She’d been going to the same conference for nearly twenty years.
Same industry. Same people. Same conversations.
She’d always come home with a few business cards and maybe a couple of follow-up emails. That was the routine. That was networking.
This time was different.
Before she even got home (she lives about an hour away), she had more than a dozen connection requests. All from that conference. People she’d just met, who wanted to stay connected, work with her, bring in her expertise.
Twenty years. Never happened before.
So what changed this year? Only her LinkedIn profile. That’s it.
Which we finished the day before.
And for which she also received lots of compliments.
What her LinkedIn profile looked like before
I’ll be honest with you. Before we rebuilt it, her profile was genuinely, impressively terrible. No joke, one of the worst I’ve ever seen.
Third person throughout. Experience entries and About section copy-pasted straight from her websites. No relevant skills.
THIRD PERSON. shudders
And don’t get me started on the formatting. Or rather, the lack of it.
No Red Thread. No narrative. No reason for anyone to look twice.
(And clearly, nobody did. Fourteen years on the platform. Fewer than 400 connections.)
So we fixed it. Every section. Built the way it should have been built from the start.
And then she walked into a room full of people she’d known for two decades. And for the first time, they followed up.
Does your LinkedIn profile actually matter at in-person events?
More than you think. And not in the way most people assume.
Here’s what actually happens around a conference.
People look you up before they meet you, to decide whether you’re worth seeking out.
Then they check you mid-conversation, quietly, on their phone. And afterward, when the badges are off and they’re home deciding who was worth the follow-up, they go to LinkedIn to connect.
And they decide fast. A profile that doesn’t make sense in the first few seconds doesn’t get a second pass. They just…move on.
In every one of those moments, your profile is in the room whether you are or not.
So if it’s written in third person, copy-pasted from a website, with no story and no reason to look twice, it’s not neutral. It’s actively talking them out of you.
Why are you letting your profile talk them out of you?
Your profile works before you walk in the room
That’s the whole point, and her conference proved it.
Your profile works before you walk in the room. It works while you’re in the room. And apparently, it works on the drive home too.
Twenty years of the same room, the same industry, the same handful of cards.
One rebuilt profile. A dozen requests before she hit her driveway.