These 7 mistakes on your LinkedIn profile are killing your job search

BY GWEN MORAN

The team at digital selling firm Vengreso was ready to hire an instructional designer. They found someone on LinkedIn who seemed perfect for the job, and he likely would have gotten an offer after a cursory interview. But there was just one problem, says co-founder and Chief Visibility Officer Viveka von Rosen: He had no contact information listed.

That was the “final straw” from an already weak profile, says von Rosen, author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day. Sure, she could have messaged him through the platform, but they didn’t know how long it would take him to check for messages and the fact that his profile made it more difficult than necessary to contact him was a deal-breaker. The team moved on to look for someone else. “Update your contact information and consider including it in your summary, too,” she says. “Make it easy for them to find you.”

You may have built your LinkedIn profile and network over the course of years–or you may pay little attention to it at all. Either way, your profile may have red flags to recruiters or hiring managers, undermining your job search. But refreshing it doesn’t have to take long. In addition to keeping your contact information up-to-date, here are seven more red flags to keep in mind.

MISTAKE #1: A MISLEADING HEADLINE

The headline next to your photo is one of the most valuable pieces of LinkedIn real estate you have. Use it wisely, says  executive recruiter and career advancement coach Suzanne O’Brien. If you have aspirations of moving up, don’t use your current title in your headline. Instead, opt for something that reflects the job you want without being misleading. “Try using something that encompasses your current role and where you want to go, along with your unique value,” she suggests. For example, “Leadership in Product Management with Mobile and Healthcare Expertise” or “Marketing Professional for High-Growth Companies.”

“For the company that’s looking for someone with that expertise, they’ll know right away that you’re a ‘bull’s-eye’ candidate and they want to speak with you,” she says. Avoid very broad descriptions like “Consultant” or “Tech Explorer with a Systematic Approach.” Also, it’s not the best place for a quote from your favorite author, she says.

MISTAKE #4: RESUME MISMATCH

If you do nothing else before your next job hunt, do this: Pull up your resume and compare it side-by-side with your LinkedIn profile, Boggs says. Make sure the dates, positions, and job titles match. When resumes and LinkedIn profiles aren’t aligned, recruiters don’t know what to believe, she adds.

See all 7 Mistakes and the complete Fast Company article

 

5 Tips To Game The LinkedIn Algorithm

Adrian Dayton

Does LinkedIn keep pushing your posts down to the bottom? Are your posts constantly flagged as ‘low-quality?’ The Problem is that you don’t know how LinkedIn thinks. There are some simple ways to boost your visibility across the site, increasing your social media presence.

1. Add Followers
You can’t be seen on LinkedIn if you don’t have many connections. It’s very easy to add some; go to the “My Network” tab, then you have three options. There is the recommended section, people that LinkedIn thinks you might know. Then, the individual search, which isn’t the most effective way to add connections fast, but if you want some specific people in your feed, this is a great way to do it. Finally, there’s the import personal contacts tab, which is a fantastic way to add most people that you already have the contact information for. You can literally import your entire list from Gmail or Outlook and double your LinkedIn connections overnight. 
**  If too many people reject your connection requests you can have you account locked.  Send out a smaller batch each day instead of sending out to your entire contact list...

4. Find Your Audience
It is better to have a group of 100 people who constantly comment, like, and share, than 10,000 people who never interact with you. Think of it as a web. The average user has 450 connections; if you have chosen these 450 connections very wisely and they all like to share and comment, each one of those 450 connections are sharing to their 450 connections. The numbers get very large, very quickly. You also have the potential for these article to spread beyond the first two degrees, this is what makes the viral nature of social media so intriguing. So, find an audience that likes your posts is willing to like and share them.

See all 5 tips and the complete Forbes article

5 Tips To Build Your Personal Brand On LinkedIn

Vidhi Bubna

Since LinkedIn was founded in 2002, it has grown to a community of 660 million-plus members. LinkedIn has opened new arenas of usability for professionals on the platform. Benefits of using LinkedIn extend beyond networking, increasing job opportunities, finding business leads as the platform creates several intangible benefits like creating a personal brand name and increasing credibility.

“Everyone is trying to build their personal brand on LinkedIn. It’s not just top level management and well established leaders, but also students, freelancers, start-up founders and hustlers. Everyone recognizes the benefits of a large following and high engagement on the platform and users want to leverage the platform to take advantage of the benefits of personal branding,” according to Tannisha Avarrsekar, founder of Lokavyuha Strategy and Communications.

Though the platform can be leveraged to create several benefits for its users, gaining visibility and personal marketing on the platform has become increasingly challenging. The most common tips given by personal branding experts include posting a professional personal profile picture on the platform, updating skills, education and work, and posting regularly and commenting.

Since most of the users are now aware of these basic tips, there is no real profile differentiation or branding created by incorporating these strategies on the platform. Posting regularly is not the ‘key mantra’ for personal branding on LinkedIn anymore, because posting regularly may not increase your visibility or network. LinkedIn marketing in 2020, in the era of COVID uncertainty calls for a different approach for building a personal brand on LinkedIn.

