Do you have a bare-bones LinkedIn profile or a well-branded LinkedIn profile that makes you stand out? 

This is an important question because over 90% of recruiters use LinkedIn as the platform to search for talent.

Let me give you 6 tips to optimize your LinkedIn profile for job searching success.

1- Make a complete profile

Important things to include:

• Your CV/Resume
• A professional description
• Your skills & competencies
• Educational background

You can upload any additional information you would like. For example, good feedback from customers, previous salaries, some volunteer work. 

Don’t simply mention your responsibilities. Weave an interesting tale about your successes in the job. Explain the problems and how you solved them, especially if you came up with creative solutions to important challenges. Keep your narrative brief; a long story might turn off busy recruiters.

Lastly, a letter of recommendation makes a huge difference.

2- Choose a professional profile picture

In your LinkedIn profile photo, you should be dressed in business wear, and only your head and shoulders should be in the shot.

Use a well-lit, corporate image of yourself. Immaculate personal presentation is vital so you must appear tidy and formal in your online presence. 

Choose a backdrop that isn’t busy. The fewer distractions there are in the background, the better.

Wear solid colors instead of prints – and be mindful of your background color, to avoid blending in. 

Avoid those where you’re not looking at the camera or a photo that looks like years ago.

3- Focus your profile on where you want to go

Professionals at mid-career are often looking to reinvent themselves after years of working in a specific type of job or industry. But too often, their LinkedIn profiles only reflect where they’ve been. Instead, focus on where you’re going versus where you’ve been.

Find your ideal jobs, then build your profile around those.

For example, don’t list tons of skills from all your years of experience, keep your focus on what’s relevant to the job you’re seeking. And by all means, remove skills you no longer want to use in a job. So, if you don’t want to work anymore as an Instagram consultant, don’t mention those skills in your profile. 

The more effort you put into highlighting your experience and what you’re looking for, the better your chances are of getting in front of a recruiter and landing a job you’re excited about.

The ‘About Me’ section is where you can provide a summary about yourself and describe what you’re looking for in your own words.

4- Get visual

Have you won awards, or gotten impressive degrees or certifications?

Post photos of them on your profile, rather than simply listing them in text. If you’ve given a well-received presentation, post it on SlideShare (which LinkedIn owns) and add it to your LinkedIn profile. If you’ve appeared in or produced an interesting video, post that to your LinkedIn profile, too.

5- Have a relevant and optimized headline

Your headline is the first thing that people see, and the first thing that recruiters get when they screen through the search results, so you want to have a headline that catches people’s attention.

Start with including the title that you are targeting or in. Use relevant keywords in your area. Highlight an impact statement to help people really understand your unique differentiator.

For example:

JOHN SUAREZ

CDO | CTO | CIO | Digital, Data & Business Transformation Executive | Powering solutions that enable billions in revenue.

Keep in mind, there is also a character limit, but there’s a way that you can get around this. This is to update your headline in the LinkedIn mobile app that currently doesn’t have any character limit.

You can also use your Elevator Pitch for this.

Refer back to my Elevator pitch challenge, to help you create a catchy and professional one.

https://englishpriority.newzenler.com/courses/catchy-and-professional-elevator-pitch

6- Make yourself accessible

One common mistake on LinkedIn is not making it clear how others can reach you via email or phone. 

Remember that LinkedIn limits the number of InMails its paid users can send and doesn’t allow members of its free service to send InMails at all. That’s why it’s important to list your email address and phone number prominently in your profile, such as in your summary.

So… what are your next steps to boost your LinkedIn profile?

Related Articles:

LinkedIn profile in English https://www.englishpriority.com/linkedin-profile-in-english/

How to Adapt Your Resume to the Job Description https://www.englishpriority.com/how-to-adapt-your-resume-to-the-job-description/

5 Secrets to Making an ATS-Friendly Resume https://www.englishpriority.com/5-secrets-to-making-an-ats-friendly-resume/

Want to practice even more?…