Transcript
Page 1: Take Your LinkedIn Profile from Good to Great

TAKE YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE FROM GOOD TO

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Page 2: Take Your LinkedIn Profile from Good to Great

The Missing Link Whether you’ve been working on your LinkedIn profile for months or just a few days, you know that employers are definitely checking you out on LinkedIn. You know that if you’re not on LinkedIn, you’re hurting your chances of landing a job. And you’re willing to do anything to finally land a job. So, you have your work experience listed, your education, and a summary introducing yourself. You’re linking to your LinkedIn profile anytime you apply for a job. But nothing seems to be happening. Employers aren’t calling you to setup an interview. It feels like you’re no better off now than you were before you had a LinkedIn profile. Either LinkedIn is bullshit or you’re missing something. I can tell you from personal experience and the experience of others that: LinkedIn is not bullshit.

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Who are you? What do you want? What do you have to offer? Why choose you over someone else?

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Those are the questions that your LinkedIn profile needs to answer. Listing your work experience and list of responsibilities doesn’t do that. Adding a line in your summary that talks about your goals and summarizes your skills, doesn’t do that. Having a profile that is 100% complete doesn’t do that either. You need to give employers more. Your LinkedIn profile isn’t your resume. Your resume is garbage. Because it doesn’t do enough to answer any of the questions that make employers really want to meet you. The answers that make LinkedIn worth your time.

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Who are you? What do you want? What do you have to offer? Why choose you over someone else?

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PERSONALITY

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Who Are You?

A resume is a list of skills and responsibilities you claim to have. It doesn’t talk about whether you’re fun to work with or you love some (healthy) competition. And those things matter to an employer who is trying to figure out if you’d be a good fit for their team. Why? Because you may have all the right experience and skills to become a doctor. But if you don’t like working under pressure, why would they hire you to be a surgeon in their trauma center? Companies spend thousands of dollars on each employee that doesn’t work out. This has forced them to start looking beyond resumes and interviews in order to protect themselves from more bad hires. This is where LinkedIn comes in. LinkedIn lets employers discover new candidates based on more than a resume, all in one place. Because it allows candidates, like you, to share more than your work history. It allows you to share who you are. How?

By telling your story. By getting personal. By sharing your passion, ideas, and values. You have to show employers that you have the skills and the right character traits needed for the job you want.

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Your Summary

After your picture and headline, your summary is the next thing that people look at on your LinkedIn profile. This makes it a crucial piece of real estate on your profile, and the perfect place to start telling your story. Here are two approaches to start getting personal with your future employers:

1.  Talk about where your passion originates from.

•  I was the kid in grade school who took those grammar rules to heart. I annoyed all my friends and classmates as the unofficial grammar police.

•  I always hated math class growing up. Until I had to take Mr. Fairmont’s statistics class in the 10th grade. My belief that math was useless was obliterated by the insights that statistics provided into the world’s issues.

2.  Talk about how you got to where you are.

•  While in the military, I lived in several Indonesian provinces. After seeing how these people lived, I felt compelled to help them. As I traveled back to Indonesia through multiple organizations, I began writing about the struggles of these people. This led to my passion for international journalism.

•  After seeing the movie Food, Inc., I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching the facts the movie proposed. It seemed impossible that what these farmers were doing could actually be legal. When I found nothing but loopholes and supporting legislation, I chose law school over business school and never looked back.

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Volunteer Experience & Causes

Recruiters and hiring managers look favorably at candidates who volunteer. Why? Because giving up even an hour of your time once a month to help someone else, says a lot about you. It says that you think beyond yourself, you’re caring, and a good person. If you volunteer regularly, it also shows commitment and dedication.

Projects

Projects on your LinkedIn profile provide you with another opportunity to show more of who you are. This works best for projects you’re working on outside of work or outside of your regular duties at work. For example, you may be working on creating a new game app outside of work. This shows passion, initiative, and a desire to keep learning and challenging yourself.

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The Real Deal

Kay Allison’s summary is a great example of how sharing where your passion began creates a personal connection while still being professional.

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Who are you? What do you want? What do you have to offer? Why choose you over someone else?

