How Do I Create a Great LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn is an online platform that connects the world’s professionals. A complete LinkedIn profile will summarize your professional experience to your connections, current and future employers, and recruiters. Through your profile, you can showcase your professional life, milestones, skills and interests.
Why I should create a profile on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn will help you find a job faster because most hiring managers and recruiters are already using it. Having an active and well put together LinkedIn profile will, thus, significantly increase the chances of your discovery by various companies looking to hire people based on your skills and experience.
8 Steps to creating a great profile?
Step 1: Add a professional profile photo
A good profile photo increases the credibility of your profile and helps you stand out from the crowd. Members with a profile photo on LinkedIn can get up to 21 times more profile views that members without a photo. Click here to see more details on picking the right profile picture. You can also add a background image to personalize your profile.
Step 2: Make your headline stand out
Your headline is created when you add your positions to your profile. However, you can re-write it to either promote an area of expertise or to let your personality shine through.
Step 3: Write a summary
The About section of your profile should express your mission, motivation, and skills to people who view your profile. Ideally, you should limit the text to one or two paragraphs while filling this section. You can use bullet points if you’re not comfortable with writing paragraphs.
Step 4: Add all your relevant work and education experiences
You should keep the profile updated with all your professional experiences that align with your current career goals. You can also add media samples to provide quick access to your work portfolio. Here is the link on how to update your work experience and this link explains how to update your education
Step 5: Add relevant skills
A list of relevant skills on your profile helps you showcase your abilities to other members, like your colleagues and recruiters. It helps other understand your strengths. Once you add your skills, your connections can endorse them. If someone endorses your skills, it will increase the likelihood of you being discovered for opportunities related to the skills you possess. You can also take assessments for the skills you’ve listed on your profile to showcase your proficiency. You can find this option ‘Take Skill Quiz‘ on your profile page as shown below.
Step 6: Request recommendations from your connections
A recommendation is written to recognize or commend a connection, such as a colleague, business partner, or student. There’s no limit to the number of recommendations you can request for. Once you accept a recommendation written by a connection, it becomes visible to your network by default. You can also hide recommendations that you think don’t suit your professional goals.
Here is the link on how to request a recommendation.
Step 7: Gauge the strength of your profile
Use your profile strength meter to gauge the strength of your profile.
Final Step: Share your profile
Once you’ve created and updated different sections of your profile, you can begin sharing your public profile with your wider network. Your public profile is a simplified version of your complete LinkedIn profile that shows up in search engines and is visible to everyone. You can promote your profile to show up better in search engine results by creating a personal URL. Here is the link how to create a personal URL.