The Recruiting Rodeo 🐎 ﹘ THE STORYTELLING SERIES (The Resume📑)

Vol. 32: To Summarize or Not To Summarize, "That" Is The Question (But First, How I Find You And Read Your Profile + Resume)

There are a few ways to land a new job. One is to apply for a position online via a job search platform like LinkedIn, Glassdoor or Indeed; another is to be referred by a friend, colleague, or family member directly to someone at a Company that may have an open position; and yet another although less common scenario is to be “found.” To be sitting at work or home and receive an email or LinkedIn message from a retained executive recruiter (like me) who is proactively searching for strong potential candidates for a senior-level position that my Search Firm has been retained to work on or that it may be working on, in the future.

For purposes of The Recruiting Rodeo’s 🐎“storytelling” series and how to take what we learned interviewing some of the world’s finest content professionals and apply their wisdom to the two most important job search tools: the RESUME📑 and LinkedIn profile, we’re going to focus on the first and last scenarios: applying for jobs online and being found by recruiters (like me) who reach out unannounced to job seekers and non job seekers, because we are working on a position and think the person we’re reaching out to — could be a strong potential fit.

In this Rodeo, I am going to explain at what stage of the Search process a recruiter like me is looking at your two most important off- and online job search marketing tools — your RESUME📑 and LinkedIn profile as well as how I view or read them. What I hope to “discover” about you by reading whatever you choose to include in your online professional social media profile, and next, your RESUME📑. Because there is an “order” in which I review these important job search tools.

You may be asking yourself, who cares how someone is reviewing or reading my RESUME📑 or LinkedIn profile?

Well, it matters if your intention is to create a strong RESUME📑and LinkedIn profile. Because understanding this information, how I look for you and eventually find you, and how I review your profile and RESUME📑, will help you write and talk about your professional experiences and skills, what you have spent a minimum of 40-80 hours per week doing for many years, in a more cohesive, strategic way that helps the person interviewing you or is considering interviewing you, better understand your “story.” Your professional background. What you have done throughout your career and how what you have done is different than your peers with similar expereince and could be very beneficial to the Company interviewing you.

Just like no two fingerprints are the same — even identical twins who share nearly identical DNA have distinct fingerprints — and so it goes in the world of talent acquisition. No two candidates are the same, regardless of whether each has worked in the same industry, holds the same position or job title, and makes a similar salary. Every executive has different strengths and weaknesses, parts of the job he or she enjoys doing and excels at — and parts of the job he or she can improve upon. As an example, if I’m recruiting a CFO, all of the high-potential candidates I interview may be equally skilled at technical accounting but not M&A and investing.

I’m trying to focus this portion of the “storytelling” series on the RESUME📑 even though I primarily search for and find many of my Candidates on LinkedIn, because eventually, I need a candidate’s RESUME📑 when/if I decide to present the candidate to my client (the Company who retains my Search Firm to find candidates for the open position) and many sections of the RESUME📑 are so challenging to write. Perhaps none more so than the two that have the most potential to impact a job search positively — the EXPERIENCE section and its “Magic Bullets” (for a refresher on this topic, please reread The Recruiting Rodeo🐎Vol. 23: The Resume: The EXPERIENCE Section And Its Magic Bullets) and the RESUME’s📑 SUMMARY section.

To note, and as I mentioned in the last Rodeo, if you are going to create a SUMMARY section on your RESUME 📑, that SUMMARY section needs to be in “sync” with the “HEADLINE” section of your LinkedIn profile because they serve similar purposes which we’ll get to in this and subsequent Rodeos.

To summarize or not to summarize, “that” is the question. The Recruiting Rodeo 🐎will answer that question in the weeks and months TK but for now, let’s fully understand how someone who is looking for you, who may want to consider you for a senior-level, open position, finds you.

In Vol: 31 of The Recruiting Rodeo 🐎, we learned that rarely, if ever, do I, a retained Search Firm, review a potential candidate’s RESUME📑when I am considering reaching out to the person about a senior-level position that my Firm has been retained to work on. Why is that? Because I’m not posting the positions or jobs that I work on online. I don’t “advertise” them. So therefore, I don’t have RESUMES📑 to review to find or evaluate potential candidates.

When you apply to a job posting online, typically you send your RESUME📑 along with the job application via a job search platform, like LinkedIn, which in turn, populates your RESUME📑 and application into the Company’s applicant tracking system (aka, “ATS”). It sits in the ATSuntil someone from the Company, typically HR or an internal Recruiter who works for the Company, logs into the ATS and reviews your information.

