Friday, February 17, 2023

24 LinkedIn Profile Tips to Make You Stand Out in 2023

What is an optimized LinkedIn profile?

Having an optimized LinkedIn profile means you have a complete and updated profile with the right and relevant industry-specific keywords recruiters look for and a strong professional online brand that ranks high in LinkedIn searches.

Why you should optimize your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn has revealed that having a complete and optimized LinkedIn profile alone makes you 40 times more likely to receive opportunities and be found.

Additionally, having an optimized LinkedIn profile helps you:

  1. Appear in more LinkedIn search results and become more visible on LinkedIn.
  2. Build and strengthen your professional brand.
  3. Get more opportunities, from jobs to connections and networks.
  4. Position yourself as an expert in your field or industry.
  5. Establish your credibility.
  6. Stand out if you apply for a job via LinkedIn.
  7. Build relationships with other professionals and even with recruiters

How do you optimize your LinkedIn profile?

To optimize your LinkedIn profile, you need to:

  1. Make sure your LinkedIn profile sections are complete and regularly updated.
  2. Ensure that you appear on LinkedIn searches when recruiters look for people like you by adding relevant keywords to your profile.
  3. Make the recruiter want to click and view your profile once you appear in LinkedIn search results.
  4. Hook the recruiter’s attention so when they view your LinkedIn profile, they’ll want to read more about you.

24 of the best LinkedIn profile tips that work

Jobscan has compiled a list of 24 LinkedIn profile optimization tips to guide you as you leverage the largest and most powerful networking platform in the world.

2. Think like a recruiter

Now that you have pinned down your LinkedIn goals, you need to switch hats and think like a recruiter. Because ultimately, it is the recruiters and hiring managers who call the shots.

So you must be strategic about what you include in your profile to solidify your professional brand and impress recruiters.

Here are some questions you need to ponder:

  • What type of job candidate would the recruiter like to hire for the position you are interested in? 
  • What skills would the recruiter or prospective employer want you to have to succeed in the job?
  • What problems would the recruiter want you to solve?
  • What information on your profile would the recruiter love to see?
  • What keywords or skills would the recruiter most likely search for?

You may also go so far as to seek help from real recruiters and ask them what they would search for to find the candidate for the specific role. Like your goals, you can use this information to guide you as you build and optimize your profile.

6. Use a great LinkedIn headshot

Having a professional LinkedIn profile picture gives you 21 times more profile views, 36 times more messages, and 9 times more connections.

Additionally, in less than 100 milliseconds after looking at your profile picture, a hiring manager or recruiter will form their impression of you.

So make sure you have a recent, decent, crisp, well-lit, and professional profile picture. Ideally, the size of your profile picture should be 400 x 400 pixels. 

8. Create a strong LinkedIn headline

Your LinkedIn headline is one of the heavily weighted sections of your LinkedIn profile, so you have to put careful thought into crafting one that helps you appear in recruiter searches. 

With 220 available characters, your LinkedIn headline is your one-liner resume that encapsulates your professional identity. Additionally, it’s the first section a recruiter or hiring manager sees after your name when they search LinkedIn or view your profile.

By default, your current job title becomes your LinkedIn headline. To increase the impact of your headline, you need to maximize the 220-character limit and make the headline powerful enough to grab the attention of the recruiter.

What to include in your LinkedIn headline

  • Current job title and company
  • Unique value proposition 
  • Tangible achievements and accomplishments
  • Areas of expertise or any specialties
  • Hard skills
  • Key certifications 
  • Professional credentials
  • Relevant industry-specific keywords

You may also include other things you are most proud of. Here is an example of a LinkedIn headline from a real job seeker.

In this example, the job seeker leads with “Senior Digital Marketing Manager,” which is her current job title. This is critical because the job title is actually the most important search keyword.

The job seeker then packs a ton of meaningful and frequently searched hard skills separated by vertical bars/pipes (|).

12. Add your top measurable accomplishments in the description field in your LinkedIn experience section

The mistake most LinkedIn users make is that instead of zeroing in on their key achievements while in the role, they just explain what the company does or outline their job responsibilities. 

Don’t make this mistake! Write your key accomplishments and achievements while in the role and prioritize those that are most relevant to your target job.

See all 24 Profile Tips and the complete Jobscan article

 

 

 

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

The 6 Best LinkedIn Learning Courses for Managing Remote Teams

BYSHREEYA DESHPANDE

LinkedIn Learning is one of the best e-learning platforms to upskill yourself with premium-quality video courses taught by industry experts. Here are the best LinkedIn Learning courses for managing a remote team.

1. Leading Remote Projects and Virtual Teams


Leading remote teams and projects requires strong adaptability to digital workflows, as well as the ability to communicate and collaborate virtually with clients and colleagues globally.

This short 29-minute video course is best to get started with learning to lead remote projects and virtual teams. It starts with a brief overview of remote projects covering different types of virtual projects, pros and cons, and must-haves for the same.

