Customizing your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is your biggest friend in your job search. Customize your LinkedIn profile by going through the following steps and get your profile reviewed by your peers or friends.

Profile picture

Have a professional-looking display picture with a close-up of your face. Profiles with pictures get more profile views from recruiters and hiring managers.

Profile URL

Customize your default LinkedIn profile URL to only have your first name and last name, without any random strings. It’s easy and professional this way if you want to send your profile to someone or include it on your resume. For example, a John Doe can have a LinkedIn profile URL like https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-doe or https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdoe, but it’s not professional to have something like https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-doe-34jh234jb3kuhewh.

Headline

Have a solid LinkedIn headline that indicates your course, university, and your career interests (Example: “Looking for Full-time opportunities in Full-Stack Web Development and Software Engineering”). Make complete use of the permissible characters limit allowed in the headline. The more keywords you include, the better search hits you get when recruiters search for potential candidates with a specific skill or field.

Summary

Write your LinkedIn Summary. Many people skip this step but it adds a lot of value to your profile. It makes people understand that you are a serious candidate who wants to market yourself. Include your professional bio, highlight your past experiences, your career interests, your skillset, core competencies, and let people know the best way to contact you. Be creative, you can use emojis too, but stay professional.

Experience

Update your previous experiences if you have any. Don’t just leave it out with the company name and your designation. Fill out a description of your role, responsibilities, accomplishments, projects, tasks, initiatives, etc. Quantify your results. Use the STAR (Situation/Task, Action, Result) format when you frame your sentences. Some people call this the CAR (Cause, Action, Result) format. STAR and CAR, both essentially mean the same. You can attach any work samples too (PDFs, PPTs, Images, Links, etc).

Projects

Update your Projects section with academic, personal, hackathon, or other projects. Use STAR format here too. This section is particularly important for people with little or no previous industry experience.

External Links

If you have a personal/portfolio website, update that info in the contact info section, and also give a link to it in the ‘Featured’ section of your LinkedIn profile.

Also, you can go the extra mile by adding a PDF of your latest resume to this Featured section, to make it easier for the recruiters to assess your profile. Since this resume would be publicly visible, be sure not to include too much personal information (like your residential address and phone number). You can give this information (or supply another resume that includes contact information) to the recruiter in a private conversation thread (email or LinkedIn chat) later.

Skills

Update your latest skills and try to get some endorsements for those skills from your friends, classmates, project teammates, or colleagues, or former colleagues.

Recommendations

Get recommendations from people. Ask for recommendations from your managers, team leads, or colleagues of current or previous jobs or internships. If there’s no one that could recommend from the industry, at least get a few recommendations from your project teammates at college.

Volunteer experience

Volunteering experience is optional, but it’s good to include it on your profile, especially if you have little or no previous experience working in the industry, or if you held any leadership position during volunteering (“web design team lead for your undergraduate college club”, etc.).

Open to work

Use the Open To Work profile picture photo frame to make sure recruiters know visually when they look at your profile snippet. Indicate that you are open to work by posting your job search preferences (location, title, start date, job type, etc.).