I don’t work at a Company. I work outside the Company and provide a service more akin to a “consultant.” I’m an SME (aka, “subject matter expert”) in many industries, job functions, and most important, know to find and recruit high-quality talent and guide both candidates and my clients and their Hiring teams through a process that results in a successful and timely new hire.

Even if I’m considering a former or long-time Candidate of mine for an open position, an executive I may have worked with or recruited in the past and know pretty well, even if I have his/her RESUME📑, it would most likely be outdated and I would still need to go online to LinkedIn or Google to figure out the potential candidate’s current employment status. Where s/he works now.

So to find top candidates for a senior-level role, even if I have known the executive for years, I primarily use LinkedIn, more specifically, its very $$ paid subscription products designed specially for recruiters and talent acquisition pros: LinkedIn Lite or LinkedIn Recruiter.

LinkedIn and its paid subscription products are my research playground, my utopia. Especially for finding people I don’t know. A Recruiter always has to keep her pipeline for new and emerging talent “fresh” because in talent acquisition, two things are true: while no employer likes a job jumper, talent nowadays does not stay put at one company forever. Especially talent that is constantly up-leveling its skills. That talent is always in high demand.

So knowing that my job is to FIND and interview only the most highly- qualified candidates for my clients, and keep my pipeline fresh and current, how do I do that? How do I actually find candidates, who are often highly-specialized in terms of their skills and experience, on LinkedIn?

Going back to Vol. 31 , I search on LinkedIn’s subscription products using a combo of keywords that are baked into pre-set LinkedIn categories like LOCATION and SKILLS and INDUSTRY. I also contribute my fair share of manual keyword inputs to find what I need.

For example, LinkedIn Lite has a LOCATION category with a drop-down menu of pre-set regions, cities and towns. It also has a SKILLS category where I can click on pre-existing drop-down keywords such as “Certified Public Accountant.“

In addition to using LinkedIn’s pre-existing categories and drop-downs under each category, I am constantly typing in my own strategic keywords to help me fine-tune and find exactly the candidates I’m looking for. I enter different words for hours and days, until I find my rhythm. What works and produces the best results, per Search.

My ability to find the right candidates — whether it’s using subscription databases such as LinkedIn’s or my former Search Firms’ or a Company’s ATS if I’m working in-house doing Talent Acquisition, is contingent on my knowledge of the job function (the skills and experience needed to perform the open position), my client’s industry and adjacent industries, my client’s competitors, org charts, new technologies, as well as shifting market dynamics like tariffs and domestic/global regulation.

I’ve been doing executive search for 25 years. I have hired hundreds of exceptional, senior-level executives at companies all over N.A. Because I interview so much talent daily, from Companies with widely-different funding models and products and services, I know which Companies have the best talent and in what job functions. I know which Company employees stay in their jobs for decades because they’re paid well (some overcompensated in lieu of that coveted VP title promotion). I know which executives scream at their employees. I understand that most of the people I recruit have no to very little reason to leave their “comfortable” situations, except perhaps, for a better opportunity.

So, after I input keywords using LinkedIn’s existing categories as well as my own manual keyword inputs, LinkedIn generates hundreds of profiles that I need to review — and quickly, because I’m often working on more than one Search at a time and in different stages of a Search (💡in Vol. 31 we learned that the first three weeks of any new Search are the busiest in terms of candidate research, identification and interviewing).

I do all of my candidate research myself, intentionally. I “like” to do research. I know exactly what I’m looking for and can find it much more easily, accurately, and quickly — than delegating this critical part of the Search process to someone else. Especially someone who has no to limited desire or incentive to learn and has not done this type of research for recruiters or talent acquisition pros before. Research is a skill. If you want to hire researchers and you work in Talent Acquisition, make sure those researchers have a definitive career path and ideally, want to become recruiters or work in HR one day.

Understanding the different phases of a Search and the time commitment involved to find and interview potential candidates, and especially, knowing how to communicate, what to communicate and when to communicate, to both interested candidates giving you their time and busy Hiring Managers and HR - the Hiring “team,” when multiple Searches are in progress, is critical to being a successful Recruiter, as well as to managing a Talent Acquisition function at any Company.

