9 Things You Need to "Get Right" on Your LinkedIn Profile Before Looking for New Jobs and Opportunities
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Before you officially publish your summary for everyone to read, be sure to do the following:
Read what you wrote out loud. This helps you catch grammatical errors that your brain automatically corrects when you read them in your head.
Double-check that your first sentence hooks your audience. You can always gather input from another person if you’re not sure.
Does your personality shine through? You want your summary to be professional, but if you’re naturally a witty person, don’t let your summary take that away from you. You don’t need to sound stuffy or pretentious to be professional and engaging.
4. Even if you’re an excellent writer with superb grammatical and spelling skills, it’s always a good idea to check your work by copying and pasting your work into a site such as Grammarly. Even the best mess up sometimes.
If you’re not comfortable writing your summary, hire a professional. This is a prominent aspect of our LinkedIn presence at Linkability.
Investing in a professional who has the experience in writing exceptional summaries that get you seen is worth it.
The skills section on LinkedIn is where you can input a comprehensive list of your professional skills and where your colleagues can endorse these skills.
Adding relevant skills to your LinkedIn section helps with LinkedIn’s recommendation algorithms. However, if you want to turn up in recruiter or client searches, you must choose keywords that demonstrate your abilities.
Hint: Add in your LinkedIn skills in order of relevance.
Having colleagues endorse your skills gives you an extra boost, as it offers validity to those skills and further strengthens your ProfileProfile. LinkedIn allows you to add up to 50, but only the first three show up before expanding the section.
Example strengths include:
Public-Speaking
Analytical Reasoning
Adaptability
Creativity
To add skills and endorsements:
View Profile -> Add to profile -> Click Core -> Scroll down to “Skills & Endorsements” -> Click add new skill
The experience section is the ideal location for using keywords that relate to your industry. More than 90% of recruiters use specific keywords to find qualified candidates, so this is an important step that you don’t want to skip over.
When filling out this section, you will describe your work experience, beginning with your most recent and senior roles.
*Pro-tip: Include experiences that are relevant to your current goals and objectives.
To add your experiences:
View Profile -> Scroll down to “Experience” -> Click the + button
Adding in your education and certifications strengthens your Profile and helps other alumni or professionals with similar credentials find you, further building your network.
Tip: When adding in your academics and certifications, be sure to list your highest qualifications at the top.
To add education and certifications:
View Profile -> Add to profile -> Click Core/Recommended -> Add education and certifications
Customizing your URL only to include your name or business name will help potential recruiters or clients find your ProfileProfile easier. Try to avoid adding symbols and unnecessary letters and numbers.
To customize URL:
View Profile -> Edit public profile & URL
Building a complete LinkedIn profile takes a little bit of time and patience, but it is an integral part of your professional digital footprint. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with the thought of producing a profile that sets you apart from your competitors, let our team of experts at Linkability help you out. We can help you open new doors and finally reach your goals for yourself and your business.
The Moving Forward Newsletter is a bi-weekly advice column by Kim Peterson Stone, the CEO of Linkability.us where we give you a peek behind the curtains into what it takes to put together campaigns that help you grow your business and career on LinkedIn and in Real Life.
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