"Enhance your profile" beta AI feature
John Espirian
Relentlessly helpful® LinkedIn® nerd, trainer & speaker. Creator of Espresso+ community & UpLift Live conference. Not a douche canoe 🛶
One of LinkedIn's latest AI-powered features – called "Enhance your profile" – is in beta for Premium members. It generates suggestions for two important parts of your LinkedIn profile:
1. Your professional headline
2. Your About statement
The feature popped up on my profile at the end of June 2023.
💡 If you've thought about your personal brand for more than 5 minutes, this feature won't be for you!
Here's the message I saw on my profile:
"Stand out for almost 2× as many opportunities." I assume this is a comparison between properly completed LinkedIn profiles and those without an About statement or without a modified headline (the default headline is your job title at your workplace – boring!).
Clicking Enhance led to the following screen.
Clicking Start gets the tool to suggest a new professional headline, as shown below.
The suggestion wasn't wrong but it lacked personality. I clicked Show option 2 in the hope of something better …
This really wasn't much better. Note that headlines can be up to 220 characters long, so I'm not sure why LinkedIn's suggestion would be to use such short text. Perhaps they have some insight that very short headlines work best(?)
Thankfully, the suggestions didn't overwrite the original:
I think my existing headline has more depth and personality than LinkedIn's suggestions, so I'm not making any changes for now.
Recommended by LinkedIn
I clicked the 👎🏻 button on the suggestions and was asked to provide some feedback:
The screen then moved on to the About statement, and suggested the following:
This was more respectable, but it's just a shortened rehash of what was already in my About statement.
Personal profile About statements can be up to 2600 characters, so a couple of paragraphs definitely doesn't fill the available space. Again, I rejected the suggestion in favour of the longer original:
Thoughts on this AI feature
Clearly, I'm not the target market for this AI-powered enhancement of the headline and About statement. I already have a strong idea of my personal brand (you'd hope so given that I wrote a book on personal branding) and have tried to convey my skills and personality in my profile.
For those just getting started on LinkedIn, this "Enhance your profile" feature may act as a useful placeholder until you think of something better.
My guess is that anyone reading this newsletter is likely to be invested enough in LinkedIn to have done that thinking already.
Note that the first screenshot above includes the word "Premium". I'd be surprised if this feature really is limited to LinkedIn Premium members only, as anyone paying for LinkedIn has surely done something to jazz up their headline and About statement. Or is that too much of an assumption?
❓ Are you going to use this or any other AI-powered LinkedIn features?
This was one of 20+ features I covered in the LinkedIn Roundup for the Espresso+ community. Join us to learn best practices to support your business on LinkedIn and online.
UI Designer & Front-End Developer | Expert in Responsive Web Design & Performance Optimization | Up to 262% of performance gain for E-Commerce & Corporate web projects
11moYesterday the "Enhance your Profile" was appearing to me... but now it has just gone.... Can someone tell me why this happens, please?
Most Empowering Leadership & Mindset Speaker 2024 🏆 Multi-award-winning Entrepreneur, Business Leader & Author 🏆 Inspiring BOLD thinkers with BRAVE HEARTS who make a BIG difference ✨
1yThank you so much for such a concise explanation of this feature. I will not be enhancing my profile with their AI.
✪ Change agent supporting professionals discover their path to influence and impact through vision, clarity, inspiration, and focus ✪ Transformational Leadership Coach ✪ Career Transition Partner ✪ Finance Executive
1yThank you for this detailed and step-by-step explanation for this new feature that popped up in my premium LinkedIn profile. I now know that I am not missing anything. I believe my profile reflects who I am and what I do authentically. As a premium user, I agree that we invest a lot about our personal branding. This feature might help more with new users or for users who are not frequent users of LinkedIn.
I enable trainers to ⭐ Close more clients ⭐ Do bigger deals ⭐ Charge premium rates ⭐ Drop low-paid work ⭐ Build a team ⭐ Reduce hours ⭐ Lower stress levels ⭐ Create the lifestyle they deserve ⭐ Ask me how!
1yI had a similarly underwhelming experience. But the tool also wrote : "I'm a training business development coach and consultant at Accelerando, with over 25 years of experience in the training industry. I have a Certified Professional in Talent Development credential and a Member of the British Computer Society status." Apart from how badly written this is, I do not have a Certified Professional in Talent Development credential and I'm not a member ofthe British Computer Society! I don't know where it got that information from because it's not on my profile. So it seems that it just made it up!
Chief Operating Officer | COO | Managing Director | Operations Director | General Manager | Trouble Shooter | ⚡️Available ⚡️
1yThanks John, that’s a really useful how to guide and your thoughts on it. It does seem strange that the feature doesn’t maximise the number of characters available in each area.