Boost Your Personal Brand (Part 3 of 3: LinkedIn Profile)

Welcome to Part 3! 🙌🏼 As a reminder, your personal brand will make or break you in your job search. It’s so important to ensure that you are utilizing every opportunity to tell your own authentic story consistently and effectively. Recruiters and companies actually really do want to get to know you and determine whether or not you’d be a good fit culturally and technically for the role. You should want that too! The tips below will help you boost your LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an extremely powerful tool for you during your job search. It not only serves as a job board, but it’s a social hub for you to engage with recruiters and other peers in the industry. If a recruiter is interested in you, then there’s an 80% chance they will check out your LinkedIn profile, so it’s important to keep it updated! With that said, this post will cover a checklist of 10 steps to optimize your LinkedIn profile for the best results!

1. Set your open to work setting as "ON" for recruiters

2. Headshot - A clean, clear headshot is important because it’s often someone’s first impression of you before they actually meet you, so you want to make sure that your picture is friendly and inviting. If you don’t have a professional headshot then no worries. Take a picture with a smartphone using portrait mode with a business casual/professional top against a clean background. You can do this yourself using a tripod or propping up the phone or asking a friend to help out. The headshot should be from your shoulders and up with open space above your head. It can be taken outside and/or in casual clothes, just please make sure the background isn’t too distracting or that your clothes are inappropriate.

3. Headline - Include your desired job title

4. Bio - Brief overview of past experience/career goals

5. Links - Add your portfolio or personal site

6. Past Jobs - Add descriptions from your resume

7. Education - Add relevant coursework & key words

8. Certifications/Volunteering - Add all experience

9. Skills - List a minimum of 20 skills

10. Recommendations - Write & request from others

If you completed the previous resume exercises then it should be a breeze for you to update your LinkedIn profile. It’s also worth mentioning that recruiters have a different view of LinkedIn than we do, so completing these steps will increase the chances that your profile is organically recommended to them.

Read Part 1 of this personal branding series for additional tips on resumes and Part 2 for tips on portfolios!