Creating a LinkedIn Profile that Works for You!
| March 10, 2022 | Posted by Prasant under LinkedIn |
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| Cartoon by JD Gershbein |
A ‘LinkedIn Profile’ is a digital representation of your professional profile. The way you take care of your presence in the professional grounds, you also need to spend quality time in creating and maintaining your LinkedIn profile. Connecting and conversing nowadays happens over the internet and with LinkedIn being the undoubted leader in the professional social media network, you should take care. Here we share our insights on how beautifully you can carve your LinkedIn profile. After all we all love to look good and for that we need to groom ourselves and LinkedIn profiles shouldn’t be an exception.
Basic Information isn’t Basic
Basic information relates to details about you with regards to Name, Professional Headline and your Location details with your concerned Industry.
- Name: Display your full name or the name you are known by in the professional world. Stay away from your cool avatar names, searching the real ‘you’ will be difficult
- Professional Headline: It is what you are. Headlines are keywords and Hiring Managers use these keywords to search for candidates.For e.g.: If you are a derivatives expert in the financial world then a suitable headline would be ‘Derivatives Expert’ rather than ‘Financial Expert’.
- Location and Industry: Location and Industry helps as an advanced search keyword for Hiring Managers.For e.g.: You are a Technical Architect from Pune, India then chances are bright for you to come up top in the search when HR people are looking for architects who are particularly based in Pune.
Summary - your Profile Synopsis
Basic Information makes you search friendly and Summary provides the synopsis of your profile. It is where you motivate people to read more about you.
- Professional Experience and Goals: Who you are? What you did and what you want to do in future should be the areas that should be covered. Try making small bulleted point list as it helps one to read quickly.
- Specialties: Use small keywords for your professional specialties rather than one long sentence. For e.g. if you are a ‘Web Designer’ then Web Designing Standards, Techniques and Graphics Designing Tools etc could be some of your specialties.
Experience - past & present
Professional experience is an important aspect but not the only one. Insert Company Name, Title, Time period and description for all your professional experience so far. Description should have relevant details of your professional experience. Let people know about your past, present work responsibilities and domain areas. Make it short, relevant and don’t copy-paste or keep the same description for all!
Education, connects with old folks
Education is as important as Experience. Insert activities and societies that you were part of during school and college. It reflects upon your varied interests other than academics and you have the added bonus of connecting with your old school mates and teachers.
Recommendations to boast about
Recommendations are like badges provided by your colleagues, batch mates, managers etc. Use the ‘Can you endorse me’ feature to get a variety of recommendations from your previous manager, college professor and your peers. Don’t be embarrassed while asking for recommendation; you can always return the favor.
Additional and Personal Information to connect
Additional Information is about your Interests, Websites (Company, Blog), Groups and Associations that you have joined. Interests act as keywords so as to connect with likeminded people. Make a point to mention Honors and Awards, makes you stand out in the crowd.
Personal Information is important so make sure what are you posting on LinkedIn. Our advice would be a short address with IM details, avoid phone numbers for security reasons. Use ‘Visibility Settings’ when you are displaying Birthday and Marital Status.
Contact Settings, letting others know
LinkedIn allows you to display an array of opportunities that you are interested in. Additionally, you can provide an advice to users considering contacting you. The idea of providing advice is to restrict unnecessary network build up. It’s your profile and you have the rights to manage it.
Other Useful Information’s, good to use
Along with Education and Professional experience, LinkedIn also provides you to add various sections such as Skills, Certifications, Languages, Patents and Publications. It isn’t a bad idea to write about if you posses some extra skills and expertise. It helps to stand out in the crowd.
Applications to enrich your profile
Applications are 3rd party add-ons to your profile. You can use the Box.Net to display your CV and other docs, Slideshare to share your presentations, Amazon to share what you are reading,Tweets and Blogs etc. These are but small things that could enrich your profile.
All these sections can be arranged in the way you want and the visibility depends on you. In short LinkedIn provides you absolute flexibility in managing your profile.
Was that useful? Do you use LinkedIn? Do let us know if you have some interesting ideas to design your LinkedIn profile.
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