19 Mar Your Linkedin profile – how to stand out.
I look at a lot of linkedin profiles every day. The profiles that instantly stand out have a well thought out “ About” section”. They are professionally written with a personal touch and above all, not in the third person.
The purpose of your linkedin profile is so you can be found and presented with opportunities that match your background, skills and experience. For this to happen it is necessary to include keywords in your profile. Keywords are the skills and expertise you gained throughout your career. Rather than have a long thread of keywords in your job summary, place them in the “skill” section. Linkedin allows you to list up to 50 keywords and that’s the place to put them.
If you’re in sales and your track record is strong then you really are doing yourself a disservice if you are not showcasing this.
After keywords the next thing to address is your headline which appears in the search results. This is usually your job title and for most people very straightforward to do,
COO at ________
Service Desk Analyst at ________
Where it becomes a little more ambiguous is if you have a nondescript title like:
Consultant at _________
Director at _________
If this is the case then you need to provide more information.
For example
Consultant, Change & Transformation at __________
Director, Life Sciences at ___________.
Customise your public profile URL. While this isn’t as important as any of the above steps you can quite easily customise the Url which looks so much better on your resume or email signature.
It should look like: www.linkedin.com/in/yourname
Here’s how to do it: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/87/customize-your-public-profile-url?lang=en
Personally I don’t pay any attention to Linkedin recommendations and I say that as someone who’s asked for them in the past.
It’s important to try to keep your profile updated. If you put aside a few minutes to do this once or twice a year then you will certainty reap the rewards.