Hacking LinkedIn to get the JOB you want

don't downplay your skills this is one of the biggest pet peeves that i have when i look at linkedin profiles or resumes or anything like this people need to get hyped about themselves you you're trying to convince a recruiter or a hiring manager or anybody else that you can do a job but you're not even comfortable in your own skin to be hyped about your skills you're technical chase you spend a lot of your free time doing try hack me right and watching youtube videos because you want to learn in this field but then you're going to tell me that you're not you don't have a technical background yet your imposter syndrome is stopping you from getting a job if you're participating in those bug bounties on hacker one and bug crowd you can put in here bug bounty bug hunter hacker one bug hunter bug crowd right and that right there that pops out as you getting experience one of the things that i think people you know you know misconstrue in the the definition of experience is that it has to be a paid job with a an employer who hired you to be a penetration tester and i think we need to break down that mentality about experience and if you're a bug hunter on hacker one or bug crowd or cobalt dot io or synack even right or you're doing work for mom and pop as david mentioned um you know or you're even doing your own cyber security research that is experience try hack me hack the box range force those are experiences that um that you should be embracing and putting on here as tag lines let's get to the important piece hacking linkedin profiles so have you got some examples of linkedin profiles that you can critique that you can give advice about um just to help everyone you know hack the system if you like in a good way absolutely absolutely and the people that we are going to show linkedin profiles today have given their permission either to david or myself to to use their their linkedin profiles as examples and so i want to personally say thank you very much for that um i know how hard it can be to to you know put yourself out there and receive some critique and so this critique is given to you in a constructive fashion because i and david want to see you succeed in this business absolutely um but um you know know that the people who we are gonna be showing linkedin profiles did go ahead and give their uh give their permission to to see this so i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen with you here david so um so this is the the linkedin profile of a mr brian adams okay um one of the things that um one of the things i always maintain when we talk about linkedin profiles is that it needs to be a reflection of your resume to some extent again remember in in this world and especially in a coveted world where a lot of a lot of our interactions are digital right um you know this linkedin profile needs to be a digital reflection of you as an individual okay and so immediately when we land on this page when we look at the profile of bryan adams you know we've got the nice landscape which i think is fine i think the background that you see up here across the top i think that that that picturesque background on the mountains that's probably not something i would stress too hard about but immediately when i look at the profile picture of brian adams i don't see a very professional looking image it's it's it looks more like an image that you would find on facebook or instagram or something that's not nearly as professional as linkedin and so almost immediately i go straight to that and i say okay that that picture is not very professional um it's not bad and i don't want to discourage you from from trying to appear you know overly casual but that's just not a picture that i think displays a very professional image when it comes to a linkedin profile now neil i disagree with you can you open up your linkedin profile because i think you've got a great example i am i think that picture needs to be changed my picture needs to be changed no no uh yeah brian here and brian's um image sorry the background picture of the sorry the background picture of the mountains that looks really nice but i think you're wasting a lot of visual real estate so looking at yours i can see immediately who you are and you you're pointing people to social media stuff that you're doing so like the the twitch stream stuff i think is great i think you need to use that kind of real estate as best as you can to get someone engaged in your profile so i um you know it's a professional environment linkedin i think it's great to be casual but i agree with you that the picture should be more more professional if you like and i would change the background image to something like you've done or you know some other profiles that we we could look at perhaps but it needs to be more professional like what are you trying to accomplish with us with this profile i mean if i if i've got like three seconds to review your profile it better be good so so i think i know i think i know one of the other profiles that you're talking about um this guy this guy's background is also very awesome here and this is this is also what you're talking about here is it's it's you know you know it's a way for you to immediately see that you can consume multiple aspects of content from this individual i mean even if you don't have like a lot of content out there you want to you want to be able to put yourself across very very quickly and there's no better way than pictures you know pictures worth a thousand words so if you absolutely put something professional there of like experience that you've worked on perhaps you know i mean if i was working on on cisco devices or pabx's or stuff like that i would put myself in a with a photo with that kind of equipment or something just to showcase my skills very very quickly sorry i don't know if you agree with that but no i do i do agree with that i i so so and this is the this is the value that i think your audience is getting from from you and i doing this together right which is you know i i looked at this and i said if i had to pick two if i had to pick you know you know you know one thing that i wanted to critique i was going to critique the profile picture you know you're choosing to critique this in addition to the profile picture which i completely support um what i would say to to somebody listening is um yes if you can do this that has a you know a decent picture of you and to david's point you know something like something that's in your profession um then then i think absolutely go for it um you know i think i think this is hard enough for people to do you know um i think this should be the low-hanging fruit right so if you had to prioritize fix fix your profile picture make your profile picture look professional and then help find somebody or try to think outside the box on how you make this picture pop about who you are so i'd look at it more from like priority one brian let's fix your let's fix your profile image then priority two let's fix this background data image and i just want to say because brian submitted this to me brian it's not a critique of you personally it's to try and help you and everyone who's watching you've got the way i look at it you've got three seconds to grab someone's attention make the most of those three seconds a hundred percent speaking of making the most of those of those three seconds this was the next big thing that stuck out to me was you know kind of this this uh tagline if you will about who you are and and what your expertise are right you know um you know david talks about using this image space up here to give people that three second view of who you are this is the next place that they're gonna look after you grab their attention up here and so you you know in this profile it's big phony doing neat meta switch hpbx stuff you know think about this from the recruiter's eyes that doesn't resonate very well with the recruiter who's probably going to be one of the first people that looks at your linkedin profile and so i i think this is a this is a big miss right here and if we're going to compare to you know we don't have to compare it specifically to mine we can compare to this you can see right here you know this is i deliver cyber security peace of mind and empower leadership to confidently execute business safely boom you can immediately see what this individual is about right here inside of it and then they drive them to their social medias and even have a hashtag that follows that you can see similarly over here on mine we talk about being a cyber streamer you can see that i was on bloomberg television show i'm a practitioner and an advisor which means i can either do the hands-on work or i can just advise you and then i've got just this cool little sun tzu quote because you know i like to be a little bit different a little bit stand out so three seconds you're going to grab the attention up here then move down here and look to grab their attention like okay this guy this guy looks like he knows what he's talking about what is he all about and then that's where you're missing here inside of this tagline so i'd say update that and put add more detail i mean use use the space that you've got yeah i think you've got i think you've got several hundred characters of space that you can use there in that tag line um you should really you should really you know capitalize on that um do you want me to stick with one profile for no no let's jump around because it's just about all right giving different places yeah okay so so one of the guys who who's on my twitch stream chase golden um who participates in my twitch stream very regularly um um you know he he volunteered his profile to use as well and so again likewise you know he's got this picture here obviously very tech savvy picture kind of pops is like somebody who's in tech you know not a great profile picture but um you know at least it's he's got a he's got a tie on um you know and a collared shirt and he's trying to smile um chase i'll give you some crap for that smile a little bit later on the stream but you you look at his you look at his tag line right down here and you can see that he's put it in there right the very first thing is that he's transitioning military sometime around july 2021 so a recruiter can look at him be like okay this guy's getting out of the military so that's a good thing um and he's moving you know we've probably got about six months that we can look to see if this this individual is somebody that looks like he's a good fit for our organization now he puts he puts his certs here in the tagline i'm not a huge fan of certs and actually one of the big notes that i took on this when i looked at chase's was i think immediately you may be setting disqualifiers for yourself by putting any form of education or certification in that tag line um i think that that's a bad place for that and so i'm not a huge fan of throwing these into these tag lines but again he puts in there that he's got an active clearance that way if he wants to continue to look for military jobs or cleared level jobs and then that's right up front um the other thing is that he talks about being an aspiring pen tester now this is this is a huge pet peeve of mine i'm not a fan of you and you know advertising that you're an aspiring pen tester look if you're self-taught if you're you know you're doing following the three pieces of advice that that i gave you guys you know when we were had the interview with david right where you're you're networking and you're doing your hands-on stuff um if you're participating capture the flags if you watch videos on hacking if you if you practice it right and i had this question come up in my twitch stream is when can you call yourself an ethical hacker when can you call yourself a penetration tester if you feel like you embolden that image don't put aspirin penetration tester right you can put something like um you know avid cyber security technologist right or um you know you know self-taught ethical hacker right you know you put that type of stuff in your in your um in your profile that says that that you are the person that they are looking for and they are the the job you know they are that you are that person that they're looking to fill the role for i don't like saying that you're an aspiring pen tester because immediately when recruiter says that sees that their immediate reaction is okay you're not there yet and that's probably not the the image you want to give off to people when they look at your profile in those first you know three to six seconds so neil i want to ask you some questions if you don't mind i'm not in the u.s so i'm not i'm not based in the u.s so i don't know the culture so you can better answer this question chases in the military or transitioning from the military how does it help or not help to actually take a photo of yourself in your military uniform because if i see someone and this is just me looking at someone who's a military person and they dressed in their you know full kit it looks great um it looks great but i mean i don't know what the what is it like in the u.s yeah so that's um that's a good question and and i think it's i think it's still a very mixed bag right um you know there are some people who hire military folks because of the discipline because of the regimented um you know way that they they're analytical and they solve problems um quite honestly and i'll be you know 100 transparent on this um i've encountered people who say that they love to hire military folks because they follow orders yeah and so so the emboldenment image of you being in your military uniform um you know could serve really great purposes for that type of crowd there are other people who are still very intimidated by the military there are still people who look at a resume and if they see that you're former military they go oh gosh this is going to be filled with a whole lot of military lingo that i do not know what it even means and i don't even know if this person is going to be a fit for the job which is one of the biggest things that i try to coach people on um when it comes to doing their resumes when they're transitioning out of the military is we've got to strip all of that military lingo out uh so that you look like you're ready for civilian life and so in my opinion i think chase's picture is actually very very apt because i think what it tells people is that yes he's transitioning military but because he can put on a shirt and a tie and look professional he's ready to be a civilian um and he's ready to talk to civilian lingo he's ready to um apply the core values that he learned in the marine corps and i want to say chase thank you very much for your service and everybody all the other military folks who watch thank you very much for your service you know but it shows that he's willing to take those core values from the marines and apply them to to a private organization without being overly military so in this case i think this is actually a really good image for chase um and i don't think that uh you know fundamentally you need to get all decked up in your military uniform to to hit that wow factor i mean that's great so i mean there's good and bad and you've got to it you know it can actually count against you and it can count for you so that's good that's good feedback the other thing i wanted to ask you it says aspiring penetration tester we've we've said hack the box things like that are a way to get experience but something i i did when i started and a lot of people do when they start is they they do work for free so they become an apprentice or you know you go to small businesses and you you tell them look i'll help you with your cyber security you know stance or whatever and i mean businesses do the dumbest thing so i mean surely if we all know this so i mean surely if he volunteered his services for a small what do you call in the states mom and pop shops is that yeah yeah so if you if you went and did some you know help small businesses with their um with their security and it doesn't have to be complicated that's experience isn't it that is experience but i want to i i don't want to downplay that by any stretch of the imagination but you bring up you know hack the box and try hack me and we've talked about this on your show where we've talked about like hacker one bug crowd cobalt dot io remember those are places where you regardless of your your your documented experience you know you could literally have zero experience and you can go sign up for hacker one and bug crowd and you can immediately jump into the bug bounty lifestyle you know you know if you're participating in those bug bounties on hacker one and bug crowd you can put in here bug bounty bug hunter hacker one bug hunter bug crowd right and that right there that pops out as you getting experience one of the things i think people you know you know misconstrue in the the definition of experience is that it has to be a paid job with a an employer who hired you to be a penetration tester and i think we need to break down that mentality about experience and if you're a bug hunter on hacker one or bug crowd or cobalt dot io or cynic even right or you're doing work for mom and pop as david mentioned um you know or you're even doing your own cyber security research that is experience try hack me hack the box range force those are experiences that um that you should be embracing and putting on here as tag lines absolutely so i mean in other words what you've said is basically rather than saying aspiring penetration tester he could say a penetration test if he's done some of that stuff or um what term would you use there because i understand the aspiring stuff immediately says okay you're not there yet yeah yeah i think i think i would drop the the aspiring and i would either leave it as penetration tester because you're doing the job somewhere somehow for somebody you're doing the job so put penetration tester on there um you know i would put you know you know you know if you if you're not doing the job you know let's be honest like if you're at a stage where you're you're not doing try hacking you're not doing half the box you haven't started doing your range for stuff you know you're you're not there from a hands-on experience then i would say you know you know i would i would phrase it in terms of of you know you know self-taught penetration tester or self-taught ethical hacker or you know um you know something that has that ethical hacker or threat hunter or forensics person inside of your title um you know that still tries to grab them but um i would i would definitely drop the aspiring or future or you know you know anything like that don't don't don't put any doubt into that recruiter's mind that you can't do the job that's great i mean we'll talk about this for hours uh neil so what else can scroll down and let's see a bit more about the well well actually i want to come back over to brian's a little bit here because i want to talk a little bit about brian's and then we'll compare and contrast it to something like chase's um when we scroll down um so so again when we talk about this we assume like to david's point three seconds you grab them with the banner boom another three seconds you've grabbed them with the headline they're gonna scroll down they're gonna look at your your profile now this is something that when you look at this this about page here um one of the things that that i encourage folks to consider the about page as is is very much a bio and a bio is vastly different than you know you know how most people are used to talking about themselves when most people talk about themselves they say i i i i you can see this here in brian's profile i am passionate about resolving customer technical needs i you know in addition to to work i also right in my spare time i when you look over at you know something like my bio it's very third party neil is has right neil has that's the difference between a bio and you talking about yourself and the reason that that's important the reason that i want folks to think about that is because sometimes mentally we have a hard time talking about ourselves we're like gosh who who wants to hear about me gosh if i say i've done this and i've done that then it feels like you're bragging about yourself which you're worried may put yourself off as an egotistical person um and and to get out of that mindset it's much much easier to think about somebody else you've you've commissioned a writer you've commissioned an author you've commissioned you know