138. LinkedIn Profile Tips for CSMs: 3 Tweaks That Get You Interviews

What if the only thing standing between you and your next big career milestone is just a strategy you haven't heard yet? I'm Carly Igar, customer success veteran award-winning career coach and you're go to for getting hired and promoted in customer success. Whether you're breaking into the field or ready to level up into leadership, this podcast is your shortcut to real career growth. Every episode is packed with practical takeaways, data-back strategies and zero fluff advice that actually works. So you can start making moves towards your goals immediately. If you're ready to take control of your career, well then you're in the right place. Welcome to the customer success career coach podcast. There's three things that need to happen before a recruiter reaches out to you on LinkedIn and offers you an interview for a job you actually want. First, they have to find you. Second, they have to click on your profile. And third, they have to be sold or convinced or excited by what they see on the page. Most of you have only ever invested your time in the third part, the page, what they see once they've already found you and clicked on your profile. That's a huge problem because if you miss parts one and two, how recruiters actually find you in the first place, you're missing out on a lot of opportunity on LinkedIn as a job seeker. So in this episode, I'm going to explain how to fix all three parts. All of what we're going to talk about today is really simple. We'll take you a couple of minutes. So I highly, highly recommend implementing the changes and the optimizations that I'm going to share with you today. We have clients, we read you their LinkedIn for them as part of our coaching program. But we have clients who will literally make the updates we tell them to make and they'll start having recruiters reach out to them like within hours. So the stuff works. It's really fast. It's really simple. You might as well do it. Also, I'm going to save the open to work banner thing for the end of this. I get asked about it literally every time I talk about LinkedIn and I do have a real answer for you. It's just probably not the answer most people are hoping for. So stick around for that one. Okay. So first, the big thing that trips up basically every customer success job seeker I talked to you is most of you think about your LinkedIn. Like it's a page like it's a little website about you. Someone's going to land on it read it top to bottom and go, oh, like this is a perfect CSM. This is who I'm looking for. That's not what happens. What actually happens is a recruiter recruiters the way that they use LinkedIn like they're not using the LinkedIn we are using. So what you see when you open LinkedIn every day is not what they see recruiters use a tool called LinkedIn recruiter and that is a search tool does not look anything like the LinkedIn that you see every day. When a recruiter goes to LinkedIn find candidates they're running a search so they're entering titles, tons of keywords filters on geography this that the other thing. Tons and tons and tons of filters and what happens is LinkedIn recruiter generates a list and for you as a job seeker you're either on that list or you're not on that list. And by the way some of you some of these lists are like hundreds of pages long so you don't just want to be on the list you want to be on like the first or second page otherwise no one's going to see you. What this means for you is you could literally be the best candidate for a job you could be the perfect CSM on paper you have all the experience you're an expert in the domain. The biggest retention numbers expansion numbers the bigger book of business whatever it is and that literally would not matter solely because your LinkedIn profile is not optimized the right way it's not optimized to make you show up in search results. And I have been talking to CS hiring managers this is part of my job is to literally stay on top of what's happening in the CS job market more and more companies are using recruiters recruiting is back. And that is because there's just so many people coming inbound when companies post roles that they don't have the time to go through it so instead they're doing outbound recruiting that is something that kind of died for a little while but it is so back. And so if you want recruiters coming to your inbox with roles that are exciting you had to meet these updates so let's start with part one we're going to go in order here so I'm going to tell you what to do so that you show up in the search results. I'm going to tell you what to do so that they click on your profile and then I'm going to tell you what to do to your profile itself so that when they land on your profile they like what they see. Part one is getting found by recruiters showing up in those search results. I want to talk about the skills section so if you're picturing your LinkedIn it's pretty much all the way at the bottom it seems so insignificant and unimportant. Chances are the skills section is something that you touched when you first created your profile and you have not touched it since it's essentially just a section with like keyword tags. That section does more for whether a CS recruiter finds you then your headline your about section your picture anything else. I know it's the least fun section on the page and it's pretty much doing all the work that is because these skills are a big part of what feeds filters in LinkedIn recruiter. So that section on your profile is how you're getting filtered when recruiters search in LinkedIn recruiter. Now I'm willing to bet if you are not driving right now and you're able to pull up your LinkedIn profile. If you go to your skills section I bet it just has a bunch of crap a bunch of fluffy crap like communication leadership teamwork. Let me just tell you that not once ever in the history of customer success hiring did a recruiter sit down and LinkedIn recruiter and say I need to find a senior CSM who can handle our enterprise book of business. I better filter on communication that's not happening a lot of you probably still have things like make yourself word on there. I say this with love but none of that is helping you. So what to do to your skills section so that you show up in recruiter searches number one tools. The