Not everyone leads with their job title

A coach at a women's program told us her directory was making people feel worse, not better.

The alumna who stepped away for six years to raise kids. The one who left finance and is a year into a master's. The one who coaches high school and does not have a company name to put anywhere. They all opened their profile, saw a blank where the job title goes, and quietly decided they had nothing to offer.

They were wrong, obviously. The woman who took eight years off and came back part-time is exactly who a senior panicking about whether she has to choose needs to talk to. But a directory that leads with title at company tells her she is not who the network is for, and she believes it.

What changed

Well-rounded profiles are a per-program setting that reorders what a profile leads with. Same fields, same member, different first impression.

Career first — the default, and still right for most programs:

The default. The job title is the headline.

Well-rounded on. Her industry sits in the header, and her own words come first:

Same member. Her story leads; her job history is further down, where it belongs for this program.

Her job did not disappear. It moved down the page, under the things a current player actually reads.

The card that does the work

Every profile has a "what I can help with" field. On a well-rounded program it gets renamed, moved up, and outlined in the program's colors.

It reads like an offer, not a data field.

That is one sentence a member wrote about herself. It is more useful than any title, and it is the thing a nervous junior screenshots and sends to a teammate.

Where it shows up most: the directory

This is the part that surprised us. Career-first cards:

Four alumnae. One of them has a hole in her card.

Nina did not fill in a company. Her card has a gap in it, and scanning the row, she reads as the one who did not finish her profile.

Well-rounded cards, same four people:

Nobody is missing anything. Nobody is reduced to an employer.

Here it is end to end:

Career-first, well-rounded, and what it does to the directory.

The fields that came with it

Turning this on is not the only way to get the benefit — these were added for every program, well-rounded or not:

About — a few sentences in the member's own voice
Interests and hobbies — the thing that actually starts a conversation
Major and hometown — how a lot of introductions really begin
Maiden name — shown as née Keller, so teammates can find her under the name they knew

That last one matters more than it sounds. Half the reason an alumna cannot be found in her own network is that she is filed under a name nobody on the team recognizes. She can now be found either way, and the sign-up flow searches the roster under both names when she claims her profile.

For coaches

Well-rounded is off by default and set per program, not per member — it is a decision about what your community should lead with. Tell us and we will flip it on for you; it changes nothing about who is in your directory or what they have filled in.

Worth turning on if a meaningful number of your alumni are not currently working, are mid-career-change, or work somewhere with no name recognition. Worth leaving off if your network's whole point is who is at which firm.

One thing to try this week

Fill in your own About and your own help-with line first. Two or three sentences, written like you talk. Every member who opens the directory and sees a coach who wrote something real is a member who writes something real.