Before you add ‘Founder’ as your job title on LinkedIn, make sure it doesn’t look silly

Trainee at [a known company] > Founder at [something without a logo]

With the current digital age, it’s really inexpensive to start something. You may not even have to spend anything in fact. After all, social media platforms provide you a free audience.

Buying a domain name is all the investment you need to make to make you feel like you’ve founded something real.

I know that it must feel great to introduce yourself as a founder/inventor/owner of something but, if you want yourself to be perceived the same way, do it at a time when it actually has something to it.

For most connection requests that I receive on LinkedIn by the job title Founder or Entrepreneur aren’t even mediocre. They’re poor.

Let me tell my experience in order.

Companies in most of these profiles lack a logo

Company logo is the first thing anyone notices in your experience list on LinkedIn because they have a clear visual slot for it.

It is something of a core essential especially when your company or idea is related to the web.

Most of the times, regardless of whether or not a company has a logo, I click on it, only to find that,

There’s no company profile

What’s the point of adding your company on LinkedIn when it doesn’t exist there.

Before you add your company to your profile, create your company’s profile first and then add that one.

But even then, you shouldn’t add it right away because then it clearly shows that,

The only employee and follower is the Founder

This goes against the very definition of company. Quoting from Wikipedia,

A company, abbreviated co., is a legal entity made up of an association of people, be they natural, legal, or a mixture of both, for carrying on a commercial or industrial enterprise.

Association of people, not a single man.

It’s still understood if there’s one employee. Others might not be on LinkedIn but, there should be a decent number of followers.

If you’re actually serious about it, promote your company profile with sharing regular content, nurture it, give it some time to grow and then add it to your profile.

Now that’s the complete checklist for having a presence on LinkedIn but what is your company exactly?

There are people who fill all these criteria but then,

The website is not ready

I actually got one request that fulfilled all these criteria but then when I clicked on the website link mentioned in the company profile, the website just had a ‘Coming Soon’ text.

Nothing else. There was no text on what was going to be there, no preview, no notify option. Even the ‘Coming Soon’ message wasn’t creative. It was just that.

While this is the last thing people might check on your LinkedIn profile, it should be the first thing that you should do before anything else.

All of this is acceptable for people whose businesses aren’t related to the web but are like local transportation or manufacturing businesses. They’re probably quite good, successful at what they’re doing and don’t understand or even need to understand these formalities.

But, since most of such LinkedIn requests I get are from people whose companies are mentioned as an online business, it holds true for most.

Bonus Point: If your company is actually a self blogging site, you should probably just add it under website.

For people in between jobs

EDIT: It seems that a lot of people stumbling on this story are ones who are currently not employed and don’t want to give the impression that they are idle, considering that they’re working on some projects of their own and keeping their skills sharp. So they can’t decide if they should mention themselves as the founder of these projects or if there’s another way to portray the same to recruiters.

Here are my suggestions for a scenario like such.

If you visit this page, you’ll see in the top video that LinkedIn recruiters can search with the inputs — Job Titles, Skills, Locations and a few more, like industry.

• Your job title as a ‘founder’ may reduce your ranking in search results if you’re looking for a different role. However, I know many people who’ve joined companies after adding a founder role (some still keep it as a parallel, ongoing role) so it doesn’t seem to have a definite adverse effect on getting job offers. Of course it’s possible that they didn’t get the job through LinkedIn.
• Even so, you may consider removing it from your headline, mainly because adding it there may come off as you’re not looking for a job. You can try something like,
  ‘Marketing Professional | Redefining Banking | Open to new opportunities’
  i.e. ‘[Your job profile] | Redefining [Your functional area or industry] | Open to new opportunities’,
  just a random example.
• You can mention your current activities in your profile description, while keeping it concise, and to make it clearer that you’re open to new opportunities and a simple way for recruiters to reach out, you can add something like this at the end of your profile description, ‘currently open to new opportunities — reach out to me on [email address].’

If you’d like me to write a separate article on this topic or a general piece on getting the best out of LinkedIn for a job, let me know in the comments area and I’ll draft one.

Here’s a piece that I had written on general tips for getting more job shortlists & interview calls, and here’s one on the ‘don’ts of LinkedIn messages’.

Thank you for reading. Do clap for the article if you found it helpful.