To be a successful recruiter, it helps to experience every possible search scenario and outcome, the wins and the fails. A fail being a top candidate declining an Offer at the eleventh hour after months and months of interviews with Company executives. Most failed outcomes are entirely avoidable. Experienced recruiters anticipate them and know how to avoid them. They know how to "guide” the process that is Talent Acquisition.

The reality is most companies don’t have a year or longer to make a senior-level hire, they can’t afford to hire internal recruiters, and they don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars budgeted to spend on annual, external Search Firm fees. The average cost per Search, executed by a retained BIG Search Firm is $100,000.

One of my all-time favorite quotes from a management coach I follow on X and LinkedIn, Dave Kline...

Going back to The Recruiting Rodeo Vol. 4: Why So Many Companies Can’t Hire Their Own Talent, the majority of the time, it is only when a Company has tried to hire talent for its open positions using its internal resources, mainly HR and internal recruiters who work directly for the Company, and the busy Hiring Managers are not getting the results they need and want and getting frustrated, that the Company makes the executive and costly decision to go “outside” and work with external Search Firms (for more about the two main and very different types of Search Firms companies work with when they cannot find their own talent, please re-read The Recruiting Rodeo Vol. 3: Retained vs. Contingency Search).

Back to how I search. I rarely search “far and wide” for candidates because I am often searching for senior-level executives who are highly specialized within their job function and/or industry and located within a certain geographic radius of the Company’s headquarters or the office designated for the new hire which is usually nowhere near the HQ (💡as I share with every person who reaches out to me on LinkedIn asking me to keep him or her in mind for a “remote” position, Companies rarely if ever hire external retained Search Firms to find Candidates for “remote” positions). I am mostly searching “narrowly,” using keywords in different combos.

As an example of my search strategy, let’s say a major airline hires me to find an Senior Vice President (SVP) of its Warehouse Operations who has experience integrating robotics, AI and other next-gen technologies into its existing and future warehouses and other facilities. I work with the Hiring Manager directly, before the Search even begins, to make sure we are fully aligned on everything s/he ideally wants in this new hire: that can include hybrid work requirements, office location, compensation range, technical skills, experience managing a team of a certain size, must-have certifications, and possibly, experience working with a union.

In this example, I am searching for senior executive who has experience managing the operations of a warehouse and other facilities that use next-gen technologies to maintain and house airplanes. As an airline is but one form of transportation, I am also going to “open up” my search to include searching for candidates who have experience managing the operations of a warehouse and other facilities that use next-gen technologies to maintain and house other forms of transportation such as automobiles, trucks, trains, and spacecraft.

And here’s why I’m sharing this example and why this piece of information is important to understand for creating a strong RESUME and LinkedIn profile. Even if many of the technologies mastered to do the job are the same or similar in these adjacent industries: trucking, trains, aero, and auto, the Hiring team will inevitably choose the executive with the same product or industry-specific experience — “all things being equal,” meaning, each candidate I find, interview extensively and present, has the technical and other job function skills needed to perform the job. The Hiring Manager and team, 9/10 times, hire the person with the airline industry experience, vs. the equally-qualified candidates who have the same or similar experience but have worked in adjacent industries, not airline. This does not mean that the Hiring Manager does not want to see or won’t see highly qualified candidates from other industries within the transportation sector, but the person who inevitably gets the job is working in or has worked in the airline industry or directly with airplanes, at some point in his/her career.

These are hiring “patterns” based on Search outcomes I’ve helped facilitate and observed for decades and these outcomes influence my “search strategy” — how I search for candidates and find them, online and off. I am here to serve my clients, deliver the most highly-qualified candidates that they want.

Using the SVP Warehouse Operations position as an example, I will be searching for top candidates who have the necessary technical skills (i.e., experience working with next-gen techs like robotics and AI within a warehouse or facilities setting) using some of LinkedIn’s pre-set categories like INDUSTRY (as well as other online search engines). A quick search using the AI app Perplexity tells me that UPS is the largest warehouse provider in the U.S. and Tesla owns the largest single warehouse in N.A. So those are logically, two Companies out of many, that I will target during my Search.

I may start my LinkedIn research by entering or clicking on pre-existing keywords under LinkedIn’s INDUSTRY category like “Motor Vehicle Manufacturing” (Tesla) and “Truck Transportation” (UPS) — as well as other INDUSTRY pre-sets like “Rail Transportation,” and of course, “Airlines and Aviation.” And doesn’t Amazon have a lot of warehouses? Amazon classifies itself on LinkedIn under the industry: “Software Development.”

