My profile uses the word “excellence” in it, so do more than a half million other profiles – so what;-)
A number of sites have been commenting on the supposed cliches contained within profiles and warning users not to use these “overused” words and phrases. (The LinkedIn site flamed the fires by first posting 10 overused cliches)
Give me a break.
Searching for words
This is an interesting aspect of the LinkedIn site – you too can search for any word you’d like on the system.
Try it – just enter something like “bamboozled” in the keyword search pane – I found 34 profiles that include that word.
Too many results to show
If you enter a very common word, LinkedIn will tell you that there are no results – it isn’t that there are no results, it’s just that LinkedIn won’t show them.
Try it – search for “the” – it isn’t that no profiles use the word, it’s just that LinkedIn would be returning nearly every profile if the search worked…
Overused terms
Perhaps I’m not on the same page, but LinkedIn is calling “extensive experience” the most overused cliche. Over two hundred and twenty five thousand people appear to use that phrase.
The word “manager” – that appears in over seven million profiles…
If you have extensive experience, why would you describe it in any other way?
Would you describe yourself as being a manager by using some other phrase just because seven million other people also use that word?
Some examples
Here are some words and the quantity of profiles containing them:
overused 114
expert 373,000
top 608,000
their 1,307,000
work 2,077,000
It’s not the frequency of the word that matters…
Taking the time to craft your profile
But – and here is a point that I can agree on – if getting shocked into believing that a profile could use an upgrade gets a LinkedIn user to actually review and edit their profile, then that will be a good thing.
Remember my informal review – most LinkedIn user profiles are not-so-very-good…
Just don’t accept someone else’s opinion that using the word “innovative” in your profile is an awful thing.
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock