Professional Development Series: Creating a LinkedIn Profile

We have started a new series to provide newbies who are entering the workforce or college this year with some tips on honing professional development and networking skills and creating a brand image and standing out. I can’t stress the importance of having a LinkedIn enough especially for budding entrepreneurs, software engineers, professors, and anyone pursuing a career in the tech/biz world. It opens your way to network with recruiters, hiring managers, professors so you are able to land that job or internship and also allows you to showcase your skills. Some tips on how to create a LinkedIn profile that will stand out and grab the eyes of recruiters and professionals in your field:

Include Content from your Resumé: Use your resume as a guide on how to populate content on your LinkedIn. Fill most of your information from there. When filling out the description of the work positions, experience, try to include quantitative information to show value. If you did something at a job, include why you did it (objective), what were the end results that you delivered and how it helped the company. If you cannot come up with something, refer to the job description to give you some ideas. The key is to always put numbers and always mention how your work improved or benefitted someone or something!

Include a professional headshot as your profile pic: Take your phone and ask someone to take a picture of you. Trust us, it doesn’t require a good photographer or an expensive camera to take a headshot. It is really important to put a profile picture so recruiters can put a face to a name.

Make a custom URL for your account: It is much easier to share your account or link your LinkedIn when you have a custom URL instead of the series of numbers that come in the default version. You can go to the privacy settings and click on a public profile and you should see an option to change your URL.

Populate content on all the sections: Ideally, you would want to fill up all the sections on LinkedIn; for example, experience, education, licenses & certifications, skills, volunteer experience, accomplishments. A resume may not always have space for all of your achievements, but make sure you highlight those on your LinkedIn. Whatever positions, organizations, honors/awards you include, make sure all of them have a short description to give context for anyone going through your resume.

Add other Profiles/ Resume on Featured Section: There’s a section where you are able to add multimedia. Highlight a GitHub profile or attach your resume on there. There is also the option to include attachments like presentations, links in the work section.

Make sure all your settings are on: We recently realized that the option for others to tag me or mention me in the comments was off in my settings so my manager was unable to tag me in the comments. Don’t make the same mistake. You would want to make your profile public so that it is visible on other search engines like Google and people who aren’t logged into LinkedIn can view your profile too. It is up to you whether you want to turn on the settings for others to see your job updates. We like to spend quite a bit of time tweaking certain things on LinkedIn, adding the positions we think are relevant or removing them. We wouldn’t want my connections to be able to see those updates or anniversaries for my positions. But it is up to you! Some people like to have job updates since other people can congratulate them in new positions.

Write a headline that stands out: Headline is the sole way to catch the eyes of recruiters. Write an outstanding yet unique headline that mentions your current job position. Write something that will define who you are and what you do!

Request a recommendation from people who worked with: Be it a professor or a manager, ask them to write you a recommendation highlighting how the work that you did impact their company, business, research, etc. It is a nice addition to your profile.

Last but not the least, make connections: LinkedIn is the social media in the workplace. Use it to your advantage. If you met someone at the career fair, or someone at a tech/ business event, don’t hesitate to connect with them on LinkedIn. These connections will go a long way. You never know who has an open position at their company and would like to hire you. You can search up open positions on LinkedIn and a list of people who are recruiting will show up. Message them saying you’re interested in the position. Sometimes recruiters will also reach out to you. Make sure you show interest in them by responding.

We hope these tips were helpful! We will add to the list if we come across any other ways to make your LinkedIn profile stand out.

Love,