LinkedIn - second-hand-tigers/badocter-career-learnings GitHub Wiki

Learning Hub › Career Learnings Directory › Dr. Docter's Career Learnings › The Job Hunt

LinkedIn profiles are the public professional presence for both job applicants and hiring teams. Both sides reach for those profiles to size each other up during the recruitment process. Every student, job applicant, and interviewer should have a LinkedIn account and an effective profile set up long before they apply for a position or open a job requisition. All profile entries are potential interview questions, and every post reflects on your professionalism. Build your network early.

Resumes communicate information in only one direction: applicant → interviewer. LinkedIn profiles are different — they're public, ongoing, and information is being exchanged in both directions.

Job applicants are looking at the hiring team's profiles to learn about the team they are trying to join and the interviewers they will be across the table from. The hiring manager's LinkedIn profile is likely the first thing applicants will look up after reading the posted job requisition. If the job requisition is posted on LinkedIn, the hiring manager's profile page is often one click away.
Hiring managers and interviewers often look up the LinkedIn profiles of the candidates that look most promising during the application/resume screening to see if there is any additional information that can help during candidate selection.
- Not every company allows this. Some limit interview teams to the materials the candidate submitted, largely to keep protected information like age or religion out of the hiring decision, so interviewers should check their own company's policy. Candidates should assume their profile will be read and be ready for it.

I've been on the candidate side of this and, for a lot longer, on the interviewer side.

How Interviewers Read Your Profile

The same rule that applies to your resume applies here. Every entry on your profile is a potential lead-in for the same kind of probing questions an interviewer would ask off your resume — probing across all four Leadership, Business, Interpersonal, and Technical (LBIT) dimensions — so be ready for it. As an interviewer, I would review a LinkedIn profile if my company's policy allowed, particularly if a link to the profile was listed on the resume. I'd print it out and go through it exactly like I did the resume, looking for items worth asking about from an LBIT perspective.
Any skill you've listed is fair game for a probe, and endorsements don't confirm competency. I never paid much attention to skill endorsements since I don't know who made them or on what basis. If I wanted to actually test whether a listed skill was real, I did it the same way as everything else on the profile: an LBIT probe during the interview. Don't list a skill you can't back up in the room with an LBIT narrative.

A Before-and-After Example, From My Own Profile

Here's what the LBIT rule above actually looks like applied to a real entry, not a hypothetical one. This is one of my own ExxonMobil positions, exactly as it read on my profile before I reframed it in terms of LBIT:

Principal Process Control Engineer | Jan 2023 – Aug 2025 | Beaumont, Texas Beaumont Complex RTO/DMC fleet value capture and improvement lead Optimization technology and work process innovation and implementation Mentoring, people development, succession planning Strategic and tactical asset support & resourcing

That's a duty list — it tells a reader what I was responsible for, not what happened because of it. No outcomes, no numbers, and RTO/DMC means nothing to a reader who is outside of process control. Here's the same role rewritten as LBIT-narrative bullets (italicized performance dimensions are included for reference and would not be in the actual LinkedIn entry):

Principal Process Control Engineer | Jan 2023 – Aug 2025 | Beaumont, Texas

Led fleet-wide value capture and improvement across the Beaumont Complex's Real Time Optimization (RTO) and Dynamic Matrix Control (DMC) portfolio, with the team contributing to a sustained fleet value capture exceeding $100MM/yr. (Business, Leadership, Technical)

Directed the innovation and rollout of new optimization technology and work processes across the site, institutionalizing them as the site standard. (Leadership, Business, Technical)

Championed use of GitHub to streamline collaboration, workflow, and knowledge retention across RTO projects and sustainment at Beaumont — the approach was adopted as the company standard for managing the global RTO fleet the following year. (Leadership, Business, Interpersonal)

Established the succession pipeline for the next generation of Beaumont RTO/DMC Principal Engineers, coaching engineers through Individual Development Plans — one of whom took over this role directly as I moved to my next assignment in central engineering. (Leadership, Business, Interpersonal)

Balanced strategic and tactical resourcing across the asset base, prioritizing across a dozen business teams and multiple projects. (Leadership, Business)

Same role, same facts — the difference is entirely in whether the reader can tell what happened and why it mattered. The $100MM/yr figure there is real and already public on this wiki (see Who is Dr. Docter?). My full profile, rewritten this way across every role, is its own worked example: My Resume — A Worked Example.

