Andy Hibel 0:04
Welcom to the HigherEdJobs Podcast. I'm Andy Hibel, the chief operating officer and one of the co-founders.

Kelly Cherwin 0:08
And I'm Kelly Cherwin, the director of editorial strategy.

Andy Hibel 0:11
Oftentimes we've talked about how this podcast came out of the conversations Kelly and I regularly have, and have had, for the nearly 20 years we've worked together. Recently, we were having one of those conversations and I stopped and said, we should stop this conversation because we're not exactly seeing this from the same perspective. And I actually think our friends in our podcast community would really enjoy hearing us, pleasantly and politely, disagree with one another. So, Kelly, do you want to introduce the topic that we didn't necessarily see eye to eye on?

Kelly Cherwin 0:47
Sure. So like you were saying, we were talking last week in a meeting about LinkedIn profiles, resumes, CVs, things like that. And the topic came up. Is LinkedIn profile more important than a resume? Should the resume have the exact same things on the LinkedIn profile? And like you said, yeah, we kind of had differing opinions on that. So my thoughts are on which one is more important. I can't pick one being more important. I think they are both equally important. I think they just serve different purposes. And there's a difference in how, how and what you put on your resume versus what's in your LinkedIn profile. So I'm going to stop there and let you give your thoughts and then I'll go into kind of my how I think they differ and why.

Andy Hibel 1:34
For me, I would first of all agree with what you just said. I think they're both important. I personally think the resume or your CV is still the more important document, but I want to be clear here before I go too far down that road. I have reasons for that, but I'm truly medium agnostic. If there's other mediums that you need to put your professional profile on, go do it. People are going to come to you as they need to come to you. I mean, I'll just be honest here. I stay at both Marriott and Hilton Hotels. I use, please don't tell them, both Uber and Lyft. I'm agnostic to so many different things in this world that are similar. Some people have a strong preference towards Coke, some do towards Pepsi. Other people are agnostic. It's COLA. I'm going to drink cola. I think here the idea that one is more important than the other to me is a very good thing. You need to respect them both and they both do different things. I think still today's day and age, the resumé and the CV are more important. And my real reason for that is it's a personal reflection of yourself as opposed to what I would say, a form based presentation of yourself. You can uniquely present your career story on your resume the way you want to tell the story in order to do it on a different profile for your professional profile. You're going to need to do it in the format that they give you. Now, do you need a LinkedIn profile? Yes, you absolutely need that LinkedIn profile. But the part I would say is, while they don't need to be identical, they should be pretty darn close. And they 100% need to be consistent. You cannot have a date off. You cannot have a title off. You cannot have your favorite sports team be Sox in one place. And the Chicago White Sox in a different place. You could say, well, come on, Andy, People are going to know if I'm from Chicago and I say the Sox. I mean White Sox. That might be true. But you don't know if it's a person who's reviewing your resume. You don't know if it's a person who's reviewing your LinkedIn profile. Both of these documents are parsed now by computers and things that are inconsistent do not bode well for your candidacy.

Kelly Cherwin 4:01
I will completely agree with the consistency. I definitely think whatever's on your resumé has to be exactly the same in terms of content on your LinkedIn profile, in terms of obviously the job titles and the dates and things like that. But I think there's certain rules on your resumé that can apply to LinkedIn. And I will also say that I do agree with the, I guess, the creative approach on your resume. Yeah, we all have the ability to kind of do whatever we want in terms of font and style and things like that. But there are rules in terms of length. I mean, you can't put every single job, every single bullet point. I mean, I guess you could, but then you'd have a 12 page resume, which is not probably recommended, but you are right in LinkedIn profile. You do have to kind of subscribe to what the parameters are there. But back to the resume, there are certain rules, like I was saying, like you shouldn't put jobs from you know, 15, 20, 30 years ago and you could, if you wanted to kind of have a section on your LinkedIn profile to do that. I also think the resume is a little bit different in terms of how it's viewed, because for each resume, you should be tailoring it to that specific job. And for your LinkedIn profile, you can't do that. I mean, it's more of a broad kind of general sales approach and kind of telling your story, your personal brand. And I don't think you have that ability to do that as well in your resumé.

Andy Hibel 5:31
Wow. Those are all extremely fair points. I think for me, and maybe this is dating myself a little bit, I'm not sure I have all those hard and fast rules on resumes. I like the idea, and maybe I'll use the word tweaked for different positions. But I also think all the substantive stuff that would be on a LinkedIn profile, if you're going to put it on LinkedIn profile, it should be on your resume. I want to know why you don't want it on your resume. Now, I think there's different things and I feel like we're now possibly going down, the, to cover letter or not cover letter. That is the question conversation that we have pretty regularly on the podcast. I think that part, the cover letter, parts of a resume that you might have, the things that kind of give context and texture to your candidacy that don't traditionally fit a resume or a LinkedIn profile might be something that really needs to be tailored to the position. How do you make certain things pop that aren't necessarily in the resume? What you might want to highlight in the resume. When you apply for a job, I think that for a longer tenured candidate, I think trying to keep it concise and keep the story concise in both ways. I do understand, particularly if you're sensitive because you're an older candidate, like what does it mean that now I have positions there going back 30 years or 40 years? I definitely am sensitive to those issues, and I think trying to do those things correctly are important. I don't necessarily want to get into the details of that. That might be another great podcast for us to do, but I think that that might be something that's interesting. I think for me, Kelly, I actually need to make a confession and I'm not going to ask you the question in reverse, but I have to be honest. Ever since I've started working for HigherEdJobs, I've kept my resume up to date. Now, first of all, I've kept it up to date on HigherEdJobs. I love doing that. It's an easy place to do it, but my resume has morphed more into a CV, I would say, over the years. But there is a couple times a year where somebody asks me for a CV and I find it to be very useful and that, my HigherEdJobs CV, literally has everything in it, and HigherEdJobs does allow for a resume or CV. So if you're out there and you're thinking, Well, I have a CV, you can do that on the site as well. But I've also kind of felt like from a career hygiene perspective, not that I'm looking for other work. One of the things I'd like to say is keeping your resume up to date should be something you only do in job searches. You're never going to go back and remember what should be on there. But by keeping that resume up to date, it's also forced me to try to keep my LinkedIn profile up to date. And I can tell you, I think that takes a lot of work. I think if you're going to commit to having a professional online profile, LinkedIn and beyond, you need to keep them up to date just as you keep your resume up to date. And I think maybe for me, the idea that when we started having this conversation, the idea that struck me being at this stage of my career, that I'm at, mentally I never really made that jump. Like, Oh, there's more places to keep things up to date in 2025 than when my career started. 30 plus years ago. And maybe and I hope we can agree on this, that keeping those both up to date is really important.

