If you’re serious about looking for a job in 2024, you’ve got to have an accomplished (convincing) LinkedIn profile. Not only is it the single largest social media platform for job search (for example, Over 80% of recruiters leverage LinkedIn on a regular basis), but the latest stats also show that 75% of all successful job seekers (that’s three out of every 4 newly hired candidates) attribute their success to LinkedIn. And this figure is only going to grow each year.
In this post, I’m going to teach you 5 strategies to optimize your LinkedIn specifically for job search. This will result in you showing up more often in relevant searches and attracting more employers and recruiters to view your profile.
Lastly, my final point will be the most valuable tip, so make sure you read until the end.
Let’s go!
Complete your profile
Our primary goal when optimizing Linkedin for job search is to make our profile as noticeable as possible by recruiters or employers. And not just to be noticed but also to convince the employer that you have what it takes to add value and help the company.
And that is the reason why you need to build a complete profile which contains all the relevant information people want to see.
The more complete your profile is, the more recruiters and employers will feel like they know you and that you’re serious about your search. As a result, they will be more motivated or assured to reach out.
And here are the main items for your LinkedIn profile that you must have.
Number 1: The Profile pic
To create a complete linkedin profile, the first thing you must have is your profile photo. And it’s not just any photo but a professional one that communicates the right kind of impression you want to leave.
I will talk more about LinkedIn photos later in the video.
Headline
The second thing is your headline. Your headline is arguably the most crucial part of your profile and it needs to absolutely communicate your value without confusion and capture the reader’s attention.
We will get into it in more detail later too.
Banner
Next one is the LinkedIn banner. A banner plays an important part of your profile’s visual presentation.
And there are a ton of ideas for a banner, and to be honest, anything that looks professional and is related to you or your work is good enough.
The point is not to make it perfect. Rather, it is to have our own image instead of leaving it blank so that it looks like you have a complete presence on LinkedIn and that you’re an active
The “About” Section
“The about section” is like your resume professional Summary containing the most interesting and relevant details about you. The difference is that on LinkedIn, you have more room for creativity.
For example, you can use this section to make a professional introduction about yourself, tell the story of your career, share your greatest strengths, or explain how you can add value.
But if you can’t think of anything or don’t have much time, don’t worry about it. You can always just copy and paste your resume summary here too.
Work Experience
And, of course, we must have a convincing work experience section, if we want to use LinkedIn as a job search tool. We will discuss this further later in the video.
“Open to work” status
And lastly, the “open to work” status. Make sure to turn this option on. Many recruiters look for profiles based on this criteria, and with the correct setting, it should only be visible to recruiters with a paid recruiter license who are not at your current employer – as a safety measure.
2. Profile pic
As mentioned earlier, you’ve got to have a professional-looking photo if you want to be taken seriously.
Think about what kind of first impression you want people to have of you.
Do you want to come across as friendly and approachable? Confident and competent? Well, your photo will communicate these things or the lack of them.
Remember, your profile picture is not just your first impression. Most of the time, it will be your ONLY impression!
The best option would be a professional photo taken at a studio. But if that’s not feasible , you can use your phone too. Just make sure your face is clearly visible and of the right size (taking up at least half of the canvas), and that the photo is on focus and has a big enough resolution.
3. Headline
Your profile photo and headline are the only info that employers or recruiters can see when they search for profiles. Which means they HAVE to be optimized to capture the viewers’ attention.
Let me get this out of the way: “Looking for a job” or “Open to work” are not the kind of headlines that attract employers because they neither make you stand out nor sell your value.
If you want to indicate that you’re active in the market, you already have an option to turn on the “Open to Work” status as I explained earlier which is precisely designed for this purpose.
Instead, your headline needs to achieve two goals. First, it needs to clearly state who you are or what you do, and second, it needs to lay out the value that you bring.
To clearly state what you do, include a job title in the headline that is both easy to understand and obvious to everyone , so that recruiters and employers can immediately tell if your profile is relevant.
You don’t want people wondering or being confused about your Chances are, if they don’t understand it they will simply move on to the next profile without giving it any further thought.
Also, make sure that you include alternatives names for your job title so that you will increase the likelihood of your profile showing up during the search. For example, if your title is a financial controller, you would want to also include terms such as CFO, or head of accounting, again so that your profile will show up even when searched using the alternative titles.
For the 2nd goal of communicating your value, you can do so through a number of ways such as explaining what problems you solve, how you make someone’s life better, your expertise, qualification, and/or skill set - basically your selling points.
Examples of value statements are:
(for a regional program manager) I help multinational firms deliver critical, large-scale regional programs (over USD 10M dollars) with a tight deadline and budget.
(for a marketing or digital manager) I help local retail firms implement data-driven and demonstrable marketing strategies from scratch.
(for a translator) Expertise in formal business language translation between Japanese and English
(for a global health professional) Expertise in securing investor funding for health research programs
Or you can include qualifications such as CPA, CFA, CCIE if they are relevant to the jobs you’re targeting.
4. Work experience
When it comes to work experience on LinkedIn, you want to make it a bit shorter than the counterpart on the resume. Otherwise, the LinkedIn profile may become too long orless effective in capturing attention.
As similar as it may be, LinkedIn is not a resume and its primary purpose is to provide an overview of your professional story, not to duplicate every detail on a CV.
Choose one or two of the most relevant or impactful details for each section of your work experience.
Another tip, which is just as applicable on a resume, is to use strong action verbs. Starting the work experience sentence with strong action verbs makes your experience look more impressive and tend to make you come across as more confident, competent, and attractive.
A short list of strong action verb examples include: achieved, completed, initiated, increased, improved, launched, Resolved, Spearheaded, transformed, etc.
5. (Incorporate) Keywords
This tip is super simple to implement but could drastically increase the likelihood of hearing from recruiters and employers. And that is: incorporating keywords from JDs of the jobs that you’re interested in!
What you wanna do is look for 5-10 JDs of the type of roles you’re targeting for your next move, identify the main responsibilities and skillset (or the main points), and then include the keywords everywhere on your profile including your headline, summary, and work experience.
This will help your profile to show up on searches more often and present itself as significantly more relevant for the type of roles that you want to apply.
The easiest way to do this is using an online word cloud generator. For those of you who do not know what a word cloud is, it’s a tool that visually indicates the most frequently used words in a document.
Do a quick search on the internet and you will find many free word cloud generators such as wordclouds.com or worditout.com.
Simply paste your 5-10 JDs into a word cloud generator and it will give you the most commonly used words from them, which you can then mention everywhere in your profile.
And try to plaster them all over your profile as much as it would make sense. You will thank me later.