Hey everybody. Welcome back to Recruiting 101 with Camille and Kierra. Recruiting 101 is dedicated to helping candidates understand the process from a recruiter’s perspective. In this segment, we’ll be sharing tips and tricks as we experience them. This week’s topic is all about updating your LinkedIn profile and what better time to do that than the start of a new year.
So happy 2023. Happy New Year. So LinkedIn profiles are super important. It really is like a digital resume that anyone can find. So even like hiring managers, recruiters, this profile can be found for you through sourcing through like LinkedIn recruiter. Or they can just look for employees at, like other companies, they can just search certain job titles and find you.
So it’s best to have your profile always up to date. I know that I’ve come across some profiles when sourcing, it just says LinkedIn user and then it just has their experience and no profile picture. So it doesn’t hurt to put some time into it. It probably only takes 30 minutes just to upload some information and some pictures.
It’s not a whole thing, but definitely worth it for recruiters and hiring managers to find you. So the first thing I would recommend is putting your full name on there and then uploading a picture of yourself. And even if you don’t have a professional photo, you can just go ahead in front of a plain white wall or any color wall and just take like a selfie of yourself just wearing like a business casual blouse or something appropriate on top.
Just make sure you don’t use a picture from like a party or show like beer cans or any alcohol involved or like someone’s arm around you. Just make sure it’s a picture of yourself and just professional and just yourself smiling is a good one. Yeah, and it can be overwhelming when you are redoing your LinkedIn.
There’s a lot of pieces to it, so split up the time and do one thing at a time. A good thing to do is to look at someone’s profile that you think looks really nice and you can get some ideas of how they laid it out and what types of things they added. There’s an about section. That’s a great place to showcase, just like an overview of who you are and what you’ve done.
It gives you a chance to add interests and details about yourself that you wouldn’t be able to normally. So it’s a great section. You can create a little paragraph about yourself, just expressing who you are and what you do. It’ll give an overview to anyone who looks at your page, just a brief description.
So I think it’s a great idea to make sure that’s up to date. Definitely. And even if you like, you’re switching industries or jobs, this is a great place to put that 10 plus years teacher, like transitioning into whatever industry. It’s really great. So then people will see at a glance what you’re looking for.
Also putting like the open to work banner on yourself. And also I think if you choose the open to work banner, you can choose preferences. So when a recruiter goes to your profile, you can see, oh they’re interested in like a junior recruiter, like a technical recruiter, a sourcing position. So that helps a recruiter understand for what titles you’d be interested in, even if your current or past experience like doesn’t match up with that.
So I think that’s helpful just to be specific as possible. Just so those people who are reaching out to people about jobs, they can find your profile pretty easily. Yeah, and there is the option, that you do not have to have the green banner on your profile. So there’s an option where you can hide that you’re open to work.
So just people like us who are recruiters can see it, and then it gives us an idea of what types of jobs you’re looking for. So we know that if we’re reaching out to you, we’re at least reaching out to you for something that is of interest. So I think that’s definitely a great piece of advice. Definitely. As far as like job descriptions, can you go over what to add under job titles on your profile and why that might be beneficial?
Yeah, so I think it’s pretty similar to what you would have in your resume. You don’t just want to write out paragraphs or tell a story or just have bullet points. You want to have action items to show like what you completed at the job. I was actually helping someone with their resume, I think it was yesterday, and I was letting her know that it was just like very generalized.
She was a recruiter and it didn’t even say like what industry was she was in, what kind of positions she recruited for. So the more specific you can be, the better. No one is ever going to say, oh, you’re way too specific on your resume. People always say you’re too general. So definitely put in all the information that you can, make it like action items, don’t just say “did this, did that,” really put some numbers and data in there. And then just the reason for doing all of that is because a job title at one company, like a manager, could mean an independent contributor at another company. So I think just making sure that you include if you have direct reports, include what you do, what your day-to-day looks like. Like your best accomplishments.
So just make sure that you put everything just because it can mean a lot of different things. And that will help recruiters narrow it down to see if you’re a best fit for the role in the company. And if not, then they won’t reach out if that’s not something you have experience with. So it only makes like their job easier as well as for you.
