Tips to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is one of the most used professional platforms. People use it to find jobs, share professional posts, and network with other professionals in the field. Your public LinkedIn profile is your brand and image. Improving it will give you more opportunities and credibility. Recruiters spend the majority of their time hunting for candidates on LinkedIn. People are continuously looking to increase their business network via LinkedIn. Having an updated and well-organized profile will work like a magnet as it will make it easier for people to find you.

In this post, I will be sharing with you the tips, learned from recruiters and online, that will make your LinkedIn profile stands out.

Cover Photo

The cover photo makes the header of your LinkedIn profile. While many use generic pictures, you would stand out if you customize yours. Canva offers the possibility to pick a cover photo and customize it with your initials, contacts, brand, or your favorite quote as you might see fit.

Profile Picture

The LinkedIn profile picture is not of your Instagram fun selfies. A professional picture with a monochromatic background is preferred. Your profile picture should be a clear picture of you in which you look approachable and professional. A picture of your pet might be a winner on tinder or Instagram but definitely not on LinkedIn.

Title

As a title, many use their job title at the company name, such as Manager at BMW. There is nothing wrong with this title, but it doesn’t make you unique. It would be better if you write your field of expertise and some key skills or a personalized short sentence. For example, let’s say you are a fashion blogger. Your title might be something like Fashion blogger| SEO Expert| All you need to know about the latest trends.

The “Talk about” hashtags after the title are a very interesting way to highlight your interest and expertise. LinkedIn will allow you to use 5 hashtags. To include those hashtags, you need to go to your Profile —-> Scroll to Resources —-> Turn on creator mode —-> Add the hashtags under Topics—-> Save. Staying with the same example of the Fashion Blogger, she might write under the topics section: Blogging, Fashion, Styling, SEO, and Online Marketing.

About

This is one of the most important sections in your whole profile. Visitors might not spend time reading everything in your experience section but they would definitely scan your summary. Before writing this section, It is important to have clarity about our career progression. What field and roles are you interested in? Once you identify this, look for 10 to 20 job posting that matches your career progression. Copy and paste all of them into a free word cloud generator such as Monkeylearn. This will allow you to identify keywords relevant to your field. Those keywords will drive and hook recruiters to your profile as they use them in their search tool.

Your about section should include:

Your title, years of experience, and field of expertise
Summarise your role in one sentence and quantify your achievement.
Give 3 case examples of how your skills made an impact (optional to give a better understanding for the reader)
Your career interest and vision. In which direction do you like your career path to grow and how do you like to utilize your skills
Personal interests such as food, sports, and reading…. to give it a humanistic touch

Experience

LinkedIn is expected to be more elaborate than a CV. In this section, you can discuss more in length about your achievements and projects. You can talk about your training, day to day activities. When impact is mentioned, it is important to quantify it. In addition, you can share some pictures, portfolios, or none confidential reports. Try to stay concise and on point as people don’t like to read a long block of words.

Skills

Your list of skills should match your career path. Remember the keyword found in the about section. Those keywords are a set of soft and hard skills. All those skills should be included in the skills section. In order to emphasize those skills, you can ask your friends and family to endorse you. The weight of professional endorsements within the field is higher than the ones coming from your inner circle.

Interests

Few people pay attention to those details but your profile tells a lot about you. The influencers, companies, and groups, you follow tell about your interest and your work ideology. You can tell if the person likes a corporate or flat environment or maybe the industries of interest.

Recommended Source

Jeff Su YouTube channel and LinkedIn Tips videos