Subscribe to this page
EquityFC Blog
Social media for FDs | 2 December 2009
How's your LinkedIn profile? Got one? Updated it recently? I ask because I was emailing an old FD contact yesterday and he mentioned he was tarting up his profile on the popular business network. (It's like Facebook for suits.) He's CFO of one of the biggest companies in Austria - and has a track record as long as your arm as FD at mid-tier public companies and subsidiaries of major brands. So I wondered why he was bothering.
Here's how he replied: "I had lunch in London with an old friend who had checked me out on Linkedin and mentioned that my profile suggested I had only had two jobs. Given that I did not even know I had a profile, I was quite impressed. But he, being a headhunter, said this was terminal for my non-exec aspirations as Linkedin apparently is 'all the go' in the search community."
It's not uncommon for people to have a dormant profile. Perhaps this CFO accepted a LinkedIn invitation via email a couple of years ago, and never did much more than acknowledge he'd worked with the people connecting to him. But whatever the reason, a quick update of "positions held" and skills is on his to-do list now.
The point being: you can be checked out online, so you may as well make it easy for people to see a rounded version of you there. I'm not saying a PE firm or the guys at EquityFC and EquityFD will see it as a clincher (far from it!). But it can't hurt to present yourself in a forum that some people might be using to evaluate the basics about you.