Next, the course advances towards managing remote teams, including tips for structuring your team and effectively communicating with your virtual team. Then, it ends with guiding you on various remote collaboration tools, challenges faced while leading a virtual team, and solutions to encounter them.

The instructor of this course, Cyndi Snyder Dionisio, is an author and consultant with over 25+ years of work experience in project management. The course has a 4.6 rating, and over 42,558 learners take up the course.

4. Leading with Emotional Intelligence


Developing emotional intelligence can assist you in many aspects of your life, including leading at your workplace, by building stronger relationships with your colleagues, reducing the stress levels of your team, and improving your overall job satisfaction.

Britt Andreatta, the instructor of this course and an internationally recognized thought leader, guides you in boosting your emotional intelligence for effectively leading your team. This one-hour course begins by giving you an overview of emotional intelligence and the brain science behind it. Next, Britt advances on helping you learn about assessing your as well as your teammates’ emotions, identifying triggers, and responding to them.

The course ends on understanding empathy and optimizing team performance using emotional intelligence. At present, the course has a 4.7 rating and is taken by 503,891 learners on the platform.

6. Managing Team Conflict


Leading a team can present situations where conflict arises among your colleagues. Therefore, knowing how to handle conflicts becomes an important part of your leadership process.

The one-hour course begins by giving you an overview of team conflicts—the necessity of it, and learning how to diagnose if the team conflict is healthy or unhealthy. Further, the instructor, Henna Inam, who has been a Coach, Author, and former C-Level Leader at Fortune 500 companies, guides you on the sources of conflicts and resolving different situations of conflict.

You also get to learn conflict-resolution skills, including the comparison between assertive and cooperative approaches. In the last part, the course explains various team conflict management styles to help you deal with any conflict confidently.

The course has a rating of 4.7 out of 5, and around 208,640 have started learning it.

See all 6 courses and read the complete article

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

5 Quick Fixes to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile - Make a better first impression in 5 minutes

By

Love it or hate it, there is no denying that LinkedIn is a big part of building your online platform — especially as an entrepreneur. In fact, the social media network now boasts over 744 million members, with over 57 million companies listed on the site.

Depending on your needs, a quality LinkedIn profile can help you grow your business connections and personal brand, find new potential customers for your B2B services or connect with new talent to grow your team.

Unfortunately, your LinkedIn profile can keep you from maximizing these opportunities. By making a few simple fixes, you can ensure your profile helps your growth efforts, rather than hinders them.

4. Start providing value to your network

Your business produces a lot of content — and most likely, much of that content will have value for people in your network. Sharing case studies and other brand content gets you to show up in the news feeds of those in your network.

Don’t be afraid to share content from others that you find interesting or insightful. When you consistently share content that provides value and starts a discussion, you can also help strengthen your personal brand.

Of course, this sharing can be even more valuable when you are writing original content. While this will obviously take more than five minutes to complete, this is a great opportunity to establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche and start conversations. The more you publish, the more top-of-mind you’ll be among others in your network.

5. Write a jargon-free summary

Your summary — or the “About” section, as LinkedIn likes to call it these days — shouldn’t read like a boring list of past jobs and achievements. Rewriting your LinkedIn summary so that it flows more like a story helps bring your skills to life. It shows why your experiences have made you into the person you are today. It gives connections a better opportunity to understand who you are, what motivates you, and what you hope to accomplish.

When making this update, avoid the temptation to litter your LinkedIn summary with meaningless jargon and buzzwords. You’ve seen these words and phrases countless times — passionate, innovative, leadership, results-driven — the list goes on and on.

Part of the reason why we’re so sick of seeing these terms is because they don’t really tell us anything. Avoiding overused buzzwords will help your summary be more engaging and unique by encouraging you to provide more specific details.

Read Quick Fixes 1-3 and the complete Entrepreneur Article

Unleash your LinkedIn profile’s potential

As with any other social network, LinkedIn requires ongoing attention, especially if you want to use it to grow your personal brand. Polishing your profile ensures that you’ll make a better first impression with those you connect with, regardless of why you’re trying to connect with them in the first place. Taking a few extra minutes to spruce up your profile now will pay big dividends later on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, January 6, 2022

5 Mistakes 99% of LinkedIn Profiles Contain

By

A dazzling LinkedIn account is an invaluable asset for professionals and almost necessary for networking purposes. The website currently hosts nearly 740 million accounts, and all it takes is a few costly mistakes to make your professional peers roll their eyes and move on to other profiles.

To make matters worse, most people don’t even realize when they are making a misstep on the platform. It’s understandable as not everyone is experienced with the effective business card of the internet. Still, some unofficial rules and guidelines guarantee your profile promotes you in the best possible light.

By rooting out these common errors, any profile can be fine-tuned and become far more effective in finding opportunities and keeping your business network strong.

1. A lackluster headline

If your headline doesn’t have a hook, your profile isn’t likely to garner much attention. Just like a magazine headline or book title, a LinkedIn headline should be a brief advertisement of what a reader can expect to come in the profile. It’s the first thing people will see, so it’s important to make a positive first impression.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you should copy and paste your job title. Instead, focus on using keywords and actions relevant to your work, as this can improve your search ranking association.