somebody to write your biography they're going to write a bio about you and so what i would encourage people is to take that biographical approach to their about sections and think about what somebody else would write about you in your about section and what you'll find is that it flows a lot better brian is a passionate uh technically you know adept business person who's able to solve the solutions for customers and get to the root cause of issues right that that sounds a lot better than i am because you know it's it's a different it's a different perspective if you will um so so you know in addition to that um when you go over here to chase's and we kind of scroll down to his about section it's a bit better i mean he still uses the i am but when you look at actually some of the things that he puts inside of his uh his about section he talks about um you know in this case some of the the certifications and some of the compliancy stuff that he has because he's military because he's transitioning military i do think it's important that he puts in something like dod 8570 which if you're not aware of is a requirement in the u.s to work in some jobs for instance you know if you're going to do penetration testing for the military you do have to have a dod 8570 compliance certification he reiterates his transitioning service in july of 2021 but this is where i think chase um loses in the about section is with this one right here right i'm looking to gain experience and apply efforts towards a new role i do not have the technical background yet but that is not going to stop me i like the idea of where you're going with this chase but i don't like it putting on your uh your bio like this i think that that's the problem um one of the things that i think that this is problematic for is that you're again we get back to if a recruiter has made it down this far right here you are immediately putting anybody who reads your profile off by saying you do not have a technical background i think i don't do that don't do that even if you don't feel like you have what you consider a technical background you're an aspiring pen tester you've got comptia network plus you've got security plus certification technical technical you're technical don't downplay your skills this is one of the biggest pet peeves that i have when i look at linkedin profiles or resumes or anything like this people need to get hyped about themselves you you're trying to convince a recruiter or a hiring manager or anybody else that you can do a job but you're not even comfortable in your own skin to be hyped about your skills you're technical you've got network plus you've got security plus you do try hack me you do hack the box you're on bug crowd you're on hacker one you can put a computer together that's more technical than ninety 90 of the people out there right don't exactly downplay your skills because you don't think that you're as technical as the guy next to you that's what gets into imposter syndrome which i would encourage you to go watch my video on imposter syndrome over on youtube because that's what you're displaying here is you're displaying openly for the world to see that you have impostor syndrome i just want to say this neil i think it's a problem for a lot of technical people um we don't like to boast and that unfortunately is something you have to overcome you have to like you said and you said it well you have to believe in yourself you have to be your own best advocate if you like because if you're not going to do it you know who's going to shout for you you've got to shout for yourself and this is the right place to shout you know it is there's a place and time to to boast about yourself and there's a place and time not to and this is the place where you should this is the place where you're trying to you know showcase the very very best of what you've got so you need to be passionate and you need to boast about yourself i can't think of a better word but you know that's sort of that i think that's really important 100 100 i think i think you you hit the nail on the head right we're we we we unfortunately in in it cyber security however you want to call it we have two vastly opposite pendulums we're either so egotistical that that people hate us and despise us and they don't want to be around us and we're kind of that toxic mentality in in the cyber security space or we're we're too humble and we're too you know well i just don't want to talk about myself we're too not comfortable with that boasting that we that you know we don't get to shine on the things that make us awesome i i think that few of us are experts about finding that right balance in between but when you look at something like this this isn't an area where you want to be this person it's better to get closer to to this person over here and this is the best place to do it you should be you should be talking about your accolades in here right and the thing is you've got only a few seconds to convince someone they don't know you they they don't know you they're going to judge you solely on what they see on this page so you need to highlight everything that's good about yourself so on saturday i had caitlyn ilcony from battleship security on my stream and and she she runs a mentoring platform that um is looking to try to innovate across all cyber security with providing mentors she gave a stat on that show with me on saturday that i thought was was insane i'd never heard it heard that stat before from any of the recruiters that i had on my stream she said that three percent three percent of the people who just cold send out resumes when they apply for a job application only three percent of those people get to the job well right just three percent that means that that's testament to what exactly you and i are trying to say david which is your linkedin profile your networking how you treat this platform is most likely accountable for the other 97 percent of the people who get jobs out there and so chase you spend a lot of your free time doing try hack me right and watching youtube videos because you want to learn in this field but then you're going to tell me that you're not you don't have a technical background yet your imposter syndrome is stopping you from getting a job [Music]

Channel: David Bombal

Views: 28,235

Rating: 4.9554319 out of 5

Keywords: linkedin, linkedin profile, hacking, ethical hacking, linkedin profile tips, how to use linkedin, hacking linkedin, linkedin hacking, good linkedin profile, ethical hacking course, ethical hacking tutorial, improve your linkedin profile, linkedin marketing, neal bridges, ine, linkedin tips, linkedin profile picture, learn hacking, cybersecurity, ethical hacking for beginners, best linkedin tips, linkedin profile tips for job seekers, tips for linkedin profile

Id: QE6E9ZxBAwc

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021