How ChatGPT can help improve your LinkedIn headline

ChatGPT can be used to enhance or rewrite your LinkedIn headline

Are you happy with your LinkedIn headline? This is one of the most important parts of the LinkedIn profile to be found in search.

If not, try ChatGPT, the latest artificial intelligence tool. This is the first in a series of posts on how to tiptoe into using one of the most valuable tools available.

If you’re like, “What is this ChatGPT thing?” I want you to listen to my podcast episode, ChatGPT Demystified: How to Harness the Benefits for Career Success with Polly Allen. Polly is an expert in this area and gives a good overview of the best uses.

If you haven’t used everything yet, check out the following tutorial ChatGPT Tutorial – A crash course on Chat GPT for beginners.

Some additional tools before we start

The video above was published in January 2023 and I am publishing this post in April 2023. That’s light years into the world of ChatGPT.

There is a Chrome or Firefox plugin that I will use.

These are important because I want you to think of ChatGPT as a very young and inexperienced intern. If you’ve ever worked with a college intern, you need to give them very good direction in order to get the kind of work you want them to do.

ChatGPT is the same. The more detailed instructions you provide, the more likely ChatGPT is to deliver the results you want. The prompt templates are useful to structure the opening request.

Let’s start by improving our LinkedIn headline

We will use the LinkedIn headline prompt.

Listen to the latest episode

When I select the LinkedIn Headline prompt, I get the following:

There is nothing magical about this template. It just gives you a framework to enter data that will guide ChatGPT to generate what you want. Please pay attention to the following:

You’re asking for 3 accessible LinkedIn headlines that are less than 120 characters. You can replace “responsive” with a more descriptive word if you like.
You’re asking for 3, but you could be asking for more, or as you’ll see later in this post, I’m asking for 3 more.
My life outside of work is said to be optional. All of this is optional.

There is an option to choose a style and tone that looks like this:

After selecting the English (United States) language, the opening prompt with the ChatGPT response looks like this:

Well… that was okay, but I wanted something bolder and snappier. I told him to generate it with a snappy tone. Note that Snarky is not on the list.

I like these better.

Note that I’m currently having a conversation with ChatGPT. The prompt was just there to get you started.

I liked these but I want more options so I asked for 3 more.

Maybe I just want to update my current LinkedIn headline

That’s good, but let’s see how ChatGPT would tell me to improve my current headline. I learned something about myself through this conversation. Let’s ask you to improve my current LinkedIn headline.

That was pretty good, but the Forbes top 100 careers site was 8 years ago. Let’s see what it tells me when I tell it to remove it.

This is an iterative process

You are having a conversation with ChatGPT. I could also have asked them to look at my current profile to give me suggestions.

My career has been varied, as reflected in my About Me section in my About Us section on LinkedIn. I don’t want to be known for the 22 years at IBM or the 2 successful tech startups, so please consider only my work at Career Pivot.

I like this much better and could keep iterating to get different variations until I have enough material to work with.

ChatGPT does not write this material in a vacuum. I need to provide it with enough information to generate new LinkedIn headlines to choose from.

ChatGPT hasn’t hallucinated…yet

ChatGPT can suffer from what I refer to as MSU glitch (MSU = Make Stuff Up). You may have read that if you don’t give them enough information and they have to fill things in for the content to make sense, they will hallucinate or make things up. Therefore, you need to check EVERYTHING that ChatGPT generates.

It’s very unlikely to hallucinate while writing LinkedIn headlines as they are relatively short. However, if I ask them to write my About Me section for my LinkedIn profile or write a custom cover letter, there’s a much better chance of doing so.

ChatGPT is great for brainstorming

I hope you can see that ChatGPT is great for coming up with new ideas. It speeds up the creative process, but you still have to guide it. Remember, this is just like working with a young, inexperienced intern. The more guidance you give it, the better the results, and over time it will learn what you want.

One thing I’ve learned is that if I ask him to write in a snappy manner, he may drop a swear word from time to time. Now, when I tell him to write a long-form document in a scathing manner, I tell him not to use swear words.

In my next post, I’ll walk you through the process of rewriting my LinkedIn About Us section.

Markus Mueller

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