9 cliches to cut from your LinkedIn profile: from lacklustre to leader energy
Don’t dilute your professional value with tired cliches - remove these words and phrases from your LinkedIn profile to stand out on screens.
If all the world’s a stage, then LinkedIn is the world’s biggest professional one — and your bio is your opening act. But if all your readers see when they land on your LinkedIn is a collection of cliches and overused buzzwords, you risk your real value getting lost in a sea of sameness.
In The Diary of a CEO, Steve Bartlett’s 33 Laws for Business and Life urges you to “Avoid being wallpaper at all costs”. It’s the reminder that your audience is habituated to ignore you:
“Wallpaper’ as I call it — the overuse of popular terms, phrases and calls to action to the point that the brain habituates to them and tunes them out — is the enemy of effective and successful storytelling and marketing.”
Cut through the clutter with a standout LinkedIn profile. Replace generic phrases that dilute your talents with clear, confident proof points brimming with personality. Empty words are empty promises. Your professional personal brand is much more magnetic, memorable and meaningful than that.
So let’s peel away the cliches to transform your lacklustre LinkedIn profile into an irresistible teaser for your true professional potential.
1. Hardworking
Your friends and family might fawn over your hard work. You might think you hustle harder than others, too. But LinkedIn isn’t the place to make hard work your claim to fame. It’s the world’s biggest professional networking platform. Don’t assume your professional personal brand is any more hardworking than the next profile in line on LinkedIn. Instead of literally word-smithing your work ethic into your profile, show it instead — through your professional story, achievements and impact.
2. Passionate
An overused cliche, ‘passion’, has lost its power for professional personal brands. Demonstrate your passion instead. Your professional experience, education, volunteering or passion projects that demonstrate your consistent commitment to the industry you serve.
3. Results-driven
Results-driven — who isn’t? Does anyone work, hoping their efforts fail? Instead of ruminating over your results, believing these are obvious to your reader, write an achievements-oriented profile. Where the actions and outcomes speak louder than words.
4. Innovative
Innovative is an impactful word. But it’s also obvious hyperbole unless you can back up your claims with examples. To avoid sounding hollow and unconvincing, evidence your innovation.
5. Strategic thinker
Like results, does anyone work with no end-goal in mind? Particularly as you climb the corporate ladder, your strategic skills will become more and more assumed. If you specialise in strategy, be clear about what type. Punctuate your strategic thinking with examples of strategies you’ve delivered. Bonus points for including the proper names of the strategy — it packages potentially vague strategic skills into exciting end-states.
6. Team-player
Every recruiter, potential employer or potential contact expects you to be good with people. Prove your people skills. What teams have you worked in or across? What communities do you contribute to? What about that teamwork most excites you? What do you bring to the table in the buzz of a professional team project? Show your relationship-building abilities with actual examples.
7. Details-oriented
If the devil really is in the details for your achievements, provide the proof. Instead of defaulting to overused details-oriented cliches, demonstrate your point. How exactly does your investigative eye underpin your success? Swap a vague reference for storytelling details.
8. Visionary
On the opposite end of the scale, “visionary” isn’t adding value to your LinkedIn profile. It’s a grandiose claim. It’s one thing to think you are, it’s another to be a visionary. Instead, communicate your vision — the unique perspective you bring to the marketplace. What is your vision for its future? Steve Jobs didn’t call himself a visionary; instead, when he revealed the first-ever iPod in 2021, he said:
“Music lovers have always wanted to carry their entire music library with them wherever they go. Well, now you can. With an iPod, you can put 1,000 songs in your pocket.”
Role-modelling Apple’s famous “Think Different” campaign was the vision made a reality.
If you’ve worked on long-term visions, communicate your contributions clearly. If not market a movement your personal brand can lead.
9. Solutions-oriented
Nobody plans to be a problem-maker. Literally every single job is designed to solve a problem for an employer or customer. If you’re solutions-focused, describe how. Write your profile to take your reader behind the scenes in your process. What actions contribute to your impactful outcomes?
Noise to nuance: Write a LinkedIn profile that resonates.
Cliches create confusion. When you confuse them, you lose them. That’s if you aren’t being ignored altogether already.
When your LinkedIn profile is vague, you blur your value. Remove overworked words and phrases and replace them with concrete evidence of your skills, actions, impact and vision. Be so good they can’t ignore you. Your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t read like a dictionary of generic words. To communicate with clarity, credibility and confidence, embrace the power of precision in your storytelling. Because, your personal brand deserves much more than becoming wallpaper.
