LinkedIn User Growth over Time
Take a look at the chart above. There has been an incredible growth in the number of users of the social network for professionals, LinkedIn. Over the past five years, the user base has grown from around 30 million to over 300 million users, and shows no sign of slowing down. What does this mean for us professional minded folks, looking for ways to advance our careers? This means that LinkedIn is already an incredibly important tool – if we know how to use it the right way.
According to the career website Jobvite, some 93% of hiring managers search LinkedIn for recruits, 65% search Facebook, and 55% consult Twitter accounts. In the modern era, if you don’t have an effective LinkedIn account, you are losing a great opportunity to make a strong all important first impression.
So how do you get your profile into shape? We’ve distilled what we feel are the most important pieces of advice into the following list:
1. Make Your Profile Public
This seems like common sense, but you would be surprised how many profiles are set to private on LinkedIn. If you are actively seeking new opportunities in your career, and your profile is set to private, you may as well not even have one to begin with. Even if you are not seeking anything, setting your profile to public makes it easier for your colleagues to find you – which has additional benefits that we’ll mention later.
2. Choose a Great Photo
First and foremost, make sure you have a profile picture. There is a 40% increase in clicks on profiles that have a photo versus ones that don’t. So, make sure you have one.
Your profile picture should be a reflection of the opportunities you are looking for. Want to work in a tech startup? Dress neatly, but leave the suit at home. Financial Services? Business professional. If all else fails, business casual is always a safe play.
Due to the way that LinkedIn thumbnails pictures, you want a clean headshot only of your head, neck, and a bit of your shoulders. No photos where you had to crop out a friend, no fun picture from your latest beach vacation (you may laugh, but we’ve seen all of these).
3. Craft an Engaging Headline
When people use LinkedIn search, the results only show Name, Picture, Headline, Title, and Location. The only thing other than your picture that you can actively control is the headline. It can make the difference between being yet another passed over search result, or being the page that the recruiter views.
Use your headline to advertise what you are looking for. For example: “2016 BA Marketing Candidate | Aspiring Brand Manager” is better than “XYZ University, Marketing Major.” One lets you clearly know what they want to do next, which is exactly what recruiters are hoping to learn from LinkedIn profiles.
4. Create a Custom URL
This bit of advice is much more stylistic in nature, but creates a professional touch. Follow this link to find out how to create your own custom URL for your profile.
linkedin.com/in/JohnDoe looks a lot better than linkedin.com/in/kd830sxjlcj
This also creates a clean URL that you can put in an email signature, business card, or your other social media pages!
5. Don’t Waste the Best Space
The summary section grants you 2000 characters to convey your story, who you are, and what you are looking for out of your career. This space is also entirely searchable, which means that any keywords that recruiters search for can be picked up from the summary section. More on keywords up next.
The summary space is arguably the most valuable real estate on your entire profile. Everything else is resume/biographical information. In the summary you can completely customize the message that you are trying to send to people viewing your profile. We recommend that you start with your elevator pitch, and use forward looking statements instead of past tense. Try your best to strike a conversational tone to make things feel more personal, depending on the industry you’re interested in (lawyers and bankers may need to keep things closer to their chest).
If you are looking for a new opportunity, make sure that you emphasize the transferrable skills that you’ve gained from your past experiences – especially those that you struggle to fit into your resume due to space concerns.
6. Use the Right Keywords
Keywords are your friend, use them to your advantage. All throughout your profile, make sure you are using the right terminology for the opportunities you’re interested in. An easy way to do this is to go pull up a job posting from your dream company for the role that you want. Copy all of the text on the job posting that has to do with job expectations, responsibilities, etc, and paste them into http://www.wordle.net/create. This website will create a word cloud of the most important words used in the text you paste in – which you can use as keywords to make sure to use in your LinkedIn profile.
Recruiters often search for profiles based off of the jobs that they are looking to fill. If you are already speaking their language, you’ve gone a long way towards making sure your profile is one that is looked at.
7. Actively Seek Connections
You’ve heard it before. It’s not what you know, but who you know. With respect to LinkedIn this is even more important. Many people will view your profile based off of connections that you have in common. It is good practice to view the “Suggested Connections” regularly to make sure that you are connected to people that you have actually worked/gone to school with, who can then vouch for you. Only your connections can endorse the skills you list on your profile or write a LinkedIn recommendation for you.
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We hope that you were able to pick up some tips on how to maximize your LinkedIn profile from this post. Whether we like it or not, LinkedIn is becoming one of the first tools that recruiters use to scout talent. Whenever you meet someone in a professional context, they will be looking at your LinkedIn profile. Using the tips above, you can use these facts to your advantage, and create a profile that will help put the best possible representation of yourself out there for the professional world to see.