What You're Doing Wrong on Your LinkedIn Profile

Last week, I had the privilege of speaking to a group of ambitious young Asian American professionals in Los Angeles about how they could use LinkedIn to build their careers. A few brave souls volunteered to have their profiles critiqued in front of 50+ people, and even more reached out to me afterwards to ask for private LinkedIn profile advice. After reviewing a dozen LinkedIn profiles over the weekend, I noticed some common oversights -

  1. You don’t have a professional profile photo. Your profile is 11x more likely to be viewed if you have a profile photo. That’s a big deal. My general rule for profile photos on LinkedIn is to show up on LinkedIn like you would show up to an interview in your industry. For attorneys, that might be you in a suit and tie but for an engineer, you can show up in a hackday t-shirt.
  2. Your Headline is your current job title. The headline is one of the first things people see on your profile. Your headline automatically defaults to your current job title, but your job title may not tell the whole story about who you are as a professional. For example, your job title might be “Sales Associate”, but the value you really provide as a sales person are your big ideas and focus on your clients so your headline could be more descriptive: "Big Idea, Client-Focused Salesperson".
  3. Your public profile URL is not customized. It’s a whole lot easier for you and others to share your LinkedIn public profile URL when it is not a string of random letters and numbers, so take 20 seconds to customize it.
  4. Your Summary doesn’t show off your personality or passions. LinkedIn is not your resume. The Summary section is open ended for a reason - use it to showcase who you are and what you care about beyond all the buzzwords and jargon. Extra tip: a summary with more than 40 words is more likely to show up in a future employer’s search.
  5. You’re not using rich media to tell your story. Repeat after me - LinkedIn is not your resume. Rich media allows you to take your static profile and transform it into a visual portfolio. Whether it’s a video about a product you’ve worked on or a blog post you authored for the company blog, share links and media in your Summary, Experience and Education sections.
  6. You’re not leveraging the Volunteer Experience and Causes section. 42% of hiring managers consider volunteer work equivalent to full-time work experience. So if you’re donating your time and talents outside of your day job to an important cause, add this section.
  7. You don’t provide details for the Honors and Awards you’ve received. It is an honor to receive honors and awards, but "Employee of the Year" doesn’t mean a whole lot unless you help fill in the details to show just how prestigious this award was, i.e. What did you get recognized for? How many other people were selected?
  8. Your Recommendations are generic. When you ask colleagues for recommendations, make sure you remind them of specific projects you’ve worked on together. So rather than them simply saying you’re smart, ambitious, hard working, they have specific examples in the recommendation to back it up so your future manager and coworkers know what a good find you are.
  9. You only update your LinkedIn profile when you’re looking for a job. Third time’s the charm - LinkedIn is not your resume. You shouldn’t only update your profile when you’re looking for a job. You should constantly be updating your profile with promotions, awards, projects you’ve worked on. By keeping your profile constantly updated, you’re helping opportunities find you (sometimes even when you’re not looking!) versus having to proactively find opportunities.

Do these sound familiar? What am I missing? Please let me know in the comments below.

If you’re looking for more tips on how to use LinkedIn to build your career, check out my presentation on SlideShare:

Special thanks to Asian Professional Exchange (APEX) for hosting me!

Photo Credit: Flickr/fornal

Christina Ramas

Independent Contractor ?? Social Media Strategist ??WordPress VA?? I help business owners develop a tailored social media strategy that boosts brand visibility and drives customer engagement.

7 年

Thank you. Very interesting.

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Great tips nonetheless

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Why would having 40+ words reappear on an employers search?

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Dina Garcia, RD, LDN, CLT

Dietitian-Nutritionist | Motivational Speaker | Helping chronic dieters eat their favorite foods without guilt or fear of overeating

9 年

Any idea how to get the media I've added to my profile to show up on my profile when viewed from a mobile device?

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Alessandro Pezzoli

BA Lead @mySugr(Roche) | Ex BIEngineer/BIManager @Amazon|AWS Certified

9 年

Maybe a well done Windows Phone app (not the current messed up one) would be nice to increase usage and profile updates for people not able to log-in at office... don't you think? (I Don't know about the android and ios ones but what I'm using on WP is weak and user-UNfriendly... you can loose users, interest and activities from these people... despite Linkedin power)... I know your revenues come for 53% from recruiting... but if you focus so much on recruiting only, people's perception can easily be "Linkedin=OnlineRecruiter" and that's all... Isn't it still a social network??

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