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CLARITY

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When someone visits your LinkedIn profile, they need to know what you want. Otherwise, they won’t know if the opportunity they have to offer is right for you. And you don’t want to miss opportunities. So, how do you bring this clarity to your profile? By understanding yourself. You need to know what you want. It’s understandable if you’re not 100% sure right now. But you can get closer to the right answer by considering the following questions:

1.  What can you do better than most people? What are others always asking you for help with?

2.  Think about the last time you were working on something (professional or otherwise), where you lost track of time or were “in the zone.” What were you doing?

3.  What skills or accomplishments are you most proud of?

4.  How would your closest family and friends describe you? (Ask them!)

These questions are meant to help you understand what you like and what others see as your strengths. Knowing what others see as your strengths, points you in the direction of what you’re truly great at. When you pair what you like with what you’re best at, you have the chance to find jobs where you can be happy and successful.

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What You Like

Using questions 2 and 3 as your guide, make a list of the activities you enjoy doing and the skills you like using. These are going to guide you in the direction of the jobs that you’ll enjoy the most. With your list ready, go to O*NET Online: http://www.onetonline.org/. On O*NET you can search for jobs by abilities, interests, knowledge, skills, work activities, work values, and more. Search for jobs based on your list of interests and skills. Once you get your list of recommended jobs, click through and take a look at the detailed information for each job. This will include:

•  The interests and values that would make that job the best fit for you •  The knowledge, education, skills, traits, and abilities needed to be

successful in that job •  Typical tasks and work activities performed in that job •  The tools and technology most often used in that job •  The median salary and expected growth of that job

Choose Your Jobs

Now that you’ve explored different jobs, make a list of all the jobs you felt would be the best fit for you. Which jobs included the most activities you’d enjoy, and required the values and interests you already possess? Feel free to make the list as long as you want. You’ll be narrowing down the list in the next step.

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Bringing Together What You Like and What You’re Best At

Now, using questions 1 and 4 as your guide, make a list of the skills you’re best at and those that people value the most from you. Then, use O*NET to match up the jobs on your list with your most valued skills. The jobs that match up with what you’re best at make up the roadmap to finding the jobs you’ll be happiest doing. Ideally, you’ll want to focus on one job or a few jobs that are related to each other. That way your LinkedIn profile will be targeted and it’ll be easy for others to see what opportunities would be best for you. Still Looking for the Right Job

If you have multiple jobs that seem like a great fit then do some more research into what goes into each of these jobs. For example, let’s say your list includes jobs in differing fields like Economics, Actuaries, and Meteorology. What you can do is use LinkedIn to find people in each of these fields and ask for 20 minutes of their time to discuss what their jobs are like. Don’t cross off a job that seems perfect until you find out it requires you to do something you don’t like. All jobs include tasks that you won’t particularly like doing. Just make sure that they’re only a small part of your job. If you have a crippling fear of public speaking and you need to give presentations on a weekly basis, then that won’t work for you. But one or two presentations a year won’t ruin a job you love the rest of the time.

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If, on the other hand, your skills don’t seem to match up with any of the jobs on your list, DON’T PANIC!

You have options. You can always work towards getting the skills you need for the job you want. If you’re worried about money (and who’s not), then go ahead and get the job you need now. Look at jobs that are in-line with the skills you have today and choose to pursue one of those. Then with financial security taken care of, work on learning the skills you need for the job you want. It’s okay to take the job you need, so you can have the job you want. Your career is an experiment. One wrong move won’t ruin the rest of your career. You’ve simply learned something new that you can apply to the next test in your career experiment. You’re figuring it out as you go along like the rest of us. There is no guarantee that you’ll find the job you love right away. But the more you know about what you like and what you don’t like, the easier it will be to get to the right job. So pay attention and don’t beat yourself up if you change your mind along the way. It’s part of the process.

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Who are you? What do you want? What do you have to offer? Why choose you over someone else?

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FOCUS

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Now that you have a clearer idea of what you want, you can use your LinkedIn profile to show it and have the right people find you. And the easiest way to do that is by using keywords. Why Keywords?

