The Ultimate LinkedIn Profile Guide

Why do I need a LinkedIn Profile? To provide an overview of your skills, qualifications, and experiences to inspire a hiring manager to schedule an interview and learn more.

Almost 90% of Recruiters spend their day sourcing candidates on LinkedIn — in order to optimize their time, they search for candidates using keywords. The more closely your profile showcases your skills and interests and includes buzzworthy keywords in your field, the more likely you are to be viewed by a recruiter hiring for your next opportunity.

How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

Intro

Let’s take it from the top. The first section of your LinkedIn profile provides connections with quick hits about you. It’s important to make these basic pieces of information easy to read, understand, and accurate. Sections like your name, pronouns, and location probably won’t take much thought. But make sure to pay special attention to your profile picture and your headline.

Experience

When filling out the experience section, include more than just your job title, company name, and years of experience for each position you’ve had. This is where you can showcase your experience in snippets without going into as much detail as your resume would. 

This section should be ripe with keywords that Recruiters will be searching for when sourcing in your field of work. And remember, your LinkedIn profile has the capability to house every job you’ve ever had, but when it comes to your resume, we need to be intentional. Your resume should only include the roles that are relevant to the job you’re applying for. But remember, you should always keep a master Resume of all of your experience.

Education

In today’s world, a college degree is required even for some of the most entry-level positions. Include your university, years of attendance, and even some of the classes you took. Again, when recruiters are searching on LinkedIn for quality candidates, these words will pick up for them. (Any learning-based Boot Camps should be listed here, too!)

Skills

This section is designed to showcase your skills, so don’t hold back. Add as many skills that pertain to your career up to the 50 skill limit set by the platform. Remember, only list skills that you truly have.

The Extras

If you’re looking for a job, notify your network and recruiters by turning on the “open to finding a new job” feature. When you select this, you have the option to choose who sees it: your entire network, or only people using a LinkedIn Recruiter profile. If you’re still working and searching for a new job, you may want to keep it just people with a LinkedIn Recruiter profile, but it’s completely up to you.

For those of you who are bilingual, this is a great place to add any additional languages you have beyond your native language.

LinkedIn has professional groups for every kind of professional. You can request to join a group you’re interested in, make new connections, learn new things, and network!

Three people get hired via LinkedIn every minute. That’s an insane stat when you think about the number of profiles out there compared to the number of professional head hunters. That means your profile needs to be in tip-top shape and updated regularly. Luckily, we’ve even created a checklist in our guide to help you stay on track and get noticed.