What Santa Can Teach Us About LinkedIn Profiles

Have you seen Santa’s LinkedIn profile? Check out his Summary:

Since it’s Santa’s busiest season, we were very lucky he found some time to sit down with us and answer a few questions.

What makes your profile’s Summary so good?

• It's packed with personality and passion.
• It paints a vivid picture of the North Pole culture where employees are intrinsically motivated to do good for others. Our values — hard work, a giving spirit, and a positive attitude — shine.
• The tone is friendly and conversational. It's written in the first person and isn't cluttered with jargon.

What are the other key elements of your well-branded profile?

What other profile features reinforce your corporate culture?

Core Skills, endorsed by my network

These real skills from LinkedIn’s drop-down menu are so applicable to me!

Recommendations from customers and colleagues

Volunteer Experience

Work Experience

Why should we care about all this profile stuff?

Looking at profiles is the #1 activity on LinkedIn. It’s a huge branding opportunity because good employee profiles = more candidate traffic = more brand exposure.

Well-branded profiles are a win-win: Employees strengthen their professional images, and your culture gets more exposure.

Do you have any parting thoughts?

Be prepared to handle objections from:

1. Candidates: “If I update my profile, it’ll look like I’m job hunting.”

Start by keeping your profile updated. If you and your team model the right behavior, your employees will feel more comfortable doing so too.

2. Leadership: “If our employees are more visible, competitors poach them.”

Use pre- and post-attrition data to show no change. You’ll prove that better profiles do not increase turnover.

* Note: Santa’s profile shown above does not exist on LinkedIn — question's still out about whether he exists in real life.

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