Assume for a moment the brand of you is a shop, LinkedIn is your shop window. It is there to provide key pieces of information, well displayed so the reader can quickly establish who you are, what value you offer and is motivated to learn more. It is possible to optimise your profile by putting effort into the following areas:
- Photo
Have a current, professional-looking photo which reflects your brand. Ideally, get it taken professionally which is affordable. If this is outside of the budget then take one yourself ensuring plain background, business attire, headshot only.
- Headline
LinkedIn will automatically pull your current job title as your headline. Overwrite this with your value proposition i.e. how you leverage your skills of X for the benefit of Y. It should capture the attention of the reader with the goal of keeping their interest, so they read more.
- Summary
Your profile summary is like a professional bio. It should give the reader a sense of your qualifications, work experience including the industries you have worked in, skills you have acquired and personal characteristics such as ‘strong work ethic’ or ‘attention to detail’ that are relevant to work. Keep the language concise and the content high level – enough to provide an overview of your career and you without the detail.
- Work experience, multimedia
List your work experience in reverse chronological order. Do not list your responsibilities write what you achieved in each role, this helps readers to assess the type of value you bring to organisations and them assess your relevancy to their needs. It is even better if you can evidence your achievements by uploading multimedia files of presentations, videos, or other content which is supportive.
- Recommendations, skills and endorsements
There are mixed views how important recommendations really are. Some recruiters do not rate them, and others use them to validate or verify claims in the CV. If you are asking for a recommendation, its important it states what
specifically was worthy of mention. For example; ‘John was a pleasure to work with’ is too generic ‘John’s attention to detail and consistent work ethic drove team performance’ tells much more about why the writer was motivated to write a recommendation.
Skills and endorsements are useful to establish and curate to ensure they reflect your current brand and career ambitions. Recruiters use these to search for possible candidates and evidence shows you will rank higher in search results if you have a greater number of endorsements for the skill the recruiter is seeking. Think about them as keywords and if your list is out of date enter ‘edit’ mode on your profile and a short video will show you how to optimise this feature to reflect your current skillset and serve you better.