You won’t have people reaching out to you for something you’re not interested in or have experience with. Yeah, I agree. Different job titles can mean different things, so it’s always good to give that overview and you’ll save yourself time and the people that are reaching out to you sometimes. So I think it just benefits everybody.
I also think it’s super important to include all of the skills that you’ve possessed over your professional career, and even in college. When you are listing those skills, you can get endorsed for them. So if somebody has witnessed you doing well with those skills, they can endorse you. And that just shows that other people can advocate for that skill that they’ve seen you do.
So I think that’s also a really great thing to add. And it also helps us recruiters find you. So if you have a skill that we’re looking for a client or a job, we can search that skill. And if you have it on your profile, you’re going to come up in our search. So I think that’s also a good point to make, and a lot of people don’t know that’s something that happens.
And unless you have had experience recruiting, so I definitely think that you need to make sure your skills are up to date and keep adding them as you accrue them. Yeah, that’s a great point. I was definitely going to highlight that as well because I’ve definitely seen like soft skills, hard skills, pretty much like anything I’ve seen nurses just put like nursing in there.
If you have like a first aid certification, if you have experience with some type of hardware, like you can put anything in there because that’s how recruiters are going to be able to find you. And I don’t think there’s a limit on how many skills you can put in there. So definitely any systems that you’ve used at your role.
Any soft skills, any hard skills, put that in the skills box. And that’s how the recruiters will find you. So that is a really great tip for sure. And another thing, I think it’s actually under skills or somewhere near the bottom, there’s a recommendation area. So you can either give recommendations or you can request a recommendation.
So what that would mean is you would just find like a current or past colleague preferably someone who’s worked above you, so it doesn’t have to be like your direct manager, maybe someone who’s just more senior than you can just send them a message on LinkedIn, it’ll send them a request and you can just say, “Hey, it was great working with you at this company. It would be really great if you could share about how we work together.” And just say thank you so much in advance. And usually people do it. I’ve asked three people to do that for me and they all did it, which was very nice. But it just is kind of like a digital recommendation letter. Any recruiter or hiring manager can scroll down and it just gives them a better idea of how well you work with others, what projects you’ve worked on, all that good stuff.
So I think that’s a really good tip. And worst thing is people can say is no. So it doesn’t hurt to try. And all it is, is sending a message. So I think it’s a really good idea to do. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I just think it gives us a better idea of who you are and what kind of environment you like to work in.
So that is a great point. I also think that it’s really important that you start building your network if you haven’t already and continue to do that. It’s not something that you stop doing ever. It’s something that you can continue to do. This is a professional platform. It’s great to continue to build those relationships.
And once you have those relationships, make sure you’re checking in with those connections that you do have in building the rapport that you have already started. It’s only going to lead to further doors being open for you and opportunities that you might not know that will come from ’em.
So definitely keep networking and following people that are people that you could see yourself working for, working with, or jobs that are desirable to you. You never know what’s going to come from a follow or a connection. I can’t emphasize enough how big networking is, especially on this platform. Definitely. And if you don’t know where to start with networking, start looking for people who have the same job title as you as other companies.
Because then you’ll see their content, maybe that’s relevant to what you do in day-to-day. Maybe that can spark some interest to share about like the different types of softwares you work on, maybe the systems you work on, maybe anything going on like locally for you. So just kind of follow people.
Then if you’re looking to change jobs, definitely follow, connect with any recruiters. Anyone who looks like they might be hiring a hiring manager. Anyone in leadership. Cause I think it’s important when you are interviewing for a company, not only to do your research, but to stay up to date with like their current news and just kinda what’s going on culturally at the company.
So if they’ve had parties going on, maybe they just had an anniversary, anything like that, maybe a big celebration for a goal that they had. Just to stay up to date on that. Maybe like their post follow, their page. It can’t hurt. Yeah, that’s how I found Hirewell, so I’m a big advocate for networking and following people. Definitely. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Remember to check out all of our content on TalentInsights.Hirewell.com and follow us on LinkedIn for more content, and have a happy start to your new year. Bye everybody. Bye.
