I could tell something was wrong the moment my friend picked up the phone. She had just spent a “ton of money” paying someone to rewrite her LinkedIn profile and they had done a terrible job. A bad, no good, horrible job whose only use would be as kindling for a fire (I’m paraphrasing here).
I was surprised since she had used a professional. Let me take a look, I said. Maybe I could help.
The package included a resume, executive bio, and a LinkedIn profile with instructions about how to populate the site. I read it all and thought… it was perfectly okay. It was professional and well written, easy to read, full of the buzzy keywords. I started to wonder what the real problem was.
I decided it was an issue of misaligned goals. I asked my friend some questions to find out.
Questions like: What is the main purpose of this profile? What do you want people to take away when looking at it? What kind of tone do you want to convey? Who is your main audience? Besides company names and titles, what do you want to communicate about your career?
She was surprised by the questions because her LinkedIn profile writer never asked them. But more importantly, she herself had not thought about them. She asked for a couple of days to sit with it.
Once she came back with answers, I had the clarity I needed to do a rewrite. I sent it to her a few days later, and she loved it. This was finally what she wanted. What she wanted all along.
She thanked me for all my hard work. What she didn’t know was how little work I had done. I pretty much changed the point of view and did some surgical rewrites, but overall, the foundation was the same package she had paid for.
This made me think about how many projects and pieces of work get tossed every day because we don’t ask simple questions about the end goal at the beginning. About how we discard good work just because it doesn’t match the fuzzy picture we have in our minds.
The professional who helped my friend never asked about the ultimate goal. She assumed it was the same as everyone’s: maximize recruiter engagement. And she delivered exactly that. A well-put-together yet generic result.
My friend failed to see the potential in what she already had. A few strategic questions and a few precise rewrites were all it took to get to the desired outcome.
Good work gets thrown away every day. Not because it’s wrong, but because nobody asks what “right” is supposed to look like.
Real Thoughts 