LinkedIn: Two easy ways to significantly enhance your profile

With 930 million members, which includes all of your colleagues, competitors and future employers, on LinkedIn, I think that we can agree that doing just the basics to enhance your profile is something to seriously consider. In this blog, I’m going to focus on two simple things that you can do to make yourself more findable and more likely that someone will reach out to open a conversation.

Skills

Towards the bottom of your profile, you’ll find a section titled Skills. Here you get to feature and spotlight skills that you would like to be ‘found’ for. Consider these skills as super keywords, because that’s exactly what they are. 

Furthermore, as we know, recruiters - including in-house recruiters - use LinkedIn extensively to find suitable candidates. There are versions of the platform that they use called LinkedIn Recruiter and Recruiter Lite. Both have advanced features which enable them to search by the Skills that you have on your profile. So, choose your skills wisely so that they are fully aligned to the core message that your Profile aims to project. 

When considering which Skills to have in this section, you might want to avoid generic options like Microsoft Word or Excel which, frankly, millions of people can offer. Come up with more narrowly chosen ideas which, when put together with others, create a mix almost unique to your value proposition. Do all that you can to help the platform’s algorithms return you in the searches that are being done to find you. It might be helpful to have a look at the profile of someone with a similar skillset to yours, or to use relevant job descriptions to elicit the most in demand and relevant skills for someone at your level and in your industry. 

In contrast to your CV, by getting your network connections to endorse your skills on LinkedIn, it’s not just you making promises of the value that you can offer. Others - maximum 99 - are also letting the reader know that this is the case. 

To get endorsed by someone, simply ask them to go to your profile and click on the Skills that you want to be endorsed for. You can make it easier by editing your profile so that the two most important Skills are the ones being shown first. 

Recommendations

The second way to easily and rapidly enhance your Linkedin Profile is to get Recommendations. This section is found beneath your Skills section. 

By having Recommendations, you’ll once again deepen your credibility because you have someone other than you letting the audience know about your abilities and attributes. 

It’s important that the person who is writing the recommendation is relevant to your industry. If you are in Investment Banking, then it should be written by someone who is in that area (there’s no point in asking your golf coach). 

Second, it would be great if that person is senior - again, this adds more credibility - and knows you well - perhaps you’ve worked together in some capacity. 

A final thought is that if you’re at the beginning of your career, or just coming back in from further education such as an MBA, then getting one of your teachers to endorse you is no bad idea. 

So, how do you ask for a Recommendation? This is very simple. Go to the top of the person’s profile and you’ll find a number of things, including a More button. Click on that and amongst the drop down options, you’ll find Request Recommendation. Click on that - you should be able to see an easy to fill in form with drop down lists. You could even write a draft for them to save that person time and effort in the personalised message box. 

Closing thoughts

I hope you’ve found this a useful snapshot into how you can maximise the impact of your LinkedIn profile. If the goal is to market yourself in a gentle and effective manner so that over the course of the year, you get a small but interesting in-flow of messages about career opportunities, then these two simple and easy to implement ideas are something to consider taking action on.

If you’re currently engaged in a job search or simply thinking about where your career is going, then do reach out for a chat. All my contact details are at the top of my Linkedin Profile in the Contact Info section.