Your LinkedIn profile is your personal brand. Your shop window. Your sales pitch. It’s the thing that separates you from a call with a recruiter.

In the UK, 94% of recruiters use LinkedIn as a primary tool for finding candidates. So as a candidate in a big pool of fish, how can you optimise your profile to stand out from the crowd? 

We’ve written a blog on our top tips:

Have a professional profile picture

Let’s start with the basics. First impressions count. That’s why having a professional headshot as your profile picture makes all the difference in giving off a good first impression. We recommend a clear, shoulder-height headshot with a blank background for the most effective results.

Have a clear bio and summary

The first part of your profile that will be seen by recruiters is your bio. Use this space wisely and write a clear summary of your career to date, highlighting your most relevant skills and experiences. A recruiter should be able to read your bio and get a good sense of you, your key skills and job history within the first minute of looking at your profile.

Use keywords

One of the ways recruiters carry out candidate searches is by using a keyword search tool on LinkedIn. To give yourself the best chance of being discovered, build your profile to contain as many keywords relating to your role as possible. You can do this by writing a detailed description of each of your previous roles in the ‘experience’ section on your profile. For example, if you’re a Head of Marketing, including keywords related to your industry, skills or specialist tools like ‘B2B’, ‘SaaS’, ‘Google Analytics’, ‘Hubspot’ etc will make your profile much more discoverable to a recruiter searching through hundreds of candidates.

Focus on growing your network

Did you know that LinkedIn users with more than 500 connections receive twice as many job opportunities as those with fewer connections? And users with over 500 connections are 40 times more likely to receive job opportunities through their network than through job boards. This demonstrates just how crucial growing your LinkedIn network is to secure a new role. Ideally, you should make growing your network part of your weekly activity, aiming to connect with as many relevant people as you can (remember you can send a miximum of 20-25 connection requests per day).

Engage with your network

There’s no point in growing your network if you’re not going to engage with it. Every engagement you make on LinkedIn, whether it’s a post, like or comment, pushes your profile to new people, increasing your reach significantly. In addition to this, an inactive account can raise red flags for recruiters, and it might make the difference on whether they decide to reach out to you or not.

Collect recommendations and endorsements

What better way give a recruiter confidence in your abilities than by having recommendations and endorsements on your profile. Getting previous employers or colleagues to leave a recommendation on your profile or to endorse you for certain skills is a sure-fire way to impress a recruiter and increase the likelihood of them reaching out to you.  

Use the ‘open to work’ banner

Don’t be afraid to switch on the #OpenToWork function. Turning this on and displaying the green banner on your profile picture is an easy way to signal to recruiters that you’re considering new opportunities. Another benefit is that a lot of recruiters will search for candidates who are open to work before moving onto more passive candidates.

You don’t need to worry about your current employer or colleagues seeing that you’re open to work, as LinkedIn allows you to set the banner as visible to recruiters only.

Get in touch

There’s no denying that LinkedIn is a massively powerful tool for helping you find a job and get noticed by recruiters. Updating your profile regularly, growing your network and engaging with contacts will help get you noticed.

If you’re looking for a new role, check out our jobs board, or if you’re looking for a talent partner to help you headhunt the best talent in the market, get in touch with us on 0117 428 0600.