The job market is resolutely digitalized and everything happens today on social and professional networks. If you don’t have an attractive LinkedIn profile, you’ll miss out on many opportunities and the chance to make a good first impression.
Jobprofile has coached hundreds of people in their career development. A fundamental step in coaching is the creation and optimization of the candidate’s LinkedIn profile. This is a real opportunity for self-promotion.
Step 1: Be visible
Finding a job is first of all about making yourself visible and remarkable. For managers and recruiters alike, to google you has become a reflex. When typing your name in the search engine, if you have a LinkedIn profile, it will appear on the first page. This is extremely important for your marketing, no matter what you do, people will look for you and automatically search for you before they even read your resume, contact you or see you. Therefore, having a professional digital identity is a must.
Step 2: Keep your profile up to date
Your LinkedIn profile is like your shop window. It must therefore be neat and always up to date. Your photo, summary containing your goals, positions and former positions should reflect clarity and consistency. It is a process to be considered as an ongoing one, not to be undertaken only when you find yourself fired or frustrated with a professional situation. It is a strategic tool for developing and maintaining your employability.
Tip: Discretion! Your community doesn’t need to know about any updates to your profile. It’s certainly essential to communicate about major changes, such as when you change jobs, titles, etc. But when you want to refine your profile and work on your marketing so that people can find and identify you more easily, it’s not necessarily recommended. Go to Privacy Preferences, Profile, then click on Turn on/off your activity notifications and don’t forget to turn on the notifications again when you are done.
Step 3: Use the network as an ally
LinkedIn allows you to monitor what’s going on in your industry, what the market demands, who’s hiring who, what people in your industry or with a similar profile are doing. Finding a job is no longer a matter of sending applications like bottles to the sea. You have to investigate, find out, compare yourself to the market, to your competitors. LinkedIn is a mine of information where you can learn about your field of activity and the trends in your sector.
Step 4: Develop your network smartly
Having a good profile is not enough. Finding a job is now about managing and developing your network of professional contacts through LinkedIn. Being active in groups related to your profession is an asset, for example. By showing your interest on the platform, by interacting, by sharing your expertise on the subjects you master, you make yourself attractive in a constructive way.
Promoting your profile in this way ensures that you send the right message to people who are likely to make decisions about you, whether it is a colleague, your manager, your future manager or the head of your department, a recruiter or even the HR manager of your future employer. It’s all about creating interest, allowing someone to see themselves with you as a colleague, a business partner, or as the person who will solve their problem.
Step 5: Repeat yourself with finesse
On LinkedIn, you have the right to repeat yourself and even have an interest in doing so, but with intelligence and finesse. This is an operation that is as much for the people likely to identify you as for the search engines of this professional network. Indeed, if a human being is still needed to formulate the most appropriate query, search engines have largely exceeded the simple detection of keywords. Today, they are able to select, associate and suggest from your profile information, and thus deliver weighted and thematic results to people searching on LinkedIn. It is also essential that people reading your profile clearly understand your skills and the direction you are taking and want to take for your career.
Step 6: Choose 3 to 5 skills to highlight
To do this, you need to select three-five key competencies that you want to be identified for. The marketing of your profile is built around the elements you choose to emphasize. Be careful not to dilute these skills and be sure to vary the way you describe the use of them in your profile. Try to repeat yourself without being redundant with respect to your knowledge, skills and recent or past experience. To do this, you should use the terminology of your field of expertise. This will make it easier to find you, and especially to identify yourself in the way you want to be found, whether by search engines or your future employer.
Example: if one of your key skills is Project Management, I suggest you describe your expertise in this field in your LinkedIn summary and also in each work experience with the terminology specific to this activity: planning, budget, specifications, requirements, purchasing, scope, deadlines, etc. This is part of your professional branding. It will position you effectively in relation to your field and to professionals in your field who will be able to identify with your profile and plan a possible collaboration.
Conclusion
It is up to you to do everything possible to make yourself “remarkable” in the eyes of everyone, including search engines. Don’t dilute your message, don’t try to put in everything and select the most relevant elements according to your current objectives. It is not easy to do this without expert help. We have accompanied many talents in this crucial step to find a job through our coaching programs. A truly effective LinkedIn profile can even save you the trouble of looking for a job, because then the job will find you.
