Our best LinkedIn profile tips to make your LinkedIn profile stand out. Because what’s better than applying for job after job? Having the jobs come to you. 

With recent changes to LinkedIn such as the new ‘Open To Work’ banner, it’s never been easier to passively search for your next job on LinkedIn. We’ve spoken to our Digital Recruitment Consultants to find out how they search for candidates using LinkedIn, and how you can grab the attention of your next employer.

Our 9 LinkedIn Profile Tips To Help You Get Your New Job

1. SEO Optimise your profile so you appear in more searches.
2. Have an appropriate profile picture and custom made background photo.
3. Ditch the quirky job title, so more people can find you.
4. Flesh out your job experience with the skills you learned and how your role progressed.
5. Be an active part of the LinkedIn community.
6. Show off your education, certification, and skills. Anything employers will be looking for.
7. Set your profile as ‘Open To Work’, so employers know you’re looking for a new job.
8. Ask colleagues and connections for recommendations and endorsements of your skills.
9. Look at your network’s LinkedIn profiles for profile ideas.

But to find out the details, keep reading below as we talk you through each stage of making your LinkedIn Profile work for you, and to start bringing in job offers.

1. SEO Optimise Your Profile

When you think about SEO, you might think of blogs more than you think of your LinkedIn profile. But the same principles apply. If you want the right people to find you, you need to be using the right keywords.

So take a look at a job advert for the job you want. What are the skills this job is asking for? What software do you have experience with, that the advert is also asking for experience with? Does it ask for a level of education or certification?

Because these are exactly the kinds of keywords our recruiters use when we’re searching for digital marketers on LinkedIn, and exactly the ones you want to have on your profile.

2. Your LinkedIn Profile Picture

Your LinkedIn profile picture is the first thing someone will see when they open your profile. Our eyes are naturally drawn to faces. So you want to have a clear headshot, where you look professional but approachable. A background that is clear and isn’t too busy. After all, your face is the main focus here.

Your profile also has a background banner photo that you can use to grab the attention of anyone who visits your profile. This is your opportunity to visually set yourself apart from everyone else on LinkedIn. In here you can include your skills, the areas of digital marketing you’ve worked in, the software you’ve used etc.

For example, at Herd Digital our team use their background photo as part of their personal and part of the company branding. They include the area of digital marketing recruitment they work in, and provide contact details to make it as easy to get in touch with them as possible.

LinkedIn has quick and easy guides for changing your profile picture and your background photo. For creating your own background photo, you can use simple and free image software like Canva, which has templates to make sure you get the size limitations right.

3. Your Job Title

When a recruiter or hiring manager searches for potential candidates for a job, the job title is one of the first things they’ll use to find you.

Some companies often give their employees unusual job titles to market themselves as quirky or unique. Digital Agency Coach, Chris Simmance, told us that in recent years, there has been an influx of new job titles into the digital agency world, such as “growth hacker” and “content strategist“. This is due in part due to the everchanging landscape of digital marketing. And part of the reason for this, is making it harder for competitors and recruiters to find and steal their employees.

You want to have a clear and simple title that would help your future employer find you. If you’re looking to progress to a PPC Manager position, then logically you would want your experience to show you as a PPC Executive or a Senior PPC Executive.

4. Your Job Experience

Equally as important as your job title, is a fully fleshed out bio of your experience. 

Given how broad the range of responsibilities in a role there is in digital marketing, job titles aren’t the reliable indicator of someone’s skills and experience that people think they are. An ‘SEO Executive’ could be either a ‘Content SEO’, or a ‘Technical SEO’. 

Without providing information on your experience, a hiring manager has no idea which you are and could choose not to reach out to you. And as we mentioned earlier, skills, experience and software are some of the keywords recruiters will use to find your profile instead of job titles. 

If you’re earlier in your career without lots of industry relevant experience, you can include other jobs and try to relate some of the soft skills you learned on these such as: time management, independent and collaborative working, data analysis, team management etc.

5. Be an Active part of the LinkedIn Community

This won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has experience with organic search, but the more active you are on LinkedIn, the more likely you are to appear at the top of a recruiters LinkedIn search.

After all, LinkedIn only wants to show your profile to recruiters and employers when you’re likely to respond to their connection and messages. So you can optimise your profile all you want, but if you never post, comment or share on LinkedIn, your profile will be at the bottom of the pile.

6. Your Education, Certifications & Skills

A large part of optimisation and impressing anyone who makes it to your profile, is your education, certs and skills. Your degree that you spent years earning. The certification and training you undertook on your own time. The skills you learned through your job or that you taught yourself.

For our digital recruiters, skills such as Google Ads campaign management or experience using Screaming Frog to run technical audits are absolutely criteria they would use to search for and find relevant candidates. 

Some jobs we recruit for ask for a relevant degree. Especially some of the junior positions. So if you’re earlier in your career without massive amounts of experience, including your degree and the skills you learned in this is a good way of filling out your LinkedIn profile.

7. LinkedIn Open To Work Profile Setting

LinkedIn has recently introduced a new feature with its ‘Open To Work’ setting. This feature allows recruiters to see that you’re open to being approached for new positions, and adds a banner to your profile photo to visually set you apart.

This filter comes with a variety of settings to make sure that recruiters only reach out to you with relevant job opportunities, such as:

• Job titles with more than one option. This gives you flexibility, for example: If you’re a Paid Media Executive looking to progress to a Paid Media Manager position, or would consider a lateral move to a Biddable Account Executive.
• Options for if you want to work on-site, hybrid or fully remote; or a combination of three.
• You can even specify location, including choosing multiple different cities. Meaning instead of recruiters only being able to base their search off the location on your LinkedIn profile, you can choose to be approached for jobs in places you would like to live. 
• You can even choose a start date to signify whether you’re looking to start immediately, or if you’re more casually browsing but still open to opportunities.

As you can see from the image below, LinkedIn also gives you the power to choose who can see that you’re ‘Open To Work’. Whether this is everyone on LinkedIn, or more privately you can only allow those with LinkedIn Recruiter to see that you’re open to work.

LinkedIn also hides that you’re open to work from anyone with LinkedIn Recruiter at your own company. So while they’ve taken steps to protect your confidentiality, systems like this aren’t always 100% private and should be used with caution.

8. LinkedIn Recommendations and Endorsements

Listing your skills and experience is all well and good. But having other people confirm them? Even better. Having the endorsements and recommendations of previous coworkers helps give employers and recruiters who view your profile confidence in your abilities.

But they likely won’t appear on their own. You’ll have to actively reach out to people you have worked with who can confirm that you possess the skills you claim to.

9. Look At Your Networks LinkedIn Profiles For Tips

Now you know what to do, it can still be a struggle of what to put on your profile. A great resource to use would be the LinkedIn of someone who is actually doing the job you want. What are they including in their profile?

Have a look at the LinkedIn profiles of your network or the wider LinkedIn community to see what kind of things they post, or even reach out to them and ask for advice on how they got their role. They might say they don’t have the time or may just ignore your message, but there are a lot of people who would give advice on what you can do.

Having an optimised LinkedIn Profile is great for both passively searching for your new job and having recruiters and employers approach you, as well as supporting your active job search. When you send your CV to an employer, you can bet they’ll be looking at your social media as well. 

An even better way to support your job search, is to work with a recruiter who will work actively on your behalf and search for a job that meets your skills, experience, and goals: As well as advocate on your behalf to employers and provide support throughout the interview process. If you’re a Digital Marketer who’s considering making a move, you can reach out to us here, or apply to one of our open positions here and we’ll be in touch.