Every day, millions of professionals use LinkedIn to find people. And in today’s market, candidates hold the power in the relationship with their recruiters. In order to manage expectations, recruiters need to change strategies, tools and approaches, to adapt to the power that candidates now hold.
That’s why it’s critical to maintain complete and optimized profiles on LinkedIn. And this benefits your company as well. An optimized profile can improve the visibility of your company and its content in various search results. So with an optimized profile, you and the company could gain the advantage when prospective candidates are searching for services like yours.
Here are five ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile.
Showcase your work. LinkedIn enables users to add media such as videos, images, documents and links to their profiles. With this, you can showcase projects and provide samples of your work. Because imagery adds visual appeal to make your profile stand out, infographics are a great way to display content. Media increases engagement as readers stay longer on your profile and in the process get to know you better and imagine how they can fit into a role you are looking to fill. Stay away from showcasing personal imagery, though; save that for Facebook.
Get endorsed and recommended. LinkedIn enables users to endorse their connections for skills they’ve listed or recommend skills they haven’t yet listed. Spending time listing the skills you want your contacts to endorse will boost your profile’s credibility.
Getting recommendations takes a little more effort but goes a long way. Take the time to personalize a sincere message to your connections requesting endorsements. But make sure the person recommending you can actually attest to your skills and experience.
Use keywords in your headline and summary. The headline is the first thing people see when they go to your profile. Because this headline appears in various places on LinkedIn, make sure it is descriptive. LinkedIn puts a lot of importance on the words used in headlines when ranking people, so make sure it includes keywords that describe your attributes, benefits your company offers, or your geographic location. Add these keywords to various sections of your profile including your summary and include information that the reader can engage with, such as your role in your company, clients you have previously worked with and information on how you can help the candidate.
Maximize your group membership. Joining and participating in relevant groups can improve your profile’s ranking. Because group names appear on your profile, search engines will crawl the titles and learn more about who you are and what you do, in turn pushing you up the search result rankings.
Expand your network. Research has shown that those with more connections gain more visibility. While the person you initially connect with may not seem to be directly relevant to you, remember they will have a large network and many of those within their network could be really useful. The key is to be targeted as possible with your connections, but ensure you connect with a lot of people.
Once your profile is complete, it doesn’t end there. To get the most out of it, you need to be an active user. Publishing content is a great way to get noticed. Your posts could include helpful comments or articles that might be of interest to your connections. LinkedIn is also a great opportunity to stay in touch with contacts and nurture new ones. Endorse and recommend colleagues and ask them to reciprocate. Touch base with friends and acquaintances and forward any articles or info that a contact might find useful.
As with most things in life, the more you put into, the more you will get back.
