Your LinkedIn Cheat Sheet

Your LinkedIn is as or more important than your resume nowadays. It’s an excellent tool for connecting with other professionals, learning about job opportunities and learning from others. Unfortunately, most people just aren’t that good at LinkedIn.

They either aren’t making the right connections, have terrible SEO (search engine optimization) or worse, they just aren’t using it.

Let’s get yours fixed!

• You should have a photo of yourself! Mine is me in a ball pit. I’d suggest a clear photo of your face AND a background photo to fill in that blank void that LI will use if you don’t. If you need a high quality FREE image check out unsplash.com
• Your headline should read like this <Your Title/Desired Title> | <List of top 3 or 4 relevant skills> (eg. Software Engineer | Javascript, ReactJS, ReduxJS, MongoDB — your headline is searchable! The keywords here are important as that’s how recruiters will often find you!
• Your contact information should reflect the nearest large city where you live. For example, I live in a suburb outside the SF Bay Area. I need to change my location to SF Bay Area. Why? It’s more likely to attract recruiters who are searching by location. I can guarantee you no one is really searching for Concord, CA ;)

• Your about section should reflect the same skills you listed in your headline! No need to be too verbose here, as most people just aren’t going to take the time to really read it but it is a good opportunity to share a little about yourself.

• Have some projects? Cool, share them in the Featured section with a link and a nice screenshot. This will absolutely make a hiring manager feel more confident that you are in fact a skilled developer and not some bootcamp grad who hasn’t really built anything.

• Experience — this can be a tough section if you don’t have industry experience. In that case I recommend adding projects you have worked on. For example, perhaps you created a fullstack app that has been deployed to Netlify. Add the name of the project, your role and the year it took place.
• The details you add under your experience should mention (you guessed it) the skills that are in your headline and profile section!
• Don’t just list what you did. What impact did it have? Did you lead or mentor anyone? Are there specific metrics you can point to which support your credibility as an engineer? For example, did you add unit tests where there were none? Increase the performance of an app? Introduce a process?

• Education? Depends…. If you graduated from a great school or really any 4 year institution then I would add it. Your bootcamp? Maybe. Some employers are biased against bootcamps while others aren’t. If your highest level of education is high school then just leave this section blank IMO. I absolutely encourage you to experiment with all sections of your LI and do what feels right for you!

• Order your skills so that the top 3 (the ones that are in your headline/profile/experience) show up for endorsement. No one is going to dig past your top 3 skills to endorse you for much else so it’s really important to have the top 3 be the ones you want to be endorsed for! You can easily reorder the skills any time.

• Take a skills assessment! If you fail it won’t show up. If you pass it will add to your credibility and open up more job opportunities.
• Add some relevant interests related to your profession. These interests will help determine what is shown in your feed and allow you to connect with the right people.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

• Get 500 connections! Yes you must get to the magic 500 number. It will significantly increase your ability to be discoverable!
• Add 10–20 connections a day. Scroll through your feed and connect with anyone who is in your desired field of work. It’s not weird to connect with complete strangers on LI or even DM them!
• Speaking of DMs… DM some strangers. Tell them you’re interested in their company/position and want to know if they can share with you some information about what they do… this can create real relationships with people and increase your chances of getting to an interview
• Post on LI! It’s really not that hard to get noticed on LI since barely anyone posts on a regular basis. Post once a week and if that makes you nervous at first, simply comment under other people’s posts. Something like “Thanks for sharing, I found this helpful!” or “I also use this <insert technology> and really enjoy <this other aspect of it>”

Video More Your Thing?

Watch: https://www.loom.com/share/9b4e00766c014e65a74a30837c50a021?sharedAppSource=personal_library

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