Visibility Matters: How Your LinkedIn Profile Can Open New Career Doors

Why your profile matters

When making or updating your LinkedIn profile, it can be hard to judge what is and isn’t relevant from a recruiter’s point of view. I can’t cover the full complexity and nuance of LinkedIn profiles in this one post, so this is a quick guide for how to improve the basics.

Whether you’re actively looking for a new role or just open to hearing about showstopper opportunities, it’s important that your profile helps us:

1. find you and
2. understand you well enough to show you relevant roles.

How we find you

LinkedIn provides us with a really basic search function. We can use it to limit our search or expand it to find the best candidates for the role we’re filling.

When building your profile, it’s worth understanding how we expand our searches to make sure you pop up when we’re looking for a candidate just like you.

The most common ways we expand our searches are to combine search categories (for example, Bioinformatician in Biotechnology is very likely to find us lots of bioinformaticians doing drug discovery, so make sure this is up to date) or use keyword searches.

Keywords help us find specific skills or experiences, so Keyword searching is very important for us and can be incredibly complex. As a simple example, if we’re searching for a Bioinformatician who has experience with oncology, we’ll build a keyword search that reflects that combination.

These searches can contain dozens if not hundreds of words and aim to find those words anywhere within your profile. If they’re not in your profile, we’re not finding you easily, if at all!

What does this mean for my LinkedIn profile?

The more detail each section of your LinkedIn profile has (and the ‘About’, ‘Experience’, ‘Education’ and ‘Skills’ sections are key for us), the more likely we are going to find you AND the more likely it is we’ll be able to match you to roles that will progress your career. This is because the more in depth you go, the more likely it is we’ll find you in a keyword search.

Each section within your LinkedIn profile gives you an opportunity to highlight insights and information, so we can match you with roles that are right for you. Maximise how effective your profile is for you.

Some examples

I’ve taken LinkedIn profiles from two high-profile people to show you what they did right, what they did wrong, and what they could do to improve the likelihood a recruiter sends them relevant and interesting opportunities.

Mark Zuckerberg

Chances are, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t on LinkedIn to scout his next career opportunity! But if he was, he’s got work to do!

How could it be improved?

If your profile looks a bit like Mark Zuckerberg’s, there are some easy fixes to make you more visible.

Start by making sure you at least have:

• One paragraph in the ‘About’ section, telling us about your professional highlights, what you want us to know about you and your work, and even where you’ve come from and maybe where you see yourself heading. Who are you, what have you done, where are you going?
• An up-to-date ‘Experience’ section showing your professional career progression. This should include each of your job titles at each of the companies you have worked for with an accurate start and end date for each role.
• At the very least you want to show your highest level qualifications in the ‘Education’ Section, whether they are a PhD, MSc, or BSc etc. Ideally, all your degrees, qualifications, and professional certifications should be listed – you worked hard for them!

‘Skills’ is a great section for getting yourself included in our keyword searches – feel free to add as many here as you can think of. Whether they are technical skills such as individual assays, or molecular biology, or chemistry techniques, or transferable management or commercial or leadership skills, add them here!

Pano Christou

Pano Christou has done a great job making sure any potential recruiter visiting his page knows a good deal about his professional development.

His experience, education and skills section is in enough depth to help us understand whether or not he meets the basic requirements for a role.

How could it be improved?

Pano could make a difference by adding some extra details.

Give Your Profile Some Love!

The more information you can display on your profile, the more likely we’ll be able to find you, and the more likely it is we’ll be able to send interesting and relevant career opportunities your way!

Your profile can be your gateway to your next career step – it’s worth spending the time to get it in shape so you’re seen.

Isaac