Try to find out how you can create your LinkedIn profile to get your first technology job? You can feel like a significant challenge if you’ve never used the app, or if you use it so rarely, that you get hundreds of requests waiting for you every time you log in.
How do you present your work history, while still indicating that you want your future in technology? If you are making a career pivot?
Why do you build your LinkedIn profile to attract technology companies and recruiters?
The critical question is, how do you make sure you convince your new boss that you want to transfer in the hiring results?
In this post, I’ll talk about how you should set up and refine your LinkedIn profile specifically if you’re looking to improve your career and recruit technology. We will cover the must-haves and fun stuff LinkedIn has and some things you need to leave behind.
Will I still need a profile for LinkedIn?
The brief reply: yes!! Wendy Saccuzzo, a career coach, says, “[LinkedIn] is a beneficial platform to make you visible, and visibility is crucial to finding a job.”
It is particularly true in today’s world, where the recruiting process happens more and more remotely.
A web site/portfolio, an updated resume, and a LinkedIn profile may seem redundant but are all critical components of your online professional identity.
Contrary to a summary that is usually one page and customized to a specific role, your LinkedIn will include a more comprehensive work history and detailed descriptions of your work. So your LinkedIn, unlike your website, which only receives the visitors you send, will get much more traffic. It is because it has become an immense employer recruiting tool.
Some detail about LinkedIn before we dive in
The main reason you ‘re at LinkedIn is probably to find a job. It is, therefore, essential for you to know how recruiters and employers use LinkedIn.
Just as you are searching Google for the details you need, companies hiring LinkedIn are looking for job applicants. How LinkedIn determines which profiles in its search results are keywords.
Keywords are the words and phrases to explain your work, abilities, duties, context, etc. Recruiters and hiring managers use keywords to help them find LinkedIn applicants. Most of them have paid LinkedIn accounts to find the applicants that best match what they’re searching for.
All this means that the more relevant keywords you use in your profile to explain your skills and your experience, the more likely it is for companies that employ you to be identified.
I don’t suggest stuffing keywords that could at first impress you a lot but are bound to backfire if you don’t have all the skills you ‘re using in your profile. Yet don’t be afraid that you have other essential keywords and repeat them many times.
Until you start!
I strongly recommend that you switch off sharing for your profile edits before you start. It is beneficial if you don’t want your current employer to know you ‘re looking for jobs, but it is also good not to inform your contacts about your LinkedIn profile changes.
You can monitor this in these same settings if you want to defend yourself against our current employer testing your LinkedIn profile. You may also opt to make noticeable or not each part of your LinkedIn profile.
The Do Should Have LinkedIn :
- Attach a professional photo profile
According to LinkedIn, up to 21 times more views than profiles can be received without the image. Avatars and photos are nice, but the professional standard is to use a picture.
That said, you could not use a photo profile for reasons. Discrimination in hiring is genuine, and it can expose you to racism, sexism, ageism, and more, by uploading a photo. I highly recommend that you upload a photo when you feel relaxed. It enables identifying you by recruiters and hiring managers who would most likely recognize you who meet you.
You will not have to pay a professional photographer for a formal portrait for your LinkedIn profile photo. Make sure the photo you are using is:
- Based
- Well illuminated.
- Latest Latest
- Mid-torso catches or shoulders back
- Provide relevant contact information
In the standard view of your LinkedIn profile, your contact information does not show, but it is essential to include it so that employees or other contacts can quickly contact you.
You can include: in the Intro section of your profile:
• Websites
Enter links to your website, site of your client, forum, RSS feed, or other websites. As I have written posts for the Skillcrush forum, I have added a link to it as one of the other pages and included the ‘papers’ in the site description.
• Rental.
LinkedIn lists only a country of residence, but adding a single city will allow you to find results. Recruiters may be searching for candidates in metropolitan areas, and you may be able to list a city on additional recruitment lists.
