So, you decide it’s time to brush off the ol’ LinkedIn profile and tweak your most recent job title or your “Headline” (which appears under your name at the top of your profile).
You make the edits, hoping the new wording represents you better to prospective employers or clients, and…
Whoops. Ping, Ping, Ping in your inbox:
“Congratulations on the new job!”
“Good for you!”
“Good luck in your new venture-”
Uh Oh.
LinkedIn automatically assumes that any changes to your title or headline means that you got a new job, and kindly takes the extra step of notifying all of your nearest and dearest (and that old boss who connected to you on LinkedIn) that you got a new job.
If that’s true, great! (Congratulations, good for you, and good luck in your new venture.) But, for many people, the tweaks are edits they have been hoping to make “under the radar” to optimize their searches. Unfortunately, if your contacts think you have a new job, they stop keeping their eyes open for opportunities for you.
(See a real-life example here: MarketWatch: How LinkedIn could hurt your job search)
To avoid this situation happening to you, TURN OFF the setting that broadcasts your activity feed:
Go to Account — Privacy and Settings — Turn on/off your activity broadcasts (AND the one below it, Turn on/off your activity feed.)
Make sure the “activity broadcast” box is blank/not checked, and the “activity feed” box is set to “only you”.
ACCORDING TO A POST I SAW ON LINKEDIN, THIS MAY TAKE UP TO SEVEN DAYS TO TAKE EFFECT. Make sure you allow time for this to actually kick in.
And, hopefully someday soon, you get the job you want, make a change to your job title and broadcast it out to the world (on purpose this time).