If you’re currently looking for a job, it is imperative that:
a) you stop procrastinating and get on LinkedIn right now, if you haven’t already; and…
b) when you do get there, that you optimise your profile fully to make yourself professionally attractive, should a recruiter come looking in your direction.
Here are five ways to optimise your LinkedIn profile for maximum impact:
My 2014 profile picture, courtesy of Miles Willis Photography
1) Have a good profile picture
Your profile picture is one of the most important self-marketing tools you have at your disposal as it lends itself heavily to your “personal brand” (we all have one, whether we’re aware of it or not).
I often get LinkedIn connection requests where I don’t know the person, they haven’t bothered to write their profile properly (see point 3), and worse still, there is no picture on their profile for me to see who they are.
Can you take a guess what I do with these requests? That’s right – request denied!
A profile picture is a great connection tool for building trust (for a start it shows that you’re a real person!), and a good profile picture can say lots of great things on your behalf without you uttering a word.
If you don’t know what a good profile pictures should look like, professional photographer, Miles Willis, has some great guidelines in this guest post.
2) Write your headline strategically
One of the worst things I see on LinkedIn are profiles with “Currently seeking employment” as the heading. No mention of any useful information about the person, no explanation of which industry they’re seeking employment in, just a desperate statement that wastes a valuable opportunity for advertising the individual’s potential talent.
Outside of your profile picture, your headline is the first thing people notice about your profile so it’s important to make sure this is focused and targeted to the industry you want to work in. Feel free to use short separated descriptions instead of full sentences – for example:
“Marketing and Sales Professional | B2B Specialist | Consumer Marketing”
Even if you are currently unemployed and on the lookout for your next role, a better way to communicate this in your headline would be something like this:
“Experienced marketing and sales professional, currently looking for next challenging role within consumer marketing or B2B sales.”
This is clear, specific, and contains strong related keywords that will boost your chances of being discovered by a recruiter in a LinkedIn search.
3) Export the best parts of your CV
The good thing about LinkedIn, if you’re setting up a profile from scratch, is that you can import your CV straight to the site and it will automatically convert it into a ready-made profile for you to use as a starting point.
Assuming that your CV is already good (if it’s not, get a hold of 7 Keys to a Winning CV or check out CV Makeover Expert), this is a great help because from there you can then go on to edit the best bits of your CV into to your profile.
Your LinkedIn profile differs from your CV in that you have much more flexibility to be who you want to be, to a certain extent, on your LinkedIn. By this, I mean you can choose to emphasise one side of your experience and expertise that you wish to continue in and leave out the other parts.
So if we’re continuing with the marketing and sales example above, you can decide that moving forward, you only want to focus on getting a job within marketing and therefore you don’t want to emphasise your sales experience too much.
On your LinkedIn profile, you would then edit your headline accordingly (removing all sales references), write a fittingly descriptive marketing profile summary, and export only details of your marketing work experience (and maybe one or two in sales to avoid a career gap).
4) Get recommendations
Recommendations are a real treasure on LinkedIn – they are the public equivalent of job references and therefore very important for boosting both your profile and credibility.
The best way to get recommendations is to start by connecting with people you’ve worked with in the past or at present, or people you’ve had some kind of professional relationship with (this could be a client if you’ve explored freelancing, or a fellow member of a professional membership organisation you’re part of).
Recommendations are a real treasure on LinkedIn – they are the public equivalent of job references…
Send a nice personalised message asking for them to share a few thoughts on your professional conduct, work accomplishments, character traits and anything else positive they’d like to add.
I really do stress the word personalised here – one of the worst things you can do is use the standard LinkedIn recommendation request template to ask for a recommendation (it’s also not a good idea to use the standard connection request template either for the same reason).
The template is there to provide you with a guideline and hopefully inspire you into crafting something similar in your own words. It is not there for you to lazily click the send button and actually expect the person at the other end to take their time out to grant you a response!
Most people are happy to oblige with recommendations when sent genuine, personalised requests from people they know.
5) Claim your vanity URL
There’s no point having a nicely optimised LinkedIn profile if you can’t share it easily – this is where the so-called ‘vanity URL’ comes in. LinkedIn has kindly made it available for users to change the URL of your profile from the custom automatically-generated lengthy URL to one that is shorter and directs people straight to your profile (it’s fairly quick and easy to do this – just search “change LinkedIn URL” online for widely available tutorials).
Most people use their full name as their vanity URL and I recommend you do the same as it is the most professional approach.
If you have a common first name and surname, it’s likely that someone else would have snapped up your unique URL already so go for the next closest thing like adding a number at the end or a one-word description – example, ‘in/mildredtalabi12’ or ‘in/mildredtalabiauthor’ (luckily I do have a unique first name and surname so my URL is www.linkedin.com/in/mildredtalabi!).
Once you’re in possession of your unique vanity URL, be sure to include it on your CV too to show off your new-found social media savvy.
You’re now well on your way to establishing credibility and building quality connections and relationships that can aid your job search. Remember these things take time, so be patient and stay consistent in your use of LinkedIn and you will reap the rewards eventually.
This blog post is an extract from my upcoming second careers book, Inspired Job Search, due for release summer 2014. If you’d like to get hold of an advance copy prior to the official launch event, drop me an email.
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photo credit: Lotus Carroll via photopin cc