Kelly Cherwin 9:04
Yes, I completely agree with what you said there regarding keeping your resumé and your LinkedIn profile up to date, no matter if you're in a job search or not, because you'll think you remember but you won't. So I have a question for you, though. So do you think your tone and your personality coming through in your resume? I know we said trending more towards TV is exactly the same tone as your LinkedIn profile.

Andy Hibel 9:30
Absolutely not.

Kelly Cherwin 9:31
Okay. So do you think if you were applying for a position, what do you think the goal of your resume versus what the goal of the LinkedIn profile would be if a recruiter was looking at it?

Andy Hibel 9:41
I think it kind of goes to the unique document that is a resume or CV versus a standardized document, which is a LinkedIn or a professional profile, and it's also the public versus the private. I mean, in most instances, people aren't just putting their CV or resume out on the Internet. If you are, i becomes a public document. But something about being a private document makes it a little bit more of an intimate reflection of who you are in totality of what your candidacy is might be a little bit of a difference that I think if you take a photograph and you freeze it in time and you can you get a good picture of what the moment was about. But instead of that photograph, if you've got a one minute video of what happened, 30 seconds either side of that photograph, you can have more of a context of really what was happening in that situation. I think that's the difference between a resume and LinkedIn that from the resume, you're going to actually probably get a better ability to tell that full 60 seconds snapshot of who you are as opposed to that frozen moment in time as everybody is looking at it. Now, don't get me wrong, the value of a LinkedIn or a professional profile, particularly if I'm an association that you're affiliated with, is as recruiters go through that there's a standardized way for them to try to find you based on the experience you have. That's why it's that way. It's not a knock on LinkedIn. It just serves a different purpose. I'm just worried that people are losing that ability to possibly tell their own story by saying, Why do I really need to do a resume? I can just take my LinkedIn profile and send it to them. And some positions may just say, Hey, some of your LinkedIn profile, that very well may be the case, but I still feel like that personal way of telling your story is so important to your candidacy. And maybe it's a fair argument to say maybe it's not as important as it was ten, 20, 30 years ago. I think it's important to you to be able to sell your own story. If you can't tell your story through the resume, going through that job search, I'm not sure you're going to be familiar enough with your own self about what you're looking for.

Kelly Cherwin 11:53
I completely agree with your thoughts on the resume being very personal and a way to truly sell your story. I think that's what I find so intriguing about the resume. I feel like it's kind of a snapshot into who you are, and I think this is how I would evaluate someone's resume. I would look at their resume. I'd get a snapshot of their story, but then I'm going their LinkedIn profile to see if it if it matches back to what we were talking before about consistency. But then kind of like we're talking a lot earlier about the tone. I get to see a little bit more of the personality, but I also get to see which I think is fantastic. I get to see things on that profile that I don't necessarily see on the resumé in terms of endorsement, skills. You know, maybe the person had a position title with three bullet points and they said they increased sales by 25%. Well, they're not going to probably have the space to go into how. So I feel like on your LinkedIn profile, you can kind of explain a little bit further the strategy. So I definitely think that the résumé kind of paints the picture tells the story, but then the LinkedIn profile expands on that story.

Andy Hibel 13:02
And maybe in that is where our discussion made it to the podcast studio, because I think the parts of the LinkedIn profile that you just highlight that are unique to the LinkedIn profile do paint a different picture than what a resume can do. I guess I see it going the other way with a resume and CV can paint things a LinkedIn profile can't as well. Maybe I'm just stuck at that place. I think if you've heard anything from what we've collectively said, I think having a value of your time and your energy to make sure that both of these ways to tell your career story are done well, consistently, and are as much of a reflection, given their strengths and limitations of who you are and the candidacy you want to put forward.

Kelly Cherwin 13:53
Yeah, that's a perfect way to put it. And if people could see me right now, they'd see that I'm shaking my head because I think that's a great way to summarize.

Andy Hibel 13:59
Well Kelly I'm kind of worried to ask this question. But we kind of really want to hear what you folks out there tick you a LinkedIn person, your resume CV person. What are your thoughts? Where have you seen places where your resume or CV has worked better than your LinkedIn profile or vice versa? Email us a podcast@higheredjobs.com or send us a direct message on X @higheredcareers. I promise that we're not going to take a vote for one or vote for the other to say that Kelly or I are right. I hope not. We're not going to do that.

Kelly Cherwin 14:33
No, I agree, but because I think we both agree that both are important.

Andy Hibel 14:37
Both are important, but we'd like to hear what you have to say. And thank you for listening. Thanks for the conversation, Kelly.

Kelly Cherwin 14:44
Thanks, Andy. It's always fun talking to you.

Andy Hibel 14:46
Thank you all for listening. And we look forward to talking real soon.