What can you do to attract recruiters on LinkedIn?

Posted on July 23, 2019 by admin

LinkedIn is the single most tool with which you can attract recruiters today as the recruiters are searching for you proactively on LinkedIn.

The top fold is the single most important part of your LinkedIn profile. That is where the recruiter spends at least 6 seconds taking a look and seeing if you are somebody who they want to read more about.

There are three things in your top fold that are pretty darn important. The first one is your photograph. It doesn’t have to be fashionably done. You just need good lighting, neutral backdrop but the single most important factor is to be approachable. You need to look like somebody the recruiter wants to reach out to, work with and present to the hiring manager. So don’t be serious, have a smile on your face, be yourself, be approachable. The second one is your headline. When recruiters are searching for and they are putting in those keywords and the system is very much like the internet, it’s going through everybody’s profile and determining who has those keywords, how many time they have those keywords, and whether or not those keywords are in the headline. And if you have those keywords in the headline you improve your chances of moving up in the search results of that recruiter. So have an idea on what kind of job you are looking for, what kind of skillsets that everyone is looking for when it comes to your particular field of expertise. You can find those usually at the endorsement section at the bottom of your LinkedIn profile. You want to find the 5 or 6 skills that you want to leverage in the next career, the ones that you know are in demand and that provide a lot of value. And the third one is the summary. Summary by definitions means short. If you know who you are as a business of one you should be able to explain in just a few sentences what value you bring. Roll up your experience, give the numbers, facts & figures to validate who you are, entice to keep reading. So keep the summary short and engaging. Keep the keywords in mind and consider the keyword density. The more you have the keywords in your profile, the better. It’s very important that your work history and your resume mimic each other. Make sure that these always are the same because recruiters are going to look through both the documents and if they see any discrepancies they could get confused. You have to keep your titles accurate and at all costs make sure to get the actual company logo next to your name in your work history. Recruiters can then roll their mouse over that company and learn everything they need to know about that organization which means you don’t have to explain that in the work history. You can keep your bullet points of what you have accomplished and that’s what you need to understand. Recruiters need you to be objective, they need you to give just the facts, they need to be able to read through and see what you have done. So mention the numbers, the stats, the percentages, the goals that you have reached. Those are the things that should be in your work history. Keep it clean and always tie it back to those skillsets. How many projects have you managed, what size were those projects, how many people worked in those projects, those are things that a recruiter wants to know about you.

The endorsement section is where you can emphasize for the skills you most want to be known for, the skills that you want to be found on by the recruiters. The first thing you have to do is think about the 10 skill sets that are most important to you in your profession. These are the skillsets you most want to get endorsements for and here’s why. LinkedIn works very similar to internet search and so if you have 60 endorsements for project management, then that means 60 different people within your network endorsed you. That’s shows something to a recruiter, it shows them how active you are within your network and so by having those endorsements for 10 key skill sets you are going to statistically improve your chances of showing up in the search & you are going to validate that recruiter you have the skills that you say you have because you are getting third party credibility. So make sure you have the time to edit the endorsement section and put the endorsement section at the very top.

There are still some sections at the very bottom of your LinkedIn page. There are influencers, who are you following, telling what experts you are reading up on, groups that you participating in, industry organizations, etc.. And probably the most important, what companies you are following. This where you create an interview bucket list and this is something which all the companies will partner with someday.

Resume

Your resume must mimic your LinkedIn profile as much as possible. Do not put a really long-winded objective statement or summary. It’s not going to get read. Also, be really careful with your language. People tend to get really subjective and flowery and overconfident when they are writing their resume. A great tip is to get certain 10 key skills in the endorsement section of your LinkedIn profile and turn it into two columns that you put right at the top of your resume. Their eyes are going to be drawn immediately in and the recruiter is going to be able to validate your experience. Now, keeping with that idea of validating the experience lets move into the work history of your resume. It should absolutely mirror what you have done in your LinkedIn profile. Please don’t have different titles, different explanations of the work, that’s very confusing. A recruiter is going to be handling that resume off to their hiring manager and they probably may have described you in some detail to that hiring manager. So they would want that consistency there. Now, lastly, let’s talk about the design of your resume because that is equally important. If a recruiter is skimming through your resume for 6 seconds their eyes are going to work in a Z pattern through your resume. So we need to think about the formatting in terms of the font & spacing and even the margins in order to create the right effect. When it comes to your margin you should never be smaller than 0.8 inches in a margin. What we are trying to do here is create a margin white space effect so that the eyes are drawn into the key points that you are putting in the resume.