In an increasingly digital and interconnected world, businesses continue to rely more on applicants’ online networking efforts as a positive marker in the hiring process. If students’ career prospects rely on savvy professional social media use, it is incumbent on agricultural business programs to emphasize the importance in the classroom and incorporate education about the responsible use of those tools into the curriculum. In this study, students in an agricultural sales course developed LinkedIn profiles with incrementally stricter rubrics and requirements to determine how stressing specific components could nudge them to improve their professional online presence. In particular, the assignment required students to connect with other LinkedIn users outside their “safe” network (i.e., not professors, friends, or alumni of their university), leveraging those external reviewers as a mechanism to improve digital profile quality. Different treatments varied the numbers of required connections in the assignment. This external review put students’ “skin in the game,” since their public profiles would be scrutinized by real-world professionals. Results indicate that with stricter external-validation requirements, students’ efforts improved. The long-term objective is to convince students of the value and efficacy of building and maintaining an active professional social media presence and brand.

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