actual software tools that you've used throughout your career ideally you have some CS platforms some CRMs in there sales force. Gain site to tango churn zero catalyst vitally hub spot zendes gira inner comp gong tableau looker any software that you've used throughout your career. There should be a listed in your skills on LinkedIn. Now what's confusing about this is does the fact that you've used sales force make you a better CSM than someone else absolutely freaking not. But guess what on LinkedIn recruiter you can't filter for executive presence right like there's no way for a recruiter to know whether you have better executive presence or someone else. So they have to use the filters that are available to them and software is one of those filter so in your skills section your first to do list item is to add software is that you've used throughout your career. Next is hard skills when I say hard skills I mean the real functions of the job. So skills like customer success management net revenue retention churn mitigation onboarding renewals account expansion escalation management success planning voice of the customer. Those skills should be on your profile I don't think that recruiters use those super frequently. But if they do if they do their initial search and there's just way too many people on it they might just say you know what let me just throw in renewals as a skill. And what a dumb reason for you to not show up on that list simply because you didn't update your profile. Next one this is the one that most people forget I would say like 99.9% of people don't have anything like this in their skills section which is going to be hard skills from your industry. So if you want to be a line to a specific industry if you have experience in a specific industry and you're open to opportunities in that industry then you should have those hard skills in your skills section. For example let's say you've been a CSM in marketing tech forever you love marketing tech you should have things like SEO marketing automation it literally can't hurt so take the time to figure out what skills you need on your profile. Now here's what I'm not going to do on a podcast I'm not going to read you 50 keywords because half of them would be wrong for you. The terms shift depending on who you are and what roles you're going after so the real. So the best optimal version of this is a keyword bank that's built against the specific CSM that you are and the specific CSM roles that you're going after. Building those keyword banks is part of what we do in our one-on-one coaching program. So there is absolutely opportunity for us to do that for you and with you. If you're interested, you can always go to CarlyAgar.com/apply. Another quick thing on helping your critters find your profile and having you show up in search results is your titles. So titles of roles that you've held, either the role you have now or roles you've held in the past. The problem that we see a lot in our industry is, and you know this, customer success has about five bajillion titles that all mean the same thing. It makes me really sad when we start working with someone who's company has decided to be cutesy and creative with their CSM's titles and is calling CSM's like something like customer happiness advocate or a client partner that's annoying because it can prevent you from showing up in search results. So if you are truly a CSM, like you work in the CS org at your company and your company has just unfortunately chosen a title for you that is convoluted and not very common. What I would do is keep your true title, don't change it, but in parentheses on your LinkedIn, put customer success manager or senior customer success manager, whatever is appropriate. That way when recruiters are searching for CSM's, you're not getting knocked just because your company is dumb and decided to make up a weird title for you. Okay, so this is how you show up in search results. It's literally so easy. Update the skills section on your profile, the thing that you probably have not touched, literally since you created your LinkedIn. And if you have weird titles, add normal titles in parentheses. Part two. Part two is how we get recruiters to click on our profile, arguably just as important as part one because just because you show up in results doesn't really mean anything for you if nobody wants to click on your profile. So now what I want you to do is picture what a recruiter is actually looking at. They run their search, they add in all their filters, beep up, boop, they get their list. And for each person, they can see your photo, your name, your headline. That's the whole preview. So let me run something by you, by the way, your headline is that text that lives under your profile picture when you're on your profile page. Chances are you don't have one, a lot of people don't, but let me run something by you. Let's say a recruiter runs their search and they come up with 300 results. So they decide to do a first pass just by reading headlines only because they can see this in their preview. They don't have to click on your profile to see your headline. It shows up right in their search result page. And they're looking at two candidates, candidate A, her headline says passionate about customer success. Can it be her headline says senior CSM, 10 million AR, 100% retention? Which candidate do you think that recruiter is clicking on? Probably candidate B, probably not the one that says passionate about customer success. And what should really bother you about this is that candidate A might be the better CSM. She might have deeper experience, she might have better outcomes. She might be the one who is perfect for this role, but no one's ever going to find out. Because A wrote about how she feels about her job and B wrote her headline for how LinkedIn recruiter actually works. So fixing yours, here's the formula that we use with all of our clients. Next thing you're going to put is either your current title or your target title. Senior CSM, account manager, strategic CSM, enterprise CSM, mid-market CSM, whatever you want your title to be, should be the first thing. If there's titles plural that you're open to, that's fine. You can put them in as long as they're not contradictory. So what I mean by that is don't put like onboarding manager or renewals manager. Those are two very