Writing powerful LinkedIn profiles

Turn off the feature that notifies your connections of changes (it defaults to ON) because:

• If the changes are minor and frequent it may annoy people.
• It tells connections in your current organization that you may be job hunting.
  

The masthead is the area at the top that includes your picture.

• Picture: Do you have a professional picture? Good lighting? Professional attire? Appropriate, non-distracting background (e.g., books, blank wall)?
• Headline: The headline default is the last job/current job. Manually change it to position yourself as an expert or for a future potential job. Since these fields are used in automated searches, pack as many of your critical keywords into these fields.
• Custom URL: Claim it and use it for networking and marketing materials. 

• Is the description for each job generic, applying to many types of jobs?
• Or does each job description support the skills you are claiming you have for your target job? Even if a job superficially appears unrelated to your target job, if it’s plausible that you could cultivated your key skills, then talk about that.
• Delete extraneous words that do not support your key skills.

Recommendations are an important sign to readers that what you are claiming you did at a job is possibly true (social validation). You should aim to have at least one recommendation from each significant job. The best ones are from someone who is:

• High ranking (e.g., managerial or executive level).
• A boss, customer or peer is better than a subordinate or supplier. (Since they worked for you, some readers assume these recommenders are biased or coerced.) The minimum to aim for is three recommendations total. Since it takes a while to get people to write recommendations, if you wait until you really need them, then it’s too late.

Having endorsements helps a bit with your LinkedIn search rankings, but I wouldn’t put too much effort into this section because any experienced LinkedIn user knows that the way LinkedIn pushes people to make skill endorsements encourages gratuitous and false endorsements. The one exception I would make is if you decide to move into a new career or skill area, in which case it’s a good idea to deliberately ask people who work in that area to make an endorsement, but only for the key skills of that target job/career.

Remember that increasing the number of connections can extend your overall visibility. Whenever you get a connection request, err on the side of accepting it as long as the person’s profile looks respectable (since some people evaluate a candidate by the company they keep). By respectable, I mean they have a professional-level job and a complete profile (faceless or empty profiles don’t look good in your connections list).

Being a member of LinkedIn groups gives the impression that you are connected, networked, and active in your areas of interest. It also telegraphs what your interests are to recruiters and hiring managers. Search LinkedIn for groups in areas for which you are claiming expertise, as well as ones for which you would like to expand your expertise. Do this even if you did it a while ago, since new groups are created all the time. If there are additional geographies in which you might look for jobs, make sure you have membership in groups in that geography, since some recruiters look in these groups for candidates.

The other reason to join groups is that it can provide you with new connections. Once you are accepted as a member of a group (some require approval by the group moderator first), browse through the list of group members and make connection requests.

Never use the generic LinkedIn connection request text; it’s like sending a form letter, with similar poor results. Instead, tailor the text so you mention something or someone you have in common (at a minimum you are in the same LinkedIn group), which will increase significantly the chances of your connection request being accepted.

Special thanks to Jim Knickerbocker, PhD, from Intrepid Growth, LLC, for this article.