Optimizing your LinkedIn profile has become more popular than ever. A lot of young professionals are taking advantage of it to showcase their skills and talent to millions of employers and recruiters. The platform has over 810 million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. In the past, LinkedIn was primarily used as an online resume. But over the years, LinkedIn has moved past the online resume platform and expanded to help people build a professional network and improve their brand.
LinkedIn is a social media platform that allows you to share your experience, skills, and qualifications with future employers. The platform is not something you can ignore if you want job offers, professional connections, and growth.
So keeping your LinkedIn profile optimized and up to date could allow a new job opportunity to come right to you and help potential clients or people with other professional opportunities find you.
In this article, we are going to discuss how to make your LinkedIn profile attractive to recruiters
How Do Recruiters Search for Employees on Linkedin?
I will give you an analogy of the Google search engine to explain how recruiters search for potential hires. On Google, let’s say you type in “best android phones in 2022” or “best restaurant in Beverly Hills” and you’re going to probably yield hundreds of results. However, chances are you’re probably only interested in the first page and the second page. Very rarely do you go beyond that, right? You just want to know the look at the website that ranks highest on the search result page.
This is what happens when recruiters type in specific keywords they are interested in and the result pops out. So Linkedin is like a search engine and when recruiters type in your skillsets like “social media marketer” and your city, there is a chance that you will rank on the first couple of pages. If you are not ranking, it means your profile is not well optimized and up to date.
Recruiters are typing in keywords and searching for people with specific skill sets to hire for a particular job or offer. So if you’re not getting any notifications from recruiters, there are ways to optimize your profile so that you can rank higher in the search results.
We’re going to dive into how to optimize your LinkedIn profile for your job search.
How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
1. Choose a professional profile picture.
Research shows that having a picture makes your profile 14 times more likely to be viewed by others. Your profile picture is what employers will see first. And it’s a great opportunity to make a strong first impression. When taking your picture, wear something corporate and professional. Find a neutral background and take pictures in a bright place. A simple, clear photo that frames your face is enough. Think passport photo.
2. Write A Professional Headline
This is one of the most visible portions of your profile, located right below your professional headshot. The headline is your chance to tell the recruiter about who you are and what you’re looking for. This section gives your audience a straightforward and clear impression of what you do and where you do it at. If you are passionate about networking and building a unique personal brand, you have to be creative and descriptive with your profile headline. The logic behind writing a catchy headline is by including relevant keywords in it.
For example, you could write something like this “Fresh graduate with a marketing internship with Sparkconect, seeking an entry-level position in digital marketing.”
The point of your headline is to ensure you put the best type of keywords in your headline. So when someone is searching for someone in your industry, you will pop up in the LinkedIn results.
3. Write a Professional Summary
Write a short, but creative and attention-grabbing summary to demonstrate your personality and how well you understand the field you want to work in. In this section, you have to describe who you are, what you do, and what makes you remarkable to potential recruiters. Here, you have 2,000 characters to tell your story and sell yourself out to potential clients. Utilize keywords and update as often as you need to ensure relevancy and accuracy. The tip here is to impress your client with your opening paragraph because only the first 265-275 characters will show before someone will have to click “See More” for the rest of your summary content.
4. Background and Experience
This is one of the most important parts of your LinkedIn profile. This is where you get to talk about your experience, achievements, and experience. Note that you don’t add every previous job if you have a long work history. It is best to focus on the best achievements related to your career. The goal here is to update consistently. Anytime you complete a new project or achieved something related to your industry make sure you showcase it.
5 Showcase your Skills and certifications
Skills are very important as it attracts employers to your profile. When adding skills, make sure that they are relevant to the industry you are seeking a job opportunity. You can also get some of your connections to endorse your listed skills, attesting to your competency.
Certifications are also very important as they showcase your achievements in a training, workshop, or course. Listing certifications can increase your marketability to recruiters and reinforces your drive to develop professionally continuously.