Establishing keywords forces you to focus on what matters most to you. And each time you mention the same skills and activities on your profile, you’re pointing out to others that these are the things that relate most to you. So, for example, if a software company wants to hire a programmer and your LinkedIn profile talks about nothing but programming, you’ll automatically seem like a good fit. This may sound obvious but people often fail to do this on their profile. Keep It Focused

Keep in mind that you need to limit your keywords. Think about it, if you have 50 keywords, they stop being “key” words and become just words. So try to keep your keywords list to less than 15. So, What Are Your Keywords?

To identify your specific keywords, you need to know what skills will make you the most successful in the job you want. But depending on your experience, you may not have every single skill required for that job. That’s okay. Your goal is to bridge the gap between the skills needed for the job you want and the skills you have.

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The Match Up Game Start by finding at least five descriptions of the position you’d like. If you’re not finding too many descriptions using one title for the position you want, go back to O*NET and look at the list of alternative job titles (at the top). Then pick out the skills and activities that pop up the most in the descriptions. You can use a site like Tagxedo.com to paste in the descriptions and use the keywords highlighted to point you in the right direction. These are the keywords that will make you the most marketable and bring you up in search the most often for the positions you want. Match them up with the skills you have and activities you’re good at, and there’s your keyword list.

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Using Your Keywords

Now that you have your keywords, you can use them with some SEO magic to focus your profile and get found for the right opportunities. Your Headline & Position Titles

Keywords included in your headline and job titles have the greatest impact on LinkedIn’s search results. So, you’ll want to include 3-4 of your most marketable keywords there. Here’s an example of using keywords in your headline or job title:

Social Media Manager Specializing in Content Marketing | Community Management | Digital Design | SEO See the impact of this change: Search for your most marketable keywords before updating your headline or job titles. See where you show up on the search results page. Then check again after you’ve made the change. You’ll quickly see yourself jump up on the list, likely on the first page of your search results, if not in the top 10. Your Summary

After your headline, your summary will be the next thing that people read through on your LinkedIn profile. While this does have an effect on people finding you through LinkedIn search, it’s more important for helping hiring managers and recruiters easily see what you’re all about. So as you tell your story and get personal with your future employers, include a few lines on the skills you have that make you a great fit for the job you want.

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The Real Deal

Paul H. Simon's summary is a great example of how you can use keywords to focus on your most valuable skills and what opportunities would fit you best.

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Your Skills & Endorsements

Endorsements may be one of those pesky LinkedIn features that you ignore over time, because people keep endorsing you for skills you don’t have. But they are helpful in getting the people with the right opportunities to your LinkedIn profile. So, start off by making sure that all your keywords are added to your skills list. You want to be sure that people are endorsing your marketable skills. Then, to keep people from endorsing you for unrelated skills, uncheck the “Include me in endorsement suggestions to my connections” box in your Skills and Endorsements Settings.

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Clean Up

The last thing you should do to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is focused, is to remove anything that isn’t helping you with your goal. 1.  Don’t include irrelevant jobs in your work history You may have had a job waiting tables in college. But unless you’re planning on being in the food service industry, you don’t need to include it on your LinkedIn profile. If you don’t have a lot of work experience or you’re worried about gaps in your work history, then go ahead and list the position. But be sure to highlight the skills and activities that relate to the job you want, even if they weren’t a part of your main duties in that role. 2.  Focus on your main marketable skills Each position should highlight your most marketable skills before anything else. So, for example, let’s say you were a teaching assistant in grad school for an economics professor. Your main responsibilities were grading papers and creating test study guides for the students. The job you’re after now is a financial analyst position at a bank. The position requires strong analytical, research, reporting, and accounting skills. Grading papers and creating study guides doesn’t really show off any of those skills. So instead, you’re going to focus on the research you did for a few of the professor’s publications. You’ll point out that the research required extensive data analysis as you summarized global economics data into trends. There’s your marketable skill.

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Who are you? What do you want? What do you have to offer? Why choose you over someone else?

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CREDIBILITY

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Prove It

You’ve added some personality, clarity and focus to your LinkedIn profile. This puts you ahead of many of the people on LinkedIn. But there’s still a piece missing. Something that will bring it all together and set you miles a part from other candidates. Proof. Right now, your profile is like your resume in the fact that it’s just words. All you’ve made are claims about what skills you have and where your passion lies. What credibility does that give you? How many times have you heard, “You can’t believe everything you read” – especially online? But what happens when you share a link to the blog you’ve been writing for three years on fashion? What happens when you show pictures of you giving a presentation on social media in front of a crowded room? What happens when you offer a video of you working on your latest design? You make it real. You provide context. Now your claims seem more like facts. Now you seem like a better candidate than others who only offer words. Remember, companies are spending thousands of dollars on bad hires. They know what it’s like to hire someone who says they can run a social media campaign, only to find out they don’t know what a RT is.

