Did you know that 87% of recruiters use LinkedIn regularly? According to Kinsta data, 122 million people got an interview through LinkedIn and 35.5 million were hired by a person they connected with through this network. If you still do not have a LinkedIn profile or you have not optimized it; you have several ideas to achieve it, develop your brand and find your next job. To improve your LinkedIn profile the first thing you need to know is how recruiters read your profile when they are looking for a candidate for a job opening. So what are the top things recruiters look at first when they come across your profile?
LinkedIn is the number one tool for finding professionals, although not all professionals on LinkedIn are looking for jobs. Source: LinkedIn
Essential elements in your LinkedIn Profile to pay attention to
Summary
The summary is one of the aspects they look at the most. In many profiles, the summary is often very generic and not very eye-catching. This summary should explain who we are as professionals first, the type of position we aspire to, and ideally some detail that gives an idea of your personality. You can think of this part as the elevator pitch for your career. Hook them in the first 30 seconds so they're interested in learning more.
Recent Experience
Human resources managers and headhunters usually review the last one or two experiences of the employee, so you should highlight them, and detail your functions in each position and your achievements. Beyond the last two experiences, it is difficult for them to take the time to look at them if they have not found what they are looking for in your last two and most of the times only the last one. It doesn't mean that your first working experiences are not relevant, you still should list them and explain you did in them. But you should keep in mind that these people may not spend more than a few seconds on your LinkedIn profile, as it is more than likely that they have dozens, or even hundreds more waiting.
Keywords
Keywords in a LinkedIn profile are important in two ways: on the one hand, for recruiters to find the profile based on the keywords using the tools at their disposal; and on the other hand, when they scan through your profile and check for the keywords they are looking for in a few seconds. Knowing this, you should try to highlight them, for example, using bold without overdoing it so recruiters can find them easily.
Skills
The skills section is also a place where recruiters tend to stop. It's also a way for them to filter profiles on the Recruiter tool offered by LinkedIn. Therefore, it is essential that these skills that recruiters are looking for are present on your LinkedIn, otherwise, they will not find you. The reason is simple and is that the LinkedIn Recruiter tool, which almost all of them use, can filter candidates based on keywords or skills as seen in the image below.
So, knowing how they are going to look at your LinkedIn profile, you can already guess what skills you need to take to improve it.
The 3 Key Steps to improve your LinkedIn profile.
1. The headline. Who you are as a professional, not where you work today.
The headline is the phrase you see just below your name on LinkedIn.
There are a multitude of profiles that in this space describe the position held by the person (CEO, responsible for... etc.) and the company. It will always be a personal choice, but if we stop to think about it for a moment, the company we are working for does not explain everything about our professional life, we are professionals regardless of where we are working at a particular time, so the headline should try to reflect this. The company will already be seen in your professional experience.
2. Optimize your summary
We have seen that the summary is one of the most important aspects and the right place to show yourself as a person and as a professional. Take advantage of the summary to talk about yourself (do not use the third person), your professional goals, your skills, what you like about your job and how you can help companies. Do not forget to include in the text in a natural way keywords of your sector for which you can be found. Write your entire Linkedin profile carefully and read it several times to avoid spelling and typographical errors. A mistake gives a bad image of you as a professional.
3. Describe your latest job experience in detail
Your last two professional experiences are the most important for recruiters and employees to understand about you, as we have stated before. It is not enough to include the position you held in the company, talk about the responsibilities you had, the goals you achieved with your team and the skills you developed in each position. Recruiters and people who are going to look at this are looking to understand what your responsibilities were and if they can match them to the profile they are looking for. So instead of just sticking to generic responsibilities, like you could be "social media management," you should talk about "Content creation and execution for Instagram, TikTok and Twitter for company channels. Average engagement of x% and growth of x% in x period". Quantifiable is more tangible. Also, bullet points help to order the experience rather than explain it in a single paragraph.
Conclusion
If you follow these three steps and spend a reasonable amount of time, the result is likely to be an increase in visits to your profile (as more recruiters will find you with their searches) and more people wanting to contact you online. It is an investment of time and energy that will undoubtedly bring its benefits. Extra tip: Renew your LinkedIn at least every 6 months.
Improving your LinkedIn profile will help other professionals get to know you, create synergies, develop your professional brand and find the job you want. Remember: it is not enough to have a Linkedin profile, it is necessary to optimize it and be active on the network to achieve your professional goals.
Contact our expert recruiters if you are in the digital sector. Do not hesitate to send them your doubts regarding your profile on the social network. Also, if you have hiring needs please get in touch with our team here at Prosperity Recruitment, and they'll help you find the best talent around.