If you want to understand what a Company’s designated LinkedIn INDUSTRY category is, it’s all right there on regular LinkedIn, no subscription needed. Simply do a Company lookup by entering a Company name in the Search box up top on the screen next to the LinkedIn logo, press enter, then click on the Company name, and see what category the Company has chosen to list itself under. As an example, of i enter Walmart in the search box, then press enter, then click on Walmart’s name, I see that Walmart is listed on LinkedIn under the “Retail” category.

Going back to the SVP Warehouse Ops position let’s say it is on-site, five days per week, and there is no relocation assistance being offered. Given that information, I will use LinkedIn’s LOCATION category and type in different geographic-specific locations and see what pops up in the drop down menu that would make sense to explore and research based on where the position will be located. The position might not be located at the Company’s actual headquarters, but rather, at one of its large warehouse locations often far outside a major metropolitan area (and hence, why you might want to go back and read The Recruiting Rodeo Vol. 22: The Contact Information Section. What To Include And Why It Matters).

Because I’m looking for something and someone very niche, someone who has worked with next-gen technologies within the setting of a warehouse or facility, and has “operational” expertise, and let’s say the position requires supervision of people, processes, and systems, I will manually type in keywords like “robotics” and “AI” into another pre-set LinkedIn category, “KEYWORD.” I’m not looking to recruit someone out of an AI or robotics company, per se, the people creating the AI or robotics, but I might very well need to find an engineer who has worked on building or fixing airplanes at some point in his/her career and graduated to a senior-level operational role and has some experience using these technologies. So knowing that a person’s prior experience from way back and skills might be attractive to the Hiring Manager, I might enter more words into the KEYWORD section like “engineer” and “operations.” Or I might try entering keywords like Director of Operations or VP of Operations into another LinkedIn category TITLE and simultaneously, type “robotics” into the KEYWORD category and also do a lookup using LinkedIn’s EDUCATION category by degrees including “Electrical Engineering” and “Mechanical Engineering.” So anything someone with a LinkedIn profile enters when creating or updating his/her LInkedIn profile, is what shows up in these LinkedIn categories. If you list your undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering, then you will most likely show up in a Search for that degree.

There are many ways to find what I’m looking for. The takeaway for the hard-working cowgirls and boys out there reading this who have invested heavily in their careers and now know that they can be found by recruiters, not just applying to jobs online, is that it takes a lot of time and strategy and the desire to keep searching to find the right candidates, to produce the right results.

No matter how complicated or specialized the role, an experienced Recruiter who understands how to use databases and knows what s/he is looking for — understands the actual position/job function and industry -its org chart and dynamics, can find the right candidates, regardless of how specialized the position is and if the recruiter has ever recruited in the industry or job function before. TBH, the more specialized the position, the easier it is to find candidates IMO — because you’re working with a more finite candidate pool. If a C-Level Hiring Leader insists that we hire a VP who has worked at one of the FAANGs, I say silently to myself, “thank you.” You just made my job a helluva lot easier (💡as long as the Hiring Leader and his HRBP and whoever approves Compensation for the hire understand the compensation required to pull someone out of one of those Companies).

The candidate research and identification part of the Search process is “everything.” It gets the Search off and running — or not.

Once the results are generated by the machine, it’s time to review the hundreds of profiles and figure out which candidates to engage with to start information sharing about the position, and hopefully, begin interviewing.

What I look for at this stage — when reviewing hundreds of LinkedIn profiles per day after hours of keyword search and manipulation, is someone’s EXPERIENCE. I go straight to the EXPERIENCE section of the LinkedIn profile, bypassing completely whatever witty or insightful HEADLINE the person chose to include on his/her profile because what I care most about is where the person works and has worked throughout his/her entire career, what the person actually did at each job, and the titles held at each employer.

Ideally, I want to see how the person describes his/her experience. Not just see employer names and titles. Let’s be real. I am a complete stranger reading your public professional social media profile and know nothing about you, yet .. I may want to recruit you for an incredible job opportunity that could possibly be, the next step in your career. I’ve done it many times. So whatever you choose to include in the EXPERIENCE section of your LinkedIn profile, that will greatly influence whether I reach out to you — or not.