The best headlines are brief — some say under 120 characters — impactful and leave the reader with a positive impression. It’s worth tweaking and experimenting with your own until you feel this has been accomplished.

5. No personal URL

Creating a personal URL for your LinkedIn profile is an easy step that adds a layer of legitimacy to any profile. Unfortunately, those who simply go with the default setting of random numbers and letters appear less professional than those who take the time to customize.

Not having a personal URL has several negative drawbacks, the most immediate being it becomes more difficult for people to remember or find your profile. It also can show a degree of laziness or technical incompetence, neither of which are helpful labels for any professional.

When taken as a whole, a LinkedIn profile is a critical step in creating an effective digital presence for your professional self. Creating a clean and effective profile isn’t that difficult, and the positive effects of doing so can connect you with global opportunities that are truly life-changing.

Read all 5 mistakes and the complete Entrepreneur article

 

 

 

Thursday, September 9, 2021

Six Tips To Help Increase Your Engagement On LinkedIn, Find A Job And Advance Your Career

Annette Richmond

LinkedIn is your face to the business world. It’s often the place recruiters looking for candidates will meet you. It’s the place recruiters and employers who are impressed with your resume will go to learn more about you. While LinkedIn is considered a business platform, it’s important to remember that it’s also a social network. Like many things, you’ll get as much out of LinkedIn as you put into it.

Creating a compelling profile is a start. However, if you want to find a new job or advance your career, you need to build engagement on LinkedIn. If you haven’t been active for a while — or ever — here’s how to make the most of available features and create an engagement plan.

Media Features

LinkedIn has audio and video features that you can use to introduce yourself to profile visitors. If you don’t already have LinkedIn’s mobile app, you’ll need to download it to use them. 

• Craft a Cover Story. LinkedIn’s Cover Story feature is a 30-second video that you can use to share information — who you are, what you do, how to contact you, etc. — that works for your current situation. To create the video, you may want to use Apple Clips; it’s a free IOS app available in the Apple store. You can record, edit and add captions all in the app. I love Clips, but there are many other options for androids and iPhones. Once you’ve uploaded your Cover Story, a few seconds of your video will pop up from behind your headshot whenever someone clicks on your profile. An orange circle around someone’s headshot indicates that they have uploaded a video.

Engagement And Strategy

It’s important to have an engagement plan and strategy that you can commit to long-term because being active every day for two weeks and then going into hibernation isn’t a good thing.

• Take baby steps. Most people think being active on LinkedIn is about sharing status updates or posting articles, but the truth is that most of the engagement happens in the comments and messages. Follow people in your industry that you’d like to know. Particularly those who you’d like to know you. Start by spending 15 minutes three times a week reading, liking and commenting on people’s posts. Work up to 15 to 20 minutes a day while you’re having morning coffee or watching the news. Leave thoughtful comments. If you think it’s a great post, let them know why. If you’ve learned something, tell them what.

• Increase your engagement. Once you’re comfortable with commenting on other people’s posts, start creating your own. Share your thoughts on a timely article or an industry trend in a status update. LinkedIn likes people to stay on the platform, so share links to articles or posts you mention in a comment rather than in your post. Post about events or conferences you’re attending. Review books you’ve read. Share your thoughts on industry trends. Subscribing to a content aggregator will help you save hours online looking for content to comment on or share. I use Feedly. They have free and paid subscriptions, but there are many others aggregates too, including All Top, Google News, etc.

See all 6 tips and the complete Forbes article

 

 

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

7 strategies to grow the presence of your brand on LinkedIn organically

 

by Sumeet Jindal

Growing your brand on LinkedIn might be a tough job, but it doesn’t have to be. Here, I will share a few strategies you can apply to grow your brand organically. These strategies are tried and tested, so trust me when I say that they will work.

LinkedIn is the most effective social media platform for networking, marketing, and attracting business. It’s a good idea to get your business on LinkedIn if you want to grow your brand. Yet, it’s equally important to understand that it will take some time and effort to grow your brand on LinkedIn.

Here are a few strategies that you can use to grow your brand on LinkedIn organically.

7 Strategies to grow your Brand on LinkedIn Organically

1. Build a robust social media presence

LinkedIn is all about building relationships and connecting with people. It’s not just about posting content on LinkedIn but also building connections with others. So the first thing you need to do is build a solid social media presence on other platforms. Start by joining as many groups, groups of interest, etc., as possible and building strong relationships with your new contacts.

3. Promote your messages

Once you have a network and your introductions in place, it’s time to promote the content that you post on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a very powerful feature called “Promote Message” where you can promote your message to thousands of people who follow you. It only requires a small piece of your time. This will help you get more exposure for the content that you want to share with the world.

5. Be consistent

One of the hardest things to do is to be consistent with your efforts. You need to make sure that you are consistently learning, growing, and updating yourself with new strategies, so you can stay ahead of the competition.

See all 7 strategies and the complete EastMojo.com article