Building Your Network Before You Need It

Start connecting to professionals at companies and in the field you're interested in well before you're actively job hunting. A network built the week you need it is a much thinner one than a network built over the years leading up to it — the same point Building Your Network makes about building relationships generally. Connecting and following early keeps your finger on the pulse of what professionals in your field are working on and talking about, so by the time you start interviewing, you're already familiar with the issues and vocabulary instead of cramming them the night before.

Connecting With Your Interview Team

Once you know who's on your interview panel, treat their profiles as homework, not just curiosity.

Connect with your interviewers as soon as you know who they are. A connection request sent before the interview signals that you're proactively researching the people you're about to sit across from, not scrambling to figure out who they are on your way in.
- I accepted connection requests from applicants and candidates, and from students generally, not just people we'd already contacted to set up an interview. They're doing their due diligence to prepare, and if I weren't open to that, it would raise the question of why I had a LinkedIn profile as an interviewer at all.
- Some interviewers don't use LinkedIn regularly, and some hold candidate requests until after a hiring decision, so don't read anything into a pending request.
Once you're connected with the interviewers, browse their connections for team members, but don't make connection requests.
- Review team member profiles to learn about the team's roles and career paths.
- While interviewers and hiring managers may see their own LinkedIn profiles as corporate assets with respect to recruiting and connection requests, their team members may not. A "follow" is safer than a connection request.
Identify at least one question specific to each interviewer — something drawn from their actual background, not a generic question you'd ask anyone. If you can come up with two or three per person, even better: interviewers often cover some of that ground themselves when they introduce who they are, and you don't want your one prepared question to already be answered before you get to ask it.

Keep Posts Focused on Professional Topics

LinkedIn isn't Facebook or X. It's your professional presence online, and it's worth treating it that way — don't post material there you wouldn't say at work.

Off-topic posting signals you don't know what the platform is for. It doesn't need to be offensive to be a problem; it just needs to read as a mismatch between the platform and what you put on it.
Strongly political material carries a specific risk here. Whatever your views, posting them has the potential to poison the opinion of roughly half the interviewer population who don't share them — before you've ever met any of them in person.
As an interviewer, I kept my own social media research on candidates limited to LinkedIn, since it's specifically built for professional presence. I never looked candidates up on Facebook or X, and considered doing so unprofessional. Not every interviewer draws that line the same place I do, though — so unflattering posts on other platforms aren't a risk-free bet just because one interviewer won't go looking.

Keep Your Own Profile Current — A Note to Future Interviewers

This one goes the other direction, from the interviewer's chair rather than the candidate's, and it's a lesson I learned from a candidate, not the other way around.

For years, my own LinkedIn profile was a single stub: "RTO Engineer, 24 years." That was it. One line covering nearly a quarter century of work. During an interview, a candidate asked me why my career path on LinkedIn showed only one entry when my own supervisor's profile had many separate assignments documented on his. I walked them through the details of my many assignments verbally and realized I should already have posted them in the profile. I updated the profile that same evening, breaking the stub out into the actual assignments behind it. I messaged the candidate to let them know I'd updated my profile to "mirror" the detail my supervisor provided in his, and offered to discuss any further questions.

Candidates read your profile the same way you read theirs. If you're expecting candidates to make their LBIT dimensions visible on a resume, an out-of-date or nearly-blank profile of your own is a poor example for them to mirror. Students look for information about potential employers, but also for examples of what a professional profile looks like, and they'll model their own on what they find. The same rule applies to the substance, not just the existence, of what you write. The items in your own career history should cover the LBIT dimensions, showing you're not just a toolbox of technical skills but someone who delivers business value and shows up as part of a larger team.

License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.