Getting your LinkedIn profile market-ready

The power of a strong LinkedIn profile cannot be underestimated.

Think of your LinkedIn profile as your online CV. A lot of the time, the first place recruiters look is on your LinkedIn page so it pays to give your LinkedIn a little bit of love to make the best first impression in the market. And we're not just talking simply having a profile, a complete and optimised LinkedIn profile makes you way more likely to appear in front of prospective employers. So here's some tips on how to make your LinkedIn profile market-ready.

Look the part

First things first, let's look at your profile picture. LinkedIn profiles with photos get 21x more impressions and 9x more connections than those without, so having one is a competitive advantage in itself. This photo of you should be recent, high quality, and professional looking.  This doesn't have to be a professional-grade photo, a selfie on your phone is often enough these days, as long as your background isn't too busy and the picture quality is good.

It's also worth thinking about the industry you're in or the types of roles you are looking for. Start-ups may be more open to relaxed attire so won't mind a profile picture in more relaxed clothes, but a traditional corporate job where you will be wearing smart clothes will want to see a candidate in this in their profile. Make sure your profile picture is fit for who you want to see it.

Keep key information clear

When recruiters or hiring managers visit your profile, they're often doing this as a scoping exercise to make sure you're a right fit for the role - so make this nice and easy for them! 

Your headline is a great place to start to get across your experience, expertise, and what you can bring to the table. Gone are the days where your headline is just your job title. You're able to customise this to say anything you'd like, so we often recommend a concise sentence on what you do, or if you're openly looking for a role you can put something in there about that.

About section

As we move down your profile, the next section to fill in is all about you! This should be a short summary of your career to date, with some key achievements and skills that someone looking to hire you would be interested in.  This should also sound authentic to you. A great way to do this is to write it in the first person and then read it aloud. If it sounds like something you would say, then you've done a good job.

Formatting wise,  an easy to read structure will help any visitors to digest the key points you want to get across. Hiring managers reviewing LinkedIn profiles can often be scanning through them initially to find headline information, so making sure your 'about' section is clear and easily readable will help the important information stand out. We'd recommend making use of white space (so no long paragraphs) and bullet points where possible to separate out key information.

Experience

This part more than any other should be treated almost identically to your CV (with a couple of tweaks of course). You should be drilling down into career specifics here, and we'd recommend to cover your whole career but put more weight into the most recent and most relevant roles.

For the format, starting with a few sentences summarising the role gives a good overview for any readers. This is particularly important if you have a non-standard job title or one that's open to interpretation. Following this up with bullet points gives you scope to dive into key areas of responsibility, as well as the option to showcase some of your top achievements in the position. Bigging yourself up is good here! Even better if you have tangible data or stats to back up your achievements in a role.

Education

If you have achieved any qualifications, don't just put down the institution and the course. Make sure to use the description section given to describe what you learned throughout these courses, highlighting anything most relevant to the career you are going towards. This point is particularly important for recent graduates as it can help to complement what is likely to be a more limited experience section.

If you're in a technical role it also pays to include specific qualifications or certifications in this section, as employers may be looking for you to have a specific skillset. Having it clearly listed on your profile means they won't need to go searching for that information. 

Make yourself findable

All of this hard work will be for nothing if people aren't able to find your profile. Using keywords throughout all the previous sections we've gone through is one of the best ways to be found by recruiters and hiring managers. Think of around 10 keywords where you'd like to be found when people search them, and repeat them throughout your profile as often as possible. When you're deciding what these key words are, think about your experience and skills, as well as what people would likely to be searching to find someone with a background like yours. Then scatter them throughout your profile.

The more complete your profile is will also improve your findability. When editing your profile, LinkedIn have a handy tool that walks you through any missing sections. We'd recommend you give this a go to give your profile the best chance of being found.

You can also personalise your URL, which is something not all LinkedIn users are aware of. Once again, putting key words in this URL will improve your chances of appearing when users search for these terms.

Recommendations

Recommendations can be given by current or previous colleagues, tutors, or even course mates and they appear towards the bottom of your profile. These are basically like references on your CV and they can be a powerful tool to help back up any of your listed skills. So don't be afraid to ask for recommendations from people (and offer to return the favour!)

The 'Open to Work' debate

And finally, we couldn't talk about LinkedIn advice without mentioning the 'open to work' banner. LinkedIn gives you the option of putting this around your profile picture that makes it clear to anyone that finds your profile that you are willing to discuss new opportunities. There is a bit of a debate around whether you should do this or not. As recruiters we say why not?

You can have an open to work status public for everyone to see, which can often help with referrals and making new connections. Or you can set it to private so only those with recruiter accounts will see that you are open to work. LinkedIn research has found that this feature - even when set on private - can increase your approach rate by 40%.

Ultimately there's no one-size-fits all approach to curating a strong LinkedIn profile.

After all, it's personal to you. But by following a logical structure and making sure to include as much detail as possible on there, you can be sure your profile is putting your best foot forward in the market.

All this talk of 'open to work' got you thinking about a new role? Check out our live vacancies here: https://www.fmctalent.com/find-job