Recruiters these days harness the power of the internet to search for and attract the best candidates for job roles.
LinkedIn is a powerful platform where candidates ‘congregate’, so it makes sense that recruiters will ‘fish where the fish are’!!’
In order to become a potential candidate and be found, your LI profile needs to stand out. A killer profile needs to highlight your knowledge, skills, accomplishments and potential.
You wouldn’t want a potential employer not to see your full potential so do ensure your profile is completed 100%. This gives you up to a 40% greater chance of being spotted.
Top 10 Tips:
1. Publish a professional-looking photograph of yourself. Just head and shoulders work best. Not you on holiday or at a wedding – just you in your business attire.
2. Your headline should shout out what you do. You only have 120 characters here so make sure it zings! Make it clear, concise and compelling. Think about what words recruiters would use to find candidates and base it around that.
3. Complete your job experience section. You don’t need to write everything going back years but have at least your last 2-3 jobs on there. Write a mixture of what you did and your accomplishments in here.
4. The summary section is crucial – this normally gets read by potential employers. It’s the equivalent of your Professional Profile on your CV. Get lots of key words in there too, so the search engines can find you. Write it in 1st person.
5. Adding volunteer positions and interests shows a lot about you too, so don’t leave this section out. Show them the whole you!
6. Recommendations are worth their weight in gold. Who could endorse your skills/talents/accomplishments? About three would be a good number to start with.
7. Contact details – I highly recommend you customise your LI URL. The one they generically give you will not have much meaning and may well look like a series of numbers. Click on the pencil icon and see if you can get just your name. This URL will then be useful added to your CV (as a clickable link) and possibly your business/contact cards too.
8. If it’s useful to your target audience, you can also list your website address (if you have one) and social media links. But don’t add them if not relevant. Don’t detract from your core ‘personal brand’.
9. Tenses. I recommend you write your CV in 3rd person and your LI profile in 1st person. This makes you more personable. Current work duties/accomplishments should be written in current tense and past ones written in past tense (psychologically this makes the recruiter feel you have that experience already under your belt, rather than currently just learning it)!
10. Personal Branding – think of yourself as a personal brand. Does this profile reflect you well? Does it encapsulate you perfectly? If this was a sales brochure selling YOU, would it entice someone to want to know more, or buy?
Lastly, to get ‘found’ on LI you need to get visible. So remember to turn your setting from ‘invisible to non-one’ to ‘invisible to everyone’. You can show some bits and not others, but get brave and show everything!