you have your education at the top often, if you’re in your educational experience. You have work experience, we have good expansion if somebody wants it on what you were tactically doing.

And then finally, you’ve got leadership experience, which LinkedIn really doesn’t even allow you to put. And most importantly actually many organizations want that third factor of you, the extra part, not just your work and your education but also they want to know who you are when you’re not being watched. So they want to know your interests, your languages, and other pieces that LinkedIn doesn’t really have a great platform for. Let me just add a few asides.

Are Consulting Firms Using LinkedIn?

In consulting, we haven’t seen this yet. Firms aren’t using LinkedIn as the sole source of information. It’s not interesting, flexible, or dynamic enough for them to actually get everything that they need. But for organizations that either are looking for lower-level roles, for their filing a hundred people back-to-back they’re starting to use AI, you have seen, especially more tech focused roles, you have seen LinkedIn plus AI, be used as an initial filter. And somebody might be able to only look at your LinkedIn profile. So you can’t upload anything, you can’t do anything except for your LinkedIn profile.

How Much Effort Should You Put Into Your LinkedIn Profile?

Now what does that mean for how good your LinkedIn profile should be. It should be killer either way. You should always start with the resume, regardless of whether you’re going to use it or not, and then built an incredible LinkedIn profile from the resume, rather than just starting with LinkedIn using their watered-down format and trying to come up with a slam-bang approach.

So the process, if that’s the case, is still the same. It just makes it imperative that you have LinkedIn. And finally, a lot of people don’t talk about this, but it’s not applying specifically, but networking, is absolutely critical with LinkedIn. You want people to be able to find you, reach out to you, make connections with you, you want to be able to hold them for a lifetime, and LinkedIn is an amazing opportunity to do that. And then if you want to do research on places that you can reach out, and that’s also really powerful.

So we’re really excited to help with LinkedIn profiles and also with the networking approach. In addition we do great resume edits at Management Consulted.

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