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Show Them the Goods

So what do you share? Share anything people can see, hear or experience. Like links, pictures, videos, presentations, websites, portfolios, blogs, articles, designs, audio, interviews, recommendations, projects, certifications, classes, ideas, and any other creative thing you can come up with. What you share depends on what you’re trying to show. If you want to highlight your communication skills, then a picture of you sitting at your desk won’t do much. Instead, share a copy of the latest press release you created. Note: Don’t share any company documents or information that is not open to the public. If it’s meant for “Internal Use Only,” don’t share it. If you’re not sure, then ask! Sharing Party

LinkedIn has many options to help you share your work and prove your skills. This starts with offering more than a summary, work history, and education section. Remember, you can share updates or add recommendations, projects, certifications, publications, volunteer experience, organizations, test scores, patents, and courses. You can add links or upload files to your summary, work history, and education. You can also add one link to projects, publications, and certifications. For a list of supported file types you can upload, click here. For a list of approved sites you can link to, click here. You can link directly to other sites but based on how the formatting has been setup for that site, it may or may not show up well on LinkedIn.

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What If I Don’t Have Samples of My Work?

Maybe you don’t have a lot of samples of your work. It could be because you hadn’t thought of keeping copies of your work before, you’re in between jobs right now, or you simply don’t have that much experience. No worries. You can always create new samples of your work. If you don’t have that much experience, this could also be your chance to get some more experience by creating new work. Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

If you’re thinking that creativity isn’t really your thing or you need some inspiration, here’s a list of 13 ideas to get you started. 1.  Comment on and share industry-related articles and ideas through your

LinkedIn updates. 2.  Take pictures or videos of you on the job, volunteering, or working on an outside

project. 3.  Ask for LinkedIn recommendations. [Template] 4.  Create a presentation on a subject where you have a lot of experience or

record a video of you giving that presentation. 5.  Start a blog, video blog or podcast about your field. Talk about new ideas in

your industry. Interview people in your field. Show that you’re passionate about what you do.

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Still More Ideas!

6.  Take a new course. There are lots of free or cheap classes you can take to add to your skills and show that you’re dedicated to learning more. Tip: Instead of using the courses section to record a class you’re taking, list the class in the education section. This way you have more options for sharing information about what you’re learning in the course and why you’re taking it.

7.  Collect positive feedback from happy customers in a nice PowerPoint presentation.

8.  Write articles for industry-related sites or publications. Many of the smaller sites and publications are constantly on the lookout for new writers with a different perspective on topics within the field.

9.  Record a video of one or more past co-workers, professors, and other colleagues recommending you and your work.

10. Want to prove your social media skills? Then go create a social media campaign for yourself or a product you love. Track your results and give people access to them through a website or blog.

11. Want to prove your website designing skills? Then go create a fun website about your favorite TV show or hobby. Then share the link.

12. Want to prove your investment skills? Pick a stock every week that you’d invest in and write about why on your blog. Then track the results of your stock picks (as if you’d invested) and share them on the blog once a month.

13. Want to prove your JavaScript skills? Create an interactive web page that lets visitors play a simple game. Then add an explanation of how you created the game and include samples of the code you used.

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Whatever it is that you want to prove you can do,

go do it!

Then share your results and experiences.

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Who are you? What do you want? What do you have to offer? Why choose you over someone else?

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Good to Great

With personality, clarity, focus and credibility infused into your LinkedIn profile, you’re ahead of at least 80% of others on LinkedIn who’ve only filled in their profile. Now when hiring managers and recruiters visit your profile, they will quickly be able to see if you’re a good fit, and if you are, exactly what you can offer them. You’ll give them confidence that if they reach out to you for an interview, they won’t be wasting their time. For more tips on improving your LinkedIn profile or landing the job you want, head over to PrometheanBrand.com →

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