Personal brand: your LinkedIn profile

Building your personal brand in an industry is one thing, but you need to make it stand out to your potential employers, and one of the most important ways you can do that is through LinkedIn. With more than 575 million users, you need to do something special in order to stand out. Here’s our top tips on how to do just that.

Buzzwords in useful places

One of the most important features of LinkedIn that employers utilise when looking for the right people to bring in to their business is the specialised search function. This tool searches different sections of your profile for the keywords that employers are searching for, so you need to make sure you have keywords in the correct sections in order to be spotted.

Your headline, summary, position descriptions and skills are all prime spots to make sure that you have all your abilities and traits listed, and that you don’t sell yourself short.

Headline

Your headline can be the first and only thing that employers read, so you want to make sure that it does you justice. Decide where you’re going to focus your attack, and then fit as much you can into your headline related to the industry or job that you’re looking for.

Get the most relevant current title, some skills and perhaps a key achievement in there, in order to make sure you cannot be overlooked.

Filling in the gaps

LinkedIn offers numerous different sections to your profile in order that you can add as much information as possible to try and entice employers who are on the lookout for new reccruits. You need to use this to the best of your ability—if you have qualifications, put them in the qualifications section! If you’ve won awards for any particular reason, and an employer might be impressed, get them in the awards part of your profile.

There’s no point hiding anything that might impress an employer, so spend some time filling out as much as possible. Some employers will have a soft spot for those who have participated in a certain activity or sport, so it’s worth sticking them in just in case—you never know who’s looking and what they’re looking for!

Endorsements and testimonials

In the search function, LinkedIn scans your testimonials for keywords and uses this data to rank you, so it’s worth requesting industry-focused testimonials that add to your personal brand. If you’ve highlighted the parts of your character that you think are relevant to the industry and will impress employers, ask the people giving you testimonials if they could include these key words if they think they’re relevant.

There’s no shame in asking those who would be giving you testimonials to focus them on a specific part of your work or something that you worked on together that you think is impressive to employers, and getting those specific, brand-focused testimonials will do wonders in improving your ranking and therefore, your employability!