How to improve your profile on LinkedIn?

Searching for a new job opportunity? Or just to make sure your profile page is having the right visibility? The most important to guarantee is to have your profile optimize, at least the basic information that could open some doors in the future, regarding recruitment or just growth your network.

1. Basic information: Fill your basic information with your first and last names, city/country (this last one helps you to upgrade your profile to the next level), email address, and links to your portfolio/ website. You should always select your education to appear in your intro. This way people will know quickly what is your academic history and sometimes could be a way to grab their attention.
2. Pic: upload a picture with a professional look or if you are from a creative area you can try something more "funny" but try to not be cringe.
3. Cover: choose something related to your professional area. It could be a simple image, or you can highlight your core skills for example. Don't forget, it is important to have a responsive cover because almost 70% of people are using mobile phones to access social media these days.
4. Headline: use this to promote the areas that you are interested to work or just show you are expertise in it here. You can do either a mix between your current job position and the areas that you are good at. Read this LinkedIn search.
5. #OpenToWork: This hashtag is a recent LinkedIn feature (check this page too) to improve people and recruiters match, finding easily this way the right candidate/ job. You just need to edit your job preferences, add some job titles that you may be interested in, job locations, start date, job types, and whom you want to see it (for example, if you are still working on a company maybe you will select "Share with recruiters only").
6. About: Talk about your experience (years and areas/ sectors), enumerate some skills and competences, share what you are looking for (e.g:.interested in team management roles; performance marketing roles; CTO roles ). The most important here is to give an overview of your work experience in the last years, achievements, and what you want to do next, using the right keywords (the ones you want to be related to during the search). Try to avoid the third person speech, you are talking about you, not about a celebrity or someone you don't know??.
7. Featured: Write articles and post, engage people, have interaction, and just after doing it, you should feature them here; another option is to feature external links to your portfolio/website clients.
8. Activity: Make sure you comment at least 5-10 posts a day, but with relevant opinions, not just spam comments. They will be shown here and you don't want to give a bad vibe to the people that are seeing for the first time your profile. The best part is, when you are doing this right, other connections will see your relevant opinions and send invites to connect with you.
9. Experience: This is the core of your profile on LinkedIn. You must take time to understand the kind of jobs (if you have much experience) you want to share. Make sure you put the right role, chronologic time (avoid gaps between jobs), highlight the activity area of these jobs, use bullet format to list your main achievement (numbers are the best to do it, but if you don't have you can enumerate quality achievements) and tasks (makes everything easier to read). Attach your projects or company websites - it is an organized way to show your work. Try to use the same nomenclatures, consistency is important a less confusing to HR hunters understand what you are good at or at least have experience. I started to use this trick: analyze the keywords from a job match (normally they are listed at the right side) and add to my profile the ones that I didn't but could bring more people to my page.
10. Education: Add your University, Degree, Field of study, Level and ECTS credits (European only), start and end year, and some activities/study areas and achievements that you think relevant. For hunters and people, you are interested to connect, an active and dynamic person that is always doing formations will seem more interesting than someone that doesn't want to learn more. So add your workshops, formations, certifications and show that your knowledge is permanently growing.
11. Volunteer Experience: This means a lot if you really are committed to it, not just to get a better resume. During interviews, Hiring people will ask you what is your role in the project and you have to be prepared to show how this is relevant for you, not just for the community you are helping.
12. Skills, Endorsements, and Recommendations: For me, this is one of the most important parts of a LinkedIn profile, because when you work with someone and that person make the effort to recommend and endorse you, this means a lot for HR hunters. This means people like your job and soft skills, that they want to help you to be recognized for your effort as a very skilled professional.

Hope these tips help you to improve your profile! ?? They helped me in the past and I am continually working on it, finding new ways to use LinkedIn and my network to find new paths and connections.