• Industry
LinkedIn provides only the option to select one industry for your profile so that you want to pick one that suits most of the jobs you are looking for. This is another criterion of quest used by recruiters. (If you are working in two industries or looking for jobs, consider setting up different LinkedIn accounts for each sector.)
• Contact information
Think about how open it is when you decide whether or not to include your LinkedIn profile in this section. It may be best to leave your telephone number and street address for convenience and protection. But please ensure you provide a suitable email address because messages can be restricted via LinkedIn.
- Add a concise, carefully chosen title.
The headline is the title that says what you do at the top of your profile.
If you don’t update it, your title and company will be your latest headline. However, you can change it to reveal whatever you want.
And you certainly do what you want to update it. One explanation for this is that you do not wish your old work title from another sector to appear there as you move segments, tossing out hiring managers and recruiters.
You can change your title to something, so take advantage of this power. An easy technique is to use the job title, even though you haven’t got it yet. Things such as:
- Application Developer Front End
- Creator of the Internet
- Virtual Salesman.
- You may also add your experience (if it benefits you), related experience and unique niches
- Professional CSS – Flexbox, Ui Development, and Animation Technology Web Developer
- Accomplished digital marketer and SEO lifestyle brand strategist
- If you want to be skilled, you can even capture other relevant skills before changing your career:
- Front End Designer with healthcare expertise
- Web Developer (with more than ten years of media experience)
- Experienced web designer/developer and digital marketer
Your title can only be 120 or less, so keep it focused. Have only the keywords that will help you get the work you want. If some kind of experience is not appropriate for your future technology career, leave it out of your headline.
Look for the words used most frequently in worklists to identify keywords to be used in the headline. (This is another time you can look at individuals’ profiles in these types of roles.)
- In summary, tell your story.
The summary section is the open area under your title, one of the leading LinkedIn features for professional improvement. You can learn about your expertise and unpaid development experience and relate the points of your work history as well.
In the overview, the most important thing is to say your story. This means that you have space for at least three or four sentences to display your personality and make you unique, but it can take up to 2000 characters (or around 350–400 words).
“Get your profile on LinkedIn very personal,” says Dobson. “Speak a real-life story.
Don’t know how to tell your story? Try to answer questions like:
- Why do I want to work in technology or change my career?
- What excites me?
- Why does my job move to me?
- How unique is my story?
- What are employers expected to know about me?
- How proud am I?
- Enhance your work experience
The number of roles to list on your LinkedIn can be difficult to decide, particularly if you change your profession.
Saccuzzo explains that LinkedIn can be the place to include all of the details of your professional experience while you need to keep your CV on the page, and how it relates to where you go now. “To remove all you’ve done before is a mistake. You will demonstrate how your history can be passed.
In other words, don’t erase all your experience if you are moving into technology. It may be worth removing them if you’ve worked in a strange job for a short time in your career. When you graduate ten years ago, for example, you do not need to mention your tasks in college, unless you think that they help you tell your story and are essential to your current quest.
However, “If you’re in the middle of your career or a career transition, make sure your LinkedIn represents the role that you want to play.” “Review your encounters section to show what energizes you versus only what you can do.”
As in your curriculum vitae, your professional experience on LinkedIn should include specific information about your most important tasks and accomplishments.
Definitions and percentages are the most precise and easiest way to clarify and hold in mind what you have done. Quantify your success and accomplishments whenever possible. Rather than “controlled the email newsletter,” seek “the email newsletter open rates from 6% to 19%.”
The percentage may or may not work with your past roles, but always results can be shown. Explain how your job influenced the bottom line if you can not measure them.
Then use words of action that illustrate effects. Try: accomplished, developed, began, led, doubled, produced, produced.
Since LinkedIn requires unique URLs for each account, one can only use your first and last names while the other uses your first, middle, and last names
Linkedin.co / in, linkedin.com/in/irfanshafi and linkedin.co.uk. Or the other account might include the field it concerns, such as linkedin.com/in/irfandesign, or your place, such as linkedin.com/in/irfannewyork
- List your competence
I already discussed how critical it is to customize your search profile for LinkedIn. So, it’s coming here again …
If people are looking for candidates with experience or skills in those fields, fill out the LinkedIn Skills form.
