11 Ways to Create a Negative Perception on LinkedIn

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Career Development  

LinkedIn is the standard for introducing you to the world and enabling you to put your best foot forward in your chosen profession. According to LinkedIn’s pressroom:

• There are more than one billion members in 200 countries and regions worldwide.
• Seven people are hired every minute on LinkedIn.
• 9,000 members apply for a job every minute.
• 1.5 million feed updates are viewed per minute.
• 138 hours of learning content is consumed every minute.
• 67 million companies are on LinkedIn.

When used well, it can lead to fruitful long-term relationships. When used poorly, it can lock a door to an opportunity you may never even know about. Given that it can be used for free, it’s a no-brainer to use LinkedIn.

But merely putting up a profile may not be enough. I’ve seen many LinkedIn profiles that not only don’t make me more interested in a person, but they actually leave me with a negative perception of them. To that end, here are 11 lessons that might be helpful for you to avoid when creating a profile and using LinkedIn (or any other platform):

1. Job description vs. results – This is a big one for me. When I am looking at a person’s experience, I am not as interested in their job description as what they did in the job and the specific, quantifiable results delivered. Statements using “increased X by Y” tell the …

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