Summary:

What is the best way to put your maiden name into your LinkedIn profile so that people from your past can find you?  Use this new feature of LinkedIn.

Details:

In a previous post, I told you how to put common misspellings of your name into your LinkedIn profile.  That post also said that you could put your maiden name in the Summary field of your profile, and the LinkedIn search engine would find you if someone searched for you using that name.  I also promised a better technique in a future post, and here it is.

This feature of LinkedIn is relatively new, so if you created your account a while ago, it may not have been available.  To put in your maiden name, do the following: 

• Go to your LinkedIn Home page
• Under the Profile navigation, click the + box on the right to expand the selections
• Click Edit My Profile
• Click Edit to the right of your name
• Under your Last name, there is an option to put in your Former/Maiden name (this is a new feature)
• Put in the new one, and click Save

If Jolie was your maiden name, and Pitt is your married name, your name will now appear as Angelina (Jolie) Pitt.  If you implement the technique above, LinkedIn would find you if someone were doing a “normal search” for Angelina Jolie, i.e. if they used the “Search People” function in the upper right hand corner of each page.

Also, in the unlikely event that someone did the following:

• used Advanced Search
• specified Angelina as the first name
• specified Jolie as the last name

your profile would still match.  This is one case where my solution from the previous post wouldn’t work.  In other words, if you had used the technique from my previous post, and  someone

• used the Advanced Search
• specified the last name Jolie (and you had put it in the Summary field but not in the “Maiden name ” or “Last name” fields)

LinkedIn would not find a match.  This new LinkedIn technique is certainly worth implementing, and it’s easy to do.

Please pass this on to others with maiden names.  Good luck!

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