Are you innovative? Join the club. Hundreds of thousands of people on LinkedIn, the online careers network, say they are innovative too.
According to a blog post this week by LinkedIn senior research scientist Manu Sharma, legions of people say they are innovative. Many also claim to be motivated, dynamic and entrepreneurial team players.
Sharma searched LinkedIn to see what people say about themselves in their profiles, and those terms are in the top 10. He wrote that the analytics team “decided to take a crack at finding the most clichéd and overused phrases for the past year using over 85 million LinkedIn profiles.”
When I searched LinkedIn for “innovative,” I received 527,000 results. When I tweaked that to “innovator,” I received 27,000. That’s half-a-million fewer, but still way too many for me to use as a recruiter. “Innovated” yielded about 7,000. Variations on the theme help.
So, if you and everyone else have been reading the same articles about lacing your resume and online profile with actionable words, it is time for new strategies.
Here are four ways to avoid Sharma’s buzzword list:
- Use phrases rather than single words. “Innovative” plus “editor” gives me 21,000 hits. The two-word phrase “innovative editor” gives me just 24. Put a strong adjective with a word that is specifically related to your field or work.
- Look for untapped words. People who are smart about optimizing content for search engines — and that is what LinkedIn employs — do not use the most obvious or popular words. Those words are overused and it is hard to show up high in search results when everyone else is using them. So rather than say you are innovative, use a less-common synonym. You might try “founded” (227,000), “initiated” (197,000) or “inventive” (8,400). Now make the synonym part of a phrase.
- Do homework. It is so simple to search LinkedIn to see what words are overused. Find them and work around them. If you are looking to see what words employers might key on, read their postings. There is no need to guess.
- Get more active on LinkedIn. It is meant to be a network, though most users treat it as a billboard. Ask and answer questions and recommend others. Every action you take on LinkedIn usually prompts a reaction that circulates your name.
LinkedIn’s analytics team got me thinking. I looked up “slacker” (869); “knucklehead” (142); and “dumbass” (54).
Six people use my favorite resume phrase, the tragically misspelled “detial oriented.”
Career questions? E-mail Joe for an answer.
Coming Monday: How to put your e-mail signature to work for you
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