Job Seekers - Market Your Personal Brand: Top 10 LinkedIn Add-Ons

By Cheryl Simpson

Would you like to enhance the quality of your LinkedIn profile in a way that encourages recruiters and hiring managers to read yours more thoroughly? If so, consider supplementing your profile with one or more strategic LinkedIn add-ons.

Top 10 LinkedIn Add-Ons For Your Brand

Many job seekers are unaware that they can attach documents and media to a LinkedIn profile. Yet doing so turns your profile into a makeshift online portfolio and gives you greater flexibility in promoting your career brand to recruiters, hiring managers, and influential contacts.
What do I mean by profile add-ons? Through the one-click installation of a few applications, or software snippits, to your profile, you can “attach” documents, spreadsheets, videos, audios, and slideshows to your LinkedIn URL. To tempt you with some rich possibilities, here are my current Top 10 favorite LinkedIn add-ons:

1. A Personal Marketing Brief

A marketing brief is a one-page document that succinctly and strategically showcases your career brand, job search goals, work history, and achievement track record. Recruiters love them and often use this document’s content to create their own briefs on your background when they choose to share your candidacy with their client companies.

2. Your Executive Bio

Bios are more formal documents than marketing briefs, and are also more narrative in style. For executives, this is a must-have tool that serves many different networking purposes. Attach one to your profile to help recruiters and hiring managers get to know your background before they see your resume.

3. Your Resume

If you’re presently employed, this option isn’t a great idea. But if you’re a free agent, then consider attaching your resume to your profile. You won’t be able to tailor it toward specific opportunities, of course, but if you attach more than one version, you can help recruiters in different industries understand why you’re a candidate they cannot ignore.

4. A Leadership Brief

Appropriate for experienced leaders, this brief outlines detail-rich examples of your leadership experience. This is a one or two-page document that contains less branding and fewer work experience details. Instead, this brief dives deep into your leadership CAR (Challenge-Action-Results) stories.

5. A Case Study (Or 2 Or 3)

Similar to a leadership brief, this document provides in-depth detail on your best CAR stories. Unlike the leadership brief, a single case study may take up a whole page. Or, you may have two to three shorter case studies on a single page. Case studies can cover a wide array of achievements, but must be positive with impactful results

Add-Ons 6 - 10 and complete article