#29 Your LinkedIn Profile is talking behind your back

Last week I talked about the difference between a contact list and an actual network. A few of you replied (thank you — keep doing that), and there was a theme I want to pull on.

Most of you have done the work. You’ve had the conversations. You’ve told people what you’re looking for. Great.

But here’s what’s happening next, and nobody’s telling you about it.

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After that conversation, the person you spoke to runs into someone at a team offsite, or they’re in a Slack thread where a role comes up, and they think of you. They want to help. So what do they do?

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They pull up your LinkedIn profile to send it along. Or they half-remember your title and search for you.

And what they find is a profile that still says you’re a “passionate leader driving cross-functional excellence” or whatever you wrote in 2021 when you were trying to sound impressive for your skip-level.​

Now that person — who genuinely wanted to refer you — has to do the mental translation work themselves. They have to explain to whoever they’re talking to what you actually do, what you’re good at, and why this person should talk to you. Most people won’t bother. Not because they don’t care, but because it’s too much effort and they’re not sure they’ll get it right.

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Your profile isn’t a CV. It’s a cheat sheet for the people trying to help you.

If your network can’t copy-paste your own story — or at the very least get the gist in five seconds — you’re making every single referral harder than it needs to be.

If you’ve been at Amazon or somewhere like it for the last few years — you’ve never had to explain what you do. The system did that for you. Six-pagers, dashboards, shared context with everyone who mattered. You were brilliant inside that machine. But your LinkedIn profile was built inside it too. And now you’re asking it to work outside, for people who don’t have any of that context. That’s the gap. And it’s bigger than most people realise until the referral doesn’t come back or the recruiter goes quiet.

The reframe is this: your LinkedIn profile isn’t about you. It’s about making it easy for other people to talk about you accurately when you’re not in the room.

That means it should answer three questions in about ten seconds of scanning:

1. What do you actually do — in language a smart person outside your company would understand?

2. What kind of problems are you the person to call for?

3. Where are you headed — even directionally?

If it doesn’t do those three things, your network is doing double duty. They’re advocating for you and translating you at the same time. That’s a lot to ask of someone doing you a favour over coffee.

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Here’s a quick gut check:

Pull up your own profile right now.

Read your headline and the first two lines of your About section. If your bestie from your last job couldn’t forward that to a hiring manager with zero additional explanation — it’s not doing its job yet.

You don’t need to rewrite the whole thing today. Just notice the gap between how you’d describe yourself on a call with someone who knows your work and what’s actually written there. That gap is what’s costing you.