How to strengthen your LinkedIn profile

I love taking online courses, and recently I finished a course on “How to Rock your LinkedIn profile”. More than giving out some useful tips, the course helped me understand the purpose of having one. Sure, LinkedIn is a professional platform (one can argue in today’s time that it can become a working people’s Facebook), but nonetheless, making a profile is your chance to tell your story to the world.

I remember making a profile when I was in college and not understanding what to put and what not to put. Over the last few weeks, I have been able to engage with some great people who are doing commendable work on LinkedIn and it wouldn’t have been possible without improving my profile.

Here’s a few things I learnt that helped me from the course:

• Always write in first person: Your profile is a platform where you get to tell your story. When told in first person, it is more impactful. Almost feels like having a dialogue with the person who is reading it. I remember when I first made my profile, every thing I wrote on it was in third person and when I read it again a few weeks back, I didn’t feel any connect with my own words. First person storytelling goes a long way.
• Use a solo picture: Most recruiters/HRs will see your LinkedIn profile after checking your CV (if it has your profile link!). Having a picture with a scenic background like restaurants/other people in the background is great for Facebook and Instagram, but for LinkedIn, try to have a solo picture that shows only you, preferably with a solid color or comparatively plain background.
• Add media to your experience: Adding media such as PDFs, PPTs or other documents (if your firm permits) can be useful to people landing on your profile to see your work samples! You can use your pictures of community/field visits (with due consent of course!).
• Have a customised headline: If you will not update your headline yourself, LinkedIn will do it for you. It will pick your most updated work experience and display that. Before taking the course, I thought one can only add their designations etc. to their headlines, but that is so not true. Consider your headline to be a catchy email subject line about you that is compelling enough for someone to open and read your email. That’s your headline for you.
• Recommendations: Reach out to your old bosses, peers, colleagues etc. whoever you have a good relationship with and get them to write you a recommendation. Not only does it add more credibility to your profile, but also works as a reference. People can reach out to your older network for a background check if needed. It also highlights the fact that you were able to create good relationships and trust me, if you genuinely did good work, no one would refuse to write a few kind words about you in the recommendation.

These are not the only things which were covered in the course, but these were the most rewarding for me to learn. No recruiter (unfortunately) gives as much time in reading our resumes that we spent in making them. But they are quite likely to hit our LinkedIn profile if we provide the link in our resume.

Word of caution: Your LinkedIn profile is not your resume, so don’t copy paste! While a resume is required to be more crisp and fitting into one page, your LinkedIn can serve as the canvas for you to tell your story.

Photo by Nathana Rebouças on Unsplash

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash