Making The Most Of Your LinkedIn Profile

If you are on LinkedIn you want to make sure you are utilizing every available feature so that you can optimize your profile and enhance your job search. Here are a few tricks and tips you may not have known about. COMPLETE YOUR PROFILE The word on the street is that the more complete your profile, the better your chances of showing up higher in the search results. Since no one wants to be buried at the bottom of the results here is what you need to do to get a 100% complete profile: you need to have a profile summary and specialties, a photo, a current position and at least two past positions, the education section must be completed and you need at least three recommendations. BRAND YOURSELF Put some power words behind your name, it could be your title, a short description etc. It will make you stand out. Go to edit profile and edit your name. After your last name put a comma and whatever keywords or descriptors you want to use. Now your name will appear like this: Jane Smith, Dedicate Animal Advocate. You are limited to 40 characters so you might need to get creative. LIMITATIONS Speaking of character limits there are some others you should know about. Your professional headline is limited to 120 characters, your summary 2,000 and your specialties 500. The status update has a 140 character limit. MAKE SURE THEY CAN FIND YOU Ok, I’m on the fence about this one but it has been suggested that you should include common mis-spellings or phonetic variations of your name. This way if someone is trying to find you and doesn’t know how to spell your name you have a better chance of being found. Where to put this information is where the problem is. I’ve heard you should include it in your summary. But that not only takes up valuable space it also will look odd. Another option would be to include it at the bottom of your profile in the additional information section. You can add it to the interests’ area or the honors and awards section. This way it won’t be as noticeable. PRIORITIZE You also want to make sure that your best information is listed higher on your profile page. It is very likely that someone will not read all the way through to the bottom of your profile so to get the key information up front you can drag and drop the sections to reorder them. With these easy tips you’ll make the most out of your profile and stay one step ahead of the competition.