When I have finished reviewing your EXPERIENCE section, I then pivot my eyes to your ABOUT section to see what you included or “summarized” about yourself there. The ABOUT section offers a lot of room or space to go into detail about whatever it is you choose to share about yourself. This is where you can really “tell your story” on your LinkedIn profile. The ABOUT section is not intended to be as factual as the EXPERIENCE section which should list your employers by name and your job titles.

This Rodeo is about how I find you, what I look at first once I find you and why. We will go into further detail about how to compose the ABOUT section as well as other sections of your profile in future Rodeos. What’s important to understand now is that I find you through LinkedIn and extensive keyword search, how I’m searching for you, and how I review your profile, along with hundreds of other similar profiles, to arrive at my decision on whether to contact you, or not.

If I can’t make heads or tails of who you are and what you’ve done as a working professional by simply reading your EXPERIENCE and ABOUT sections (it happens sometimes), I will go back to regular LinkedIn, a separate login when I am paying for LinkedIn’s subscription products, and see what you listed under your SKILLS section. LinkedIn offers pre-set SKILLS that it populates for you and that you can click on and post on your profile so that others on LinkedIn, presumably those people who have worked with or interacted with you before in some professional capacity, can endorse you for your SKILLS. I rarely keep mine up to date, but it is another great way for people to understand your experience better.

A good example of this would be an executive who lists a title on his/her LinkedIn profile like Chief Cat Herder or Data Nerd. What does that mean? The Company and executive might think these titles are clever and could care less about recruiters contacting them, but for purposes of this Rodeo, I need to know if being a “herder” means you define your skills and expertise as being in operations or people management. Maybe you work as the Company’s head of HR? If you work with data, are you working in a data and analytics role and supporting the company’s marketing function or are you the VP Marketing and you are data-driven?

Regardless or wacky titles, at this stage of the Search process, the one section of a person’s LinkedIn profile that I am not looking at is the HEADLINE section. Why? Because the HEADLINE section is essentially a book title. It has a 220-character limit and I’m not looking for a broad brushstrokes and super brief summary at this point in the Search process. I’m trying to figure out what are your core skills and experience. More about the HEADLINE section in future RODEOS in the storytelling series.

The HEADLINE section of the LinkedIn profile can absolutely be impactful in a job search but I prefer to take a close look at it … AFTER I have someone’s RESUME in hand. And I won’t have a person’s RESUME in hand, until I engage with him or her and hopefully, share some brief yet detailed and accurate information about the position and Company, to determine mutual initial interest.

It is at this phase of the Search process that candidate research and identification moves to actual recruitment. I have read hundreds of profiles and decided who I am going to contact based largely on the information the person has included in his or her profile’s EXPERIENCE and ABOUT sections, and my general knowledge about her/his employer, industry and the job function. The person’s experience, at least initially, appears to be in sync with what my client wants.

Unlike many recruiters, I do not share the job description at this stage. I only share job descriptions with candidates whom I feel could be highly qualified for the role and to assess that, I need to engage with the person directly and share information. “Spray and play” is not how Retained Search works. At least the way I go to market.

To reach out to a candidate I am not connected to on LinkedIn, I use what are called InMails. A monthly or annual subscription to LinkedIn’s paid Recruiter or Lite subscription products comes with a limited number of InMails. Once the initial allotment has been exhausted, InMails cost $$$ for a set amount or “bundle.”

If I am already connected to the person I want to reach out to (I have 32,000 well-earned, first-degree LinkedIn connections), I will send a (free) message over regular LinkedIn, the platform’s “free” product which has a separate log in from LinkedIn Lite and Recruiter.

Once I engage with a potential candidate, and he or she responds with initial interest, the next step is arranging a 45-minute to one-hour phone or video interview for me to better understand the potential candidate’s skills and experience, and for the candidate to learn more about the job and Company.

Many Recruiters are told by their supervisors, to limit their interviews to 30 minutes in length. Especially for senior-level Search, I think this is a terrible talent acquisition policy. You can’t get to know someone, especially a busy, senior-level executive, in 30 minutes. Any experienced recruiter knows within the first ten minutes of a conversation if the person could be a strong fit for the position or not. So if the Recruiter chooses not to use the entire 45 minutes or one hour, they won’t and the busy executive being interviewed will probably be very grateful to have some free time back in his/her busy day.

I use phone or video for a first interview, depending on how eager the candidate and I are to mutually connect and how soon we can realistically make that happen,