LinkedIn will automatically recommend multiple skills for you based on your profile information. However, it is up to you to choose (or to add if you do not consider your own) other abilities.
You may have up to 50 skills, but it’s a better idea to start with a dozen or so. You’ll just be adding filler beyond that.
Join your knowledge areas such as graphic design, UX, front end development, etc. List any instruments and technologies which distinguish you, such as Adobe Suite, ReactJS, GitHub, etc. Contains, of course, languages such as HTML, CSS, Python, JavaScript, or others. And don’t miss out on essential “soft skills” such as remote work or management.
Hint: these days, you might abandon skills commonly anticipated in tech, such as time management, teamwork, word processing experience, etc.
You can (and should) rearrange your skills according to the positions you want. And you can pick three qualifications to be your top skill after choosing four or more skills.
LinkedIn the Nice-to-Haves :
- Attach a custom background photo
When you set your LinkedIn profile to the background picture, it is not worst to have the default brand blue with a subtle graphic. But why not take advantage of an easy opportunity to show more personality to recruiters?
You should select an image that is already oriented towards your landscape and as similar to an ideal size of 1584 x 396 pixels (because cropping and positioning here, prove difficult). Keep your profile relevant so that you do not send a mixed message and try something that works well with your image.
- Include your jobs and preparation
Wait, why is this guide not considered to be a “must-have” portion of education? Since technology is not always a prerequisite for formal training. It’s not uncommon for a supervisor to have no idea whether an employee went to school.
Even your education can be another excellent way to “prove” what you can do. And individual recruiting managers will search for graduates at other colleges so that they can’t hurt to demonstrate theirs.
If you have completed training in technology, listing training will help prove you are ready to enter the industry. They can list educational programs or boot camps, through which you have acquired technical skills (such as Skillcrush!) and any associated certifications, such as project management or Scrum certifications.
While you don’t have to include a lot of information about your degree, Saccuzzo recommends mentioning your degree or institution’s full name because alumni may want to communicate with you. Sharing your degree or principal will help fill in the holes of your career and help you search out opportunities in different fields. For example, many businesses value people with business or marketing experience, no matter what the role they now play.
- Request recommendations
You should ask your bosses, friends, and customers (past and present) to write about their work experience. LinkedIn suggestions “Available references upon request” are now outdated on abstracts, but LinkedIn recommendations are vital. Saccuzzo says, “The recommendations made by LinkedIn make your skills real and validate.”
You can ask for one if you have no recommendations.
Ask customers to write one or, if they have already written a review, ask if they will post it as a recommendation for Lined In. Propose recommendation swaps with current or former employees, classmates, or even supervisors provided that you offer to make a recommendation in return.
You may believe like only managers or customers are required to compliment their employees or superiors, but managers do need evidence that they are a good manager or customer.
You ‘re not going to have to go overboard. There are plenty of one or two useful suggestions in the area you want to focus on. “When you are moving, you can also obtain recommendations from colleagues, for freelancing or volunteer work,” Saccuzzo says.
- Include other information relevant to technology
In addition to your LinkedIn Profile’s essential parts, you can list the accomplishments and experiences that contribute or will make you a more memorable candidate for your new career in technology.
These are other areas:
• Completions
Essential examples: you were part of a hackathon team, you finished a hundred-day code challenge, or you won a Dribbble design contest
• Medals and prizes
Relevant standards: You were the employee of your company of the year, you were classified under 30, or you spoke at a WordCamp function.
Companies • Companies
Related examples: coding workshops, professional groups, or online communities (in person or virtual!).
• Projects
Relevant standards: you have contributed to the open-source app for food cooperation companies. You have run the digital marketing for your local sports league or create branding for your dance group.