different profiles. What you can do is senior CSM, senior AM. Those are very similar roles. So first thing you're putting is your current or target title. Then you're going to put a straight up and down line, I don't know what those are called. It looks like a capital I when you type it. Next thing is going to be a number. It could be the size of your book of business like 3 million AR. It could be a KPI, like 110% NRR in Q3 of 2026. Doesn't matter. Give me a number. Then we're doing another one of those up and down lines, capital I really wish I knew what they were called. It's okay. Next is put some keywords about the life cycle stages that you own as the CSM. So if you own renewals and expansion, you can put renewals and expansion. If you were really just focused on onboarding an implementation, you can put onboarding's implementation, whatever it is, just put a keyword or two there related to the life cycle stages that you want to focus on in your next role. That's it. So just to reiterate, you should have your current or target title, a line, a number or two that could be the size of your book of business and some result like NRR, another line. Then you're going to have keywords related to the life cycle stages you want to own. Renewals, expansion, onboarding, implementation, whatever it is. Lastly, as a bonus, if you have an industry that you are aligned to, that you would like to niche down to, that you are specialized in, you can add that last. You can put cyber security, fintech, marketing tech, whatever. That's it. This should take you, please don't overthink this. If you're spending more than six minutes on this, you're doing something really wrong. But do this today. Literally, if your headline does not follow this formula, if you don't have a headline, do it today because it could lead to a recruiter reaching out to you like a couple hours from now. So why wait, just get it done. So while you're pausing this to go update your LinkedIn headline, minus will also make sure you're subscribed following the show wherever you listen to your podcasts. I put out an episode every single Wednesday on customer success, careers, job seeking, interviewing, reaching out to hiring managers, negotiating your job offers, asking for promotions, literally everything. And this stuff absolutely builds and builds and builds. So you don't want to miss an episode. Plus, it will take you like point two seconds to just make sure you're following the show. So do that. Okay. Now that recruiters can find you and they want to click on your profile because your headline is actually interesting. The last part is surviving the profile review itself. I'm not going to go through every single part of the profile, but just the ones that I find the most mistakes or the parts that are most misunderstood. So we're going to start with the experience section. When I say experience section, that's where all your past roles that you've held are listed. The section is so critical because once a recruit clicks on your profile, that's where they're going. They're going right to the experience section to read about your past roles. So we got to get it right, especially if they have your profile pulled up and someone else's profile and someone else's profile's experience section is better than yours and they're probably going to get outreach and you're not. So we don't want to lose at this stage. We've come this far. We got to keep them interested in us. So ground rules for your experience section. Number one, dates and titles have to match your resume exactly. If your titles on your LinkedIn don't match your titles on your resume or the dates don't match up, it's going to look like you're trying to hide something and they're just going to move on. They're not going to question it. They're just going to say, I don't feel good about this and move on. Really dumb reason to lose out on an interview. Number two, probably most important. The text that goes under each of your roles that you've held should not be a copy piece of your resume bullets. It should also not be a description of your company. You know exactly what I'm talking about. If you actually go to my LinkedIn profile and look for my time at optimizely, you'll see exactly what not to do. I have like one or two sentences on there about what optimizely does. Nobody cares. I'm on your profile. I want to know what you did with your book of business. I want to know what you accomplish, what you own, the scopes of your roles. That's how I'm going to learn if you're a candidate that I'm interested in talking to you or not. I don't give a crap what your company did. So what are we actually putting in our experience section? What text goes in that section? What should be there is the stuff that a CS recruiter or hiring manager wants to know about you. They want to know. about your book, how many accounts, what segment, how big it was, what parts of the life cycle you owned, and some of your accomplishments. That's it. So here's how you're going to do this in like five minutes or less. You're going to copy your resume bullets for each role. You're doing this one out of time. So for your current role or most recent role, copy the bullets from your resume, put it into some sort of AI, and basically say summarize these bullets for LinkedIn. I want one to two sentences max, and I want you to highlight accomplishments and the scope of my role. And whatever it sits out, you're just going to copy that and paste that into your LinkedIn profile. So again, you should not have resume bullets on your LinkedIn profile. You should also not have a whole dissertation on what your company is or what they do or who that help. Nobody cares. It should be one to two sentences describing the scope of your role, what you owned, and some metrics, some accomplishments. That is it. Two more things on your profile that are super super super important, and then I'm going to get to the open to work banner debate. Number one is recommendations. These are like Yelp reviews for humans. Actually, if you like Yelp is kind of not cool anymore. These are like Google reviews for humans, and they do help a lot. It is one thing for you to say you're a great CSM. It is totally different coming from somebody who watched you do it. Ideally, you have a mix on your profile. If I could spin up the most perfect recommendation section