Level of Your LinkedIn Profile?

“How do we map people’s profiles on LinkedIn to Amazon’s job levels?”, a recruiter friend at work asked me today. “Well, good question. I’ve been thinking about this …” I can put LinkedIn profiles into three buckets: 1. Skill based profile. People with this kind of profile will put their technical skills on top of their "About", which is a sign they don't have much work or life experience. College graduates may put their courses and GPA there. Junior software engineers tend to put Java, C# and Python etc. In Amazon's leveling, these profiles roughly map to L4. 2. Experience based profile. People with this kind of profile will put their companies, products or most worthy projects on top of their “About”. They are at the middle stage of their careers. If their companies or products are well known, the profiles may get a lot of attention from recruiters. But it might be hard to tell what “role” they really played in these projects. It is usually a sign that they were contributors of big deliveries, not the leaders. People at this stage of their career require good environments to perform well. They don't have enough capacity yet to change a bad environment into a good one by themselves. In Amazon's leveling, these profiles roughly map to L5. 3. Result based profile. People with this kind of profile will put their major deliveries’s measurable results and impacts on their “About”. They've done something worthy. They can honestly claim the credit under their names. They are at senior positions of their companies. Being put into challenging environments they can influence the environments for the better. In Amazon's leveling, these profiles map to L6 or above. Now nothing is set on the stone. Someone maybe extremely talented and able to perform at L5+ level, but they never have the opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities. On the opposite side someone may have very impressive company names in their work history, and solid measurable results too, just because they showed up at the right place and the right time. All data lies; humans are biased by nature, otherwise we wouldn't have survived the evolution. What I learned through reading LinkedIn profiles is to accept the data as just one aspect of the truth and be conscious about the bias of the data, and my own bias on profiling. Are there other buckets in LinkedIn profiles? Sure, I can name a few. But they are not very relevant to we commons. (A) Profiles of people at senior leadership positions of well known companies. People with that kind of profile don't need to say much about themselves. The positions tell the stories. (B) Profiles of people with extreme impact in the industry. Their profiles are usually very terse. The shorter the better! For example, I found this profile on LinkedIn: “Main Linux kernel developer since 1991, still active maintainer. Original author and architect of Git ...” Can you guess who he is?