You can absolutely DIY it. However, there are 2 gotchas you should be aware of, otherwise you risk doing more damage than good to your profile. 

To tailor your profile to specific keywords, you’ll need at least one job description and ChatGPT to extract those.  Then you’ll need to update your profile to the specific keywords in that job description, instead of the generic skill ones, if you want recruiters to find you.  I’ve seen thousands of job descriptions in my work on AI products for recruiting teams at tech companies and at least 50-60% of them are poorly written.  So you’ll need a process of selecting and curating at least 3 high-quality job descriptions to find the keywords savvy recruiters will be searching for. I’ll teach you that process inside the Challenge. 

The second thing you’ll need is absolute clarity on what your expertise is that you want to tailor your LinkedIn profile around. If you have over 8 years of work experience, you likely have many things you can specialize in.  The longer you stay in the job market, the more likely you’re to doubt yourself, wondering if you qualify for all the requirements of specialist jobs.  If you’re like the majority of my tech clients, you won’t be able to put your finger on your expertise until someone else – an experienced peer or a coach – shines a light on your skills and experience that you’ve been taking for granted.  And then you’ll say “Wow, I didn’t realize I had expertise in this area.  It totally makes sense now.” 

It’s like pulling rabbits out of a hat and it’s one of my favorite things to do for my clients. I look forward to having some rabbits pulled out of your expertise hat by me or another Challenge participant as part of the Challenge.  

That’s the illusion that keeps people from being found by recruiters looking for them today.  By customizing your LinkedIn profile to include certain specialized skills, you are NOT making yourself less discoverable for the general jobs you can perform.  But you’re making yourself MORE discoverable for the roles that wouldn’t have found you otherwise. In addition, in the course you will learn a process by which we will test market demand for a few specialist set of keywords that you can implement.  We want to make sure you’re picking the keyword set that has the most job opportunities available at the moment.   

You may have seen the skill suggestion feature in LinkedIn.  However, as you can see in the screenshot higher up on this page, these skills are too broad. They’re not the specific skill keywords that a recruiter searches for on LinkedIn Recruiter.  And the reason for that is simple. These LinkedIn recommended skills are title-based.  They prompted me to type in a title and they generated a bunch of general skill words for it. Some were frankly off point – “engineering” is not a necessary skill for “Director of Product Management”.  But even if they were accurate, no recruiter will ever search for “software development” in LinkedIn Recruiter. There’ll be simply way too many candidates to sort through.  

Remember, LinkedIn is optimizing for number of job postings you see because most people still think that applying to jobs is the only way to get hired. So they think LinkedIn is doing a good job if it shows them more jobs to apply to.   If you’re reading this, you know better.  Inside the Challenge you will learn how to figure out the specific keywords that recruiters use to search for someone like you. 

You need to be mindful of market cycles. The right opportunity to stretch into a new role, function, industry, vertical or company stage is when the market is HOT.  When companies are so desperate for talent that they are willing to take risks with people who are making a big jump in a new direction.

But a SOFT market is like winter season. Companies are much less likely to take risks on career switchers and they are much more specific about what you need to bring to the table.  It’s time to hunker down and leverage your existing skills and experiences that will feed you and your family.  It’s time to understand what makes you a specialist and an expert and craft the right marketing signal to recruiters that showcases your expertise to those who want it.  

This strategy may not work well for you in you have only a few years of experience because we may not find enough specialized keywords for you to make you stand out for specialized jobs.  However, I’ll let you be the judge of how much specialized experience you have.  I definitely DO NOT RECOMMEND this course for anyone with less than 3 years of experience.  

I’ve tested nearly all the AI Personalization tools for LinkedIn profiles on the market and all of them provide simple rules-based recommendations.  These best-practice “optimizations” range from “put the title in the headline” and “don’t use fluff words like thought leader” to “hide your graduation year if you graduated more than 20 years ago”.  Now, I don’t think you should be paying $50 or more for basic advice like this. That’s why I’ve conveniently packaged all these best practices into the bonus pack that you get in the Challenge.  

It’s also important to know that none of the existing AI tools for LinkedIn Profile offer job customization because nobody has ever figured out a way to optimize your LinkedIn profile to a set of job description keywords, instead of an individual job description. In this respect, there is nothing like the system taught in this Challenge on the market. 

I have built resume and job matching products and algorithms across all professional functions – Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product, Operations, Finance, CS, Business Development and many more. In addition, this course does not rely on my knowledge of your field. It relies on your knowledge of the field and on the job descriptions written by others for your specialty. 

However, if you are in tech, you will get the added benefit of me knowing that field and the skill keywords in it like the back of my hand through my own professional experience as a Product executive and through my hands-on coaching of 110+ tech professionals. 

There are two developments you should be aware of if you’re relying only on job applications and on customizing your resume for each job:

1. Job postings on LinkedIn are being spammed with 500+ applications.  A large % of those applications are stretching the truth with “resume customization”.  So, companies do what any sane person would do – ignore the whole thing and focus on channels that have a higher signal-to-noise ratio like referrals and searches on LinkedIn Recruiter for qualified candidates (regardless of whether they applied or not).  So, applying to every job under the sun, even to the ones that are a “stretch”, is a waste of your precious time.  

2. Resume customization is going away in 2024. LinkedIn is quietly moving towards a single resume that is shared across all jobs and recruiters.  A few weeks ago, LinkedIn’s CEO announced a rollout of a number of products and features. Buried in the small print was an announcement about Resume search in LinkedIn Recruiter.  Inside, you can read that LinkedIn already makes any resume you upload as part of a job application available to recruiters on other jobs in the same company.  Going forward, they’ll be rolling out the ability of any recruiter to see the resume you’ve uploaded if you give that permission. A skilled Product team (and LinkedIn has plenty of those) will make the permission fly under your radar or seem like a no-brainer when it’s rolled out.

So, do you see where the wind is blowing? Soon you will need to think carefully about what you will want your single resume and LinkedIn profile to look like for everyone. 

The course’s success depends heavily on your going through the process, learning and implementing the results of your labor into your profile. And I cannot guarantee that you’ll do the work. Nothing will change if you just watch the course but don’t implement.  This course is for serious professionals only, not for lookie loos. 

I will likely run this course again in the future but it may not be for another few months.  As we get more results and testimonials, the price will go up.  So, are you willing to waste a few more precious months with an unoptimized LinkedIn profile and then pay more money to have it done later?