• Experience volunteering
Examples of this: you managed the WordPress platform for the largest animal shelter of the region, run online clubs for local kindergartens, or coordinated a virtual fundraiser for your favorite organization.
- Set your LinkedIn URL
LinkedIn will create a slug for your account, but it is more professional to customize (and more comfortable to remember for others). LinkedIn has a tutorial for your public profile URL configuration.
Who should not be included in your LinkedIn profile
Now that you are confident you have everything you need for a decent LinkedIn profile plus a few extra features for a high profile, it’s time to make a quick test to ensure you don’t have something that holds your LinkedIn profile out of the best.
- Your action updates
At the beginning of this article, I clarified how to deactivate alerts when making profile changes. You will not end up sending dozens of notifications to your contacts while editing your summary!
- Account photos of other men than you
Your photo profile will show you and you alone. This is not the place for your cat, children, or others. LinkedIn is the professional edition, not the personal life, so save group pictures or wedding images on other sites for sharing with friends and loved ones.
- So many contact details
It is essential to protect your privacy and protection on LinkedIn just as it is worldwide. You can only imagine your LinkedIn profile information with your first degree links or network. Your chances of being considered for a job would be incredibly slim, however, as it would only make your name, number of contacts, and area clear to most people.
Alternatively, you should share contact details such as your name and address while still making it easy for recruiters or recruitment managers to reach you.
- Days of schooling
While you should always remember how long you have been in a job, you don’t have to share school dates. This is because it isn’t vital material that can date you and make it (unfortunately) easy for recruiters to use age discrimination even though they don’t.
It can go in both ways. You have not recently finished school, so you are not considered too young for a job, so if you have gone to school long ago, it might be proper not to mention dates that would preclude you from being considered too old.
If you only want to hear from colleagues who are not affected by age constraints, it may be a good idea for you to share your dates.
- Effective career experience
You should most of the time, including roles that are not connected with your current search. You can show how your skills can be transferred to your new field and help to tell your story.
Whether it is not practical, or if a job you have done doesn’t match in any way with where you’re now with your career, you should abandon it. This is usually the case with your first jobs: part-time and weekend work at secondary or college, with example.
- You don’t want to work with skills.
It’s nice to have a long and reliable list under your LinkedIn profile skills section (while it is still less than 50). However, if you want to step beyond all fields you used to work, don’t feel you need to have an ability only because you have it.
If you also list past positions in your experience section, employers will recognize that you have other credentials. But if you mention them, the keywords might make you a better candidate for jobs you don’t even want in search results.
- Data not matching
When your LinkedIn profile works its magic and takes you to the next stage in the recruitment process, you can almost definitely share your curriculum vitae with the recruiter. Make sure that your LinkedIn profile matches the information, so your experience is consistent.
- Forms, errors in orthography or grammar
Your LinkedIn profile is much like your currency in terms of proofreading because you have to go over everything to identify and delete any misspelling forms. Or errors in grammar. Reviewing reveals how well you can interact with bosses and how committed you are to working. In case of doubt, ask a friend to read it.
- Text walls
One thing you should have in common with your resume and your LinkedIn profile is that none of them has daunting text walls. Recruiters should get rid of very long sentences and paragraphs that are hard to look at and difficult to understand. We will look at thousands of candidates, and they can use short sentences or bullet points quickly and easily.
- Generated mouth words
And a final way to be heard by LinkedIn recruitment managers is not to sound like anyone else. LinkedIn’s communication and career expert listed LinkedIn ‘s ten most overused buzzwords. Look at it, then go to your favorite online thesaurus for more original and relevant words to be included in your profile and recognized by your recruiters.
If that is taken into account, a LinkedIn profile should be provided to give you a picture of who you are, what you have done, and what you can do as a professional, both in your previous roles and in your future in technology.
Naturally, you will need to regularly update your profile as you know more and gain more technical knowledge. But you know that your LinkedIn is ready for your job search with the updates above.