6. Customized URL
A unique and customized LinkedIn profile is better and easy to share unlike the random numbers and
alphabet assigned to your profile by LinkedIn. A rule of thumb is to include both your first and last name.
in your profile URL. Make it short and unique to make it easier to remember and share. This makes it
easier for recruiters to find you, and increase your visibility. Having a customized URL for your profile
increase the probability of appearance in search result with keywords of your name.
7. Education
Research shows that most employees emphasize real-life work experience over an educational background. However, this should not discourage you from listing it in your LinkedIn profile. Listing your educational background enables a connection between people from the same niche or network. When adding your education, it is important to include all the activities, clubs, and organizations you are part of to show your involvement in extracurricular activities. Leadership positions are highly valuable to recruiters. Include any leadership position you took, sports involvement, and other valuable roles.
Some General Tips for Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile
Apart from the main important part of the LinkedIn profile, there are still some additional tips you can add to make your LinkedIn profile attractive to recruiters.
1. Activate the #OpenToWork feature.
This feature was launched by Linkedin to improve the experience of both job seekers and employers. As a job seeker, you can leverage this feature to show the recruiters and your entire network that you are looking for a job change and seeking employment. Research shows that the #OpenToWork profile frame increases the chances of a job seeker receiving relevant recruitment invitations by 40%.
2. Make your profile public
Making your profile public increases your chance of getting hired and also makes your profile visible to those that are not part of your network. So when recruiters type in relevant keywords, they will be able to see your profile.
3. Stay active on Linkedin
Like other social media platforms, engagement is very important if you want to remain relevant. Linkedin is the same. The more you engage with people on LinkedIn, the more people get to notice you. You can stay active on LinkedIn by posting regularly on LinkedIn. There is a space where you can write about relevant topics in form of a blog post. You can also share relevant posts from your blog and social media pages. Also, comment and like other people’s posts. You can even join professional groups that are relevant to your industry. Doing this will add more followers to your network and also attract recruiters to your profile.
4. Get the Linkedin Mobile App
One advantage of the Linkedin mobile app is that it gives you an additional 80 characters to use in your headline section. So instead of the normal headline limit, the app gives you an additional 80 characters to use.
How To Use Keywords to Optimize your Linkedin Profile
Linkedin keywords have become very important in the context of job searches on LinkedIn. Keywords are words that recruiters type in to search for potential employees. They act as a signpost that tells the potential recruiters about who you are and what your talent is.
For example, if you work in the marketing department, some of the common keywords that would describe your profession would be:
- social media marketer
- Content marketer
- Digital marketer
- Social media manager
- Inbound marketer
- Email marketer
So when recruiters type in these keywords, they might come across your profile and understand your skillset. But to get recruiters to see your profile, you have to use these keywords in various sections of your profile like the headline, summary, experience, and other relevant places.
How To Find The Right Linkedin Keywords
Now that you have a better understanding of LinkedIn keywords and their importance in optimizing your LinkedIn profile, let’s talk about ways to find the right one for you.
Job seekers can head to LinkedIn’s skills tool to get keyword suggestions. Alternatively, head to the LinkedIn job board and run a standard job search as if you are looking for a role. Make sure that you filter your search by location, entry-level, and any other factors that you would like to consider. Ideally, you want to find 3 relative matches to your target position for keyword sourcing. Once you have at least 3 job positions, now you can source keywords.
Linkedin keywords are unique to each industry and will be different for everyone. The easiest way to figure out your unique keywords is to use a software program such as wordle or word cloud.
To do this, find about 3-10 job positions that you are interested in. Then copy and paste or upload all of these job titles into the “Type/Paste” section of the word cloud, then hit enter and get your results. After you have gotten your result, you can take the top 3 keywords from your cloud and put them in your Linkedin profile headline. You can also use the top 5 and sprinkle them throughout your about section. You can also use some of these keywords in your experience sections.
Conclusion
Linkedin is more than social media platform, it is a professional networking platform that helps connect professionals and like-minded members across various industries. With Linkedin, millions of people can get recognized and hired for their talent without having to submit CVs to various organizations. One of the most significant advantages LinkedIn offers is serving as a platform where job seekers can research their target industry and companies that they aim to belong to.
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