for you, you would have a recommendation from a prior manager, a peer, and if you can get one a customer. Is that always easy to do? No. Is it a little awkward to ask? Yes. Do I care that it's awkward? No. Listen, don't like lose your mind over recommendations. Something is better than nothing. So if you have three peer recommendations, that's better than nothing. If you have one from a prior manager, still better than nothing. The point is make sure you've got some recent recommendations on there. And lastly, I want to talk about your activity section. I'm just going to kind of fly through this with a couple of hard and fast rules. You do not need to be super active on LinkedIn. You don't need to be creating your own content. However, it does look good if you are interacting with some content. So if maybe once a week you're on there, just like reposting something, liking something, commenting on something, it can help. My other rule for LinkedIn activity section, which is hopefully, hopefully obvious is I wouldn't engage in political conversations. I wouldn't be talking about stuff that is, I don't know, taboo or super personal. Hiring managers and recruiters can see everything you do on LinkedIn. So if you're open to a company seeing all of that stuff, you're participating in, that's your prerogative, but just know that could be a huge reason why companies are not reaching out to you. So just be really mindful. All right, the open-to-work banner, I promised I'd settle this. Listen, we have looked into this. We pretty much have continued to do research on this for five years. And by research, I mean talking to recruiters, talking to hiring managers, gathering lots of data, testing it with our own clients, telling certain clients to have the banner on, certain clients to have the banner off, tracking what happens. And at the end of the day, more evidence points to it not being helpful. The only justification I have for that is in our data, slightly more people, people meeting recruiters and hiring managers will claim that that banner makes them maybe have some unconscious bias towards a candidate. However, at the end of the day, our data really points to it not mattering either way. Whether you have the banner or not, we've never been able to find evidence through testing, through research that it helps you at interviews or that it hurts you in getting interviews. So what I always tell people when it comes to the open-to-work banner is it's up to you. It is solely down to preference. You get to choose. Maybe you don't like that answer, but people put a lot of energy into this decision and I'm just going to tell you like either put it up or don't, it does not matter. Okay, we've now gone over in detail the three most important aspects of your LinkedIn profile that you need to optimize so that recruiters start reaching out to you and offering you interviews for roles that you're excited about. If you didn't have a chance to update your LinkedIn profile as you were listening to this episode, I highly recommend saving it, bookmarking it, whatever and sitting down at your computer, replaying the episodes you can pause it, go make updates to your LinkedIn as you're listening. I really hope this episode helped you. It was a little bit longer than my norm, but there was a lot of details we needed to get to. One thing I want to say is if as you were listening to this episode, you're thinking to yourself like holy shit, why did I not know this or oh my god, that makes so much sense, but how come no one ever talks about this or wow, the way that I thought about LinkedIn in the context of my job search was completely wrong now hearing everything I've learned about LinkedIn Recruiter and how it works. Chances are there's a lot of stuff that you've either been taught the wrong thing or you just haven't like been exposed to to understand how these little tweaks all add up to making a job search take either 90 days or six to 12 months. Now in this episode, all we talked about was aspects of your LinkedIn profile. Think about how much more goes into a job search. It's your resume. It's ETS systems. And what you say in your job applications, it's how you interact with recruiters and hiring managers over email, how you interact with them over LinkedIn. It's your interviews. There's so many aspects to the job search and if you're feeling like you just learned a lot or you're feeling like, wow, there was so much I didn't know about LinkedIn. Chances are there's a whole lot more where that came from for all these other aspects of your job search. And that is literally what my team and I do all day every day. We work solely with customer success professionals to teach them all of these things that they've never been taught or have been taught the wrong way. And we show them how to optimize it and fix it so that they can land jobs quickly. Most of our clients do so in 90 days or less and they can land jobs are excited about most of our clients are still in their role that they land with us after a year. 25% of our clients who land roles with us get promoted within 15 months. So clearly they are not just landing like crappy roles that they don't even want. They're landing roles they're excited about. They're landing roles that align with what they've done and what they want to be doing and what they're good at. They are making on average 18% more OTE and that's solely because we're showing them all of these things that they've never been shown before. So if this episode helped you, think about all the other aspects of the job search that you could learn a thing or two on. If you want my team's help, go to CarlyIgar.com/apply. We do make people apply because we don't just let everyone in. If we don't think that we can help you, then we're not going to help you. We're not going to waste your time. We're not going to waste your money. So that's why we make everybody apply. That application will take you a minute seriously. It's nothing crazy. So if you're even curious about working with my team, if you just want to learn more about what that looks like for now or later, fill in an application. We'll chit chat over email. I don't even force people to get on calls with me. Like it's extremely straightforward. I'm going to let's just see if we can help you. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you in the next episode.