A common LinkedIn complaint – “I have over 500 connections on LinkedIn. Why aren’t recruiters calling me?”
Here is why – because your competition has over 500+ connections as well.
It’s not just your presence or connection count that will get you found by recruiters. It’s the content of your profile.
Whether it’s your resumé or your LinkedIn profile, always remember – content rules!
Recruiters are using LinkedIn Recruiter, a special platform inside of LinkedIn designed for recruiters to find, connect with and manage candidates. And candidates are searched by – you guessed it – keywords!
When clients ask me to review their LinkedIn profiles, two default settings are most commonly overlooked.
The first is the default URL of their profile. LinkedIn will add a combination of your name and random numbers to your URL.
And job seekers unknowingly copy the same URL to their resumés, making in non-memorable and creating a negative impression to the reader that you are not detail oriented or tech savvy.
You can easily correct this.
Google “Customize LinkedIn public profile URL” or check this link and change your URL to be more closely aligned to your name. Get rid of all the numbers.
The second default setting that impacts your search results for recruiters is the default headline (the section just under your name). LinkedIn will autoset your headline to your last job title and company.
The words in your headline has a very high keyword weighting for ranking your profile when recruiters search for candidates.
So you must pack it with keywords from the research you should be doing from your target job title.
For example, instead of the default “Health and Safety Coordinator at ABC company”, you could change that to:
Heath and Safety Coordinator | Safety policy and procedures | OHSA and WSIA | Consultation | Incident Management
You have 120 characters for your headline. Make it count!
