But what really defines a good LinkedIn profile? Open up your profile, and take a look at the following!
Many people who have worked in the recruitment world for a while now may have had their LinkedIn profiles for at least a decade (we won’t tell anyone!), meaning the rules for what is acceptable and what isn’t is likely to have changed.
For example, at one point, if you were wearing anything other than a suit jacket or a shirt and tie in your profile picture, you could be deemed unprofessional. Thankfully, those days are well behind us.
That being said, there’s still quite a robust checklist you can have at your side when completing or updating your LinkedIn profile, to give you the optimum chance of being successful in terms of being accessible to the relevant people.
1. Headline
It might sound strange because it’s your LinkedIn profile, but your headline should talk about the problems you solve, not what you do. For example, if you manage the contract recruitment team at a tech recruitment company:
❌ Contract Recruitment Manager
✅ Providing the top tech contractors for your business!
People viewing your profile care more about what you can do to specifically help them, as opposed to what your job title is.
2. Profile picture
Make sure you choose a picture that looks like you, with your face taking up around 60% of the frame and no distractions in the background. Don’t worry too much about ‘looking professional’. Instead, focus on looking approachable and open to conversation – that’s what LinkedIn is all about, after all.
Did you know that just having a picture – in comparison to having no profile picture at all – makes your LinkedIn profile 14x more likely to be viewed?
3. Contact info
Make sure you fill in your email, phone number and website information to make it easy for people to contact you. Also, adding your birthday means your connections are notified when the day arrives!
4. LinkedIn URL
The default LinkedIn URL gives you has numbers after your name. In the top right of your profile under ‘edit public profile and URL’ – you can get rid of the numbers, and change it to just your name if the URL is available. (Apologies to all the John Smiths who this may not be applicable to.)
5. Connections
Build your network with a preference for quality over quantity. Have you ever seen those people on LinkedIn who boast about having 100k+ connections in their network? We can almost guarantee you that their networks are almost redundant, and they aren’t engaging with all of those 100,000 people.
6. Summary
A summary should be what it says on the tin. Summarise how you help people, solve a problem and add value to your ideal customer. This is your chance to show yourself off, so do just that – but make sure it’s not War and Peace. Finish with a CTA on how they can get in touch with you, and provide multiple options to work around them.
7. Content
Make sure your network views your best posts first by pinning the ones that performed the best. The likelihood is, they performed best for a reason, so pinning them will encourage more people who view your profile to click on them, too.
Alternatively, you can pin your website pages to give greater accessibility to your features, about us or careers page.
8. Experience
Yes, your experience section should somewhat resemble your CV. However, there’s a reason CVs are slowly but surely going out of style in the recruitment world. Most CVs are a few pages long (despite years of CV tips from thousands of people), and to put it frankly – not every hiring manager has the time to read through every role responsibility you’ve ever had.
9. Education
Most people tend not to expand on their education section, but they’re missing a trick! It’s an opportunity to not only write about where you went to school or university but also to include any relevant online courses or certifications you’ve completed.
10. Recommendations
The recommendations section on your LinkedIn profile is crucial – they are testimonials from people who know you and have worked with you. In the recruitment sector, the more positive testimonials you can get, the better!
For every successful placement, you make, try and encourage the client and candidate involved to leave a recommendation on your LinkedIn profile, and offer to do the same in return.
