Who actually asks about you
Four kinds of people look you up and they want different things. What each is really asking, and how to set your page up in ten minutes.
When you set up who can ask your page, the software offers you settings. That is the wrong way round. The useful thing is to picture the four people who actually turn up, because once you can see them the settings answer themselves.
Here they are, in the order they usually arrive.
The recruiter, sizing you up
They found you through a search, a former colleague, or a post you wrote two years ago. They have a role in hand and about ninety seconds of attention. What they want to know is not on your profile: would you move, what for, what do you refuse to do, how do you actually work with people.
The mistake is treating this person as an intruder. They are the reason to have a page at all. Give them your beliefs about the work in full, your lessons in full, your positions on the contested things. Those are the answers that make them either stop wasting your time or make a much better first message.
What they should not get is your calendar, your current client list, or anything about a live negotiation. Not because it is secret, but because it is none of the question.
The prospective client, deciding
This one is further along than the recruiter and in more of a hurry. They are trying to decide whether to put you in front of their board, their team, or their money. They ask concrete things: how do you run the first ninety days, what do you do when the team disagrees with you, have you done this in a regulated shop.
They want method, and method is the most underrated thing on anyone's page. Write down how you do things, plainly, the way you would tell a new hire. Give it to everyone. It is the single highest value thing you can publish, because it is the thing you repeat most and the thing nobody can copy convincingly.
Where to draw the line: the names. How you run an engagement is yours to tell. Who you are running one for is theirs.
The person about to work beside you
A new colleague, a co founder candidate, someone joining the project next month. This is the only one of the four with a real relationship on the line, and the questions are softer and harder at once. What do you hate in a process. What do you need to do good work. What did you get wrong last time.
This is the audience to be generous with, and the one people forget to set up. Invite them by name and open more than you open to the web: the rougher lessons, the things you changed your mind about, roughly when you are free. Then they can ask at midnight without feeling like they are imposing, which is most of what a good working relationship is made of.
Their assistant
Increasingly the first thing that reads you is not a person. Somebody asks their assistant to look you up before a call, and it goes and gets whatever it can find. Today that is your profile, a few posts, and whatever a search engine decided was you.
An assistant asking your page is not a different kind of reader, it is the same reader with less patience and a better memory. It gets exactly what its person would get: if they are signed in, their door, and if they are a stranger, the open one. It cannot talk its way into more, because what it may see is decided before it is allowed to ask anything.
The practical consequence is that your words get quoted rather than summarised by something that never read them. That is worth ten minutes of setup on its own.
Ten minutes, roughly
If you want the short version, this is what I would do on a new page.
- Start with three audiences: anyone on the web, anyone signed in, and people you invite. That is enough for a long time.
- For anyone on the web, open your lessons, how tos, opinions and beliefs in full. Those are the things you would happily say on a stage.
- For anyone signed in, add your work history in full and let your rough availability through if you want to be reachable.
- For the people you invite, open everything you would tell a colleague over coffee.
- Leave anything about a current engagement, or anyone else's business, out of the page entirely rather than hidden inside it. What is not written down cannot be released by a setting you got wrong at eleven at night.
That last one is the rule I keep coming back to. Settings are for deciding who sees what you wrote. They are not a place to park something you should not have written down.
When you are ready, set yours up. If you want to see what the doors feel like from the other side, ask somebody else's page first.