Having an excellent LinkedIn profile is one of the best ways to get noticed in your job search.
With more than 500 million members now on LinkedIn, it's more important than ever to stand out from the crowd. Just a few small improvements can have a big impact and increase your visibility to recruiters and potential employers on LinkedIn.
Spare a few minutes to update these areas and take your LinkedIn profile to the next level. Remember: the more you put into LinkedIn, the more you'll get out of it.
How to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile:
1. Make Your Profile Public
It's a simple one but you'd be surprised at how often this is overlooked. If you would like your profile to appear in searches, check your account settings and ensure that your public profile is visible.
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Click on the "Me" icon in the toolbar at the top of your screen and then click "View profile". Next, click on "Edit public profile & URL" at the very top right of your page. Under "Edit Visibility", adjust your public visibility as you see fit. We suggest that:
2. Keep Your Profile Complete and Updated
The more complete and up-to-date your profile, the more likely you will be found by a recruiter or potential employer.
A study from LinkedIn found that:
- Members with a current position listed get up to 8x more profile views
- More than 300,000 people search by industry every week
- You are 23x more likely to be found in a search if you add your location
Be sure to complete all of the sections including current position, industry, location, education, certifications, interests and contact information to improve the accuracy of search results.
3. Customise Your URL
LinkedIn automatically assigns you a URL with your name and a random set of numbers when you sign up to the network. But just like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, you are able to customise this.
We recommend keeping it simple and professional with a variation of your name, just like you would with your email address. Therefore when you add your LinkedIn URL to your CV or a job application, it will look cleaner and show that you have great attention to detail e.g. linkedin.com/JohnJSmith
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4. Pick an Appropriate Profile Picture
According to LinkedIn, simply having a profile photo results in up to 21x more profile views and 9x more connection requests. They say, "A picture is worth a thousand words" so it's important that your profile picture tells the right story. LinkedIn is a professional platform so choose your picture accordingly, although this doesn't make that you need to hire a professional photographer or must pose in a fancy suit.
A few key tips:
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LinkedIn also has a built-in photo editor to enhance your photos. There are six photo filters and a variety of editing tools such as crop, brightness, contrast and saturation to create the perfect profile picture.
5. Upload A Cover Photo
Don't waste an opportunity to stand out from the sea of generic blue backgrounds on LinkedIn. Give your profile a bit more personality or personal branding with a custom cover photo. Simply head to a free stock photo website such as Unsplash, Pexels or Pixabay to find a royalty-free image that relates to your career or interests.
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6. Use Keywords
Make sure your profile is rich with keywords that relate to your profession as this will impact whether you are found in the search results. Spend a few minutes to research and identify keywords for your industry. Include those keywords throughout the professional headline, summary and experience sections of your LinkedIn profile.
7. Tidy Up Your Endorsed Skills
Your skills section should highlight who you are, what you do and what makes you stand out from the crowd. You must be strategic with the skills you include on your profile and only include the skills that are unique to your talents or are keywords for someone in your role/industry e.g. copywriting, SEO or Google AdWords.
Don't include meaningless skills (e.g. Microsoft Word) or reorder the list so that your most important skills are on the top.
8. Let Recruiters Know You're Open
Are you actively looking for new career opportunities? You can privately signal to recruiters that your open to exploring new job opportunities as well as what type of career prospects you're interested in (full-time, part-time, contract), whether you are actively or casually looking, locations, job titles, and more.
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9. Own your media
LinkedIn allows you to showcase your personality and your achievements through images, documents, videos and presentations in the summary, education and experience section on your profile. Adding media to your profile is an effective way to differentiate yourself from the competitive and stand out from the crowd.
Examples of media you could upload:
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10. Showcase your achievements
Recruiters spend hours searching through LinkedIn to find the ideal candidate so make sure you fill your summary and experience section with your specialities, career experience and noteworthy achievements. Just like a CV, people tend to skim through your profile so long descriptive paragraphs won't do you any favours. Use bullet points so that the important information is easy to find. Also, make sure that your summaries of previous roles are listed in past tense, not present tense.
11. Request LinkedIn Recommendations
LinkedIn Recommendations help you build credibility in the industry. Do you need some more recommendations? LinkedIn makes the process simple by allowing you to ask your connections to write you a recommendation. In these requests, you are able to specify who you want to recommend you and what you would like to be recommended for.
Another great way to receive more recommendations is to provide recommendations for someone you've worked with in hope that they would return the favour. After all, sharing is caring.
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12. Update your status
LinkedIn is full of active professional sharing industry-related news and insightful posts. Why not share your own expertise? We recommend highlighting your recent work, industry knowledge, interests and expertise in your status updates. Engaging with likeminded people by liking/commenting on posts, following companies and joining groups can also be very beneficial.
If you keep active on LinkedIn, your extended network will see your updates and people can discover your posts via search. You will be able to gain more visibility, grow your influence and acquire new follows, which can potentially lead to new opportunities coming your way.
If you're on the hunt for a new job, Creative Personnel are here to help you with your search. We advertise our roles on our LinkedIn page or you can visit our jobs page today to see what roles we have available.