2) Share Posts of Other Influencers Which Are Relevant

Though most LinkedIn influencers recommend posting content on the platform regularly to increase engagement, often they take for granted that not everyone has the time to create original posts on the platform. Creating an original post or article may be time consuming and challenging to do on a daily basis. However, it may be easy for you to repost relevant content on the platform to keep your audience engaged.

“Sharing content of other influencers is a great way to leverage the platform to your advantage. You don’t need to have original content to post, reposting content which is different and giving the creator credit for it helps to boost your own profile. Your main aim should be posting great content, even if it means reposting articles, research papers or posts if you don’t have time to create content yourself,” says Avarrsekar. Reposting content of influencer’s also increases the quality of content on your feed itself, ensures high reach and engagement.

Moreover, sharing content of LinkedIn influencers increases your reach within the influencer’s network itself. Hence, the ‘share’ tool on LinkedIn is a quick way to increase engagement and build your network and it is definitely easier than posting original content.

3) Leverage The Power of Storytelling to Enhance Your Personal Brand

Sharing your personal story on the platform creates a more human touch and makes your personal brand relatable to other users on the platform. Moreover, this strategy is easy to use because writing about your own experiences from memory takes less time than doing research to create a post.

Harsh Karamchandani, co-founder of ed-tech start-up Edunify, explains “You don’t need to be a popular personality to establish your personal brand on the platform. The platform empowers everyone because it gives everyone a voice. You can use the power of storytelling on the platform to highlight your personal life experiences which other people can learn from. Being the co-founder of a start-up, I use the power of storytelling to narrate my journey, experience and challenges, and my stories resonate with other aspiring start-up entrepreneurs which increases my engagement.” Storytelling also creates a personal brand which is more genuine and real because users can see the real person behind the LinkedIn profile.

Most often people hesitate before posting their failure stories on LinkedIn. Posting about failures on LinkedIn can increase engagement and depict a strong personality based on constant learning. According to an article written by Vani Kola, managing director of Kalaari on LinkedIn “Is failure the new success?”, failure creates constant learning in one’s life and reflecting on failure is the path to improvement. Owning up to your failure’s on LinkedIn shows that you are willing to own up to your mistakes, learn from them and grow.

Posting about failures is an important part of personal brand building because it resonates with the audience via storytelling. Personal stories are likely to get more engagement and reach on the platform because they directly connect with the audience and display the real person behind the LinkedIn profile.

The power of storytelling can also be extended to highlighting the stories of people associated with your brand. Prerna Mukharya, founder of Outline India, a data firm focused on ground level impact, explains how Linkedin can be a powerful tool to meet the right people. “One of our initial projects at Outline India was through linkedin and I have not forgotten that. It is essential to stay authentic as one tries to make a point. Personal stories (stories from the field in our case about data collection), have been instrumental in reaching out to our target audience. I receive about 7-10 messages each week from people across the spectrum, sharing appreciation, kind words or looking to contribute to our greater goal of - creating social impact through data. In most cases, I do not know these people, but they are willing to offer their expertise, and their time to know about our story at Outline India.” Mukharya says. Hence highlighting stories of people who you are working with and interacting with is a part of your own storytelling and can be leveraged to create your personal brand.

5) Don’t Forget to Leverage the Power of a LinkedIn Article

While communication experts recommend making posts on LinkedIn regularly, very few focus on the power of writing articles on the platform. Around 45 per cent of the article readers on LinkedIn comprise upper level management. Hence, writing articles on the platform increases the possibility of you connecting with upper level management which increases your rating on the platform and boosts your following. Moreover, building relationships of increased engagement by top level management and getting their comments on your posts ensures more credibility towards your personal brand.

Though it may be challenging to increase the visibility of your posts, increasing visibility in an article can be much easier because only 0.2 per cent users on LinkedIn have published articles on the platform.

Here are a few general tips you can keep in mind when you are writing an article to create your personal brand on the platform. The tips are based on research conducted on LinkedIn publisher statistics:

-         Write long form articles, around 1,900 words to get the best engagement.
-         Post “how-to” and list format articles because they get higher number of shares
-         Split the article into 5, 7 or 9 sub headings
-         Ensure that the article title is 40-49 characters
-         Do not add videos to the article unless absolutely necessary
-         Try to add exactly 8 photos to the article
-          Post some original images with people’s faces in the article

See all 5 tips and the complete Entrepreneur article 

Make these 4 LinkedIn profile updates now to get more job offers

By Abhijit Tamhane

Just one of these strategies used on a LinkedIn profile made them discovered up to 27 times more in searches by recruiters. 

 

If you’re on the hunt for a new job, there are few tools more powerful than your LinkedIn profile. It’s a one-stop shop for recruiters and hiring managers to learn more about your professional story, so make sure your profile represents not only your experience and strengths but also your goals and what you want to accomplish.

Here are a few new ways to update your LinkedIn profile to give you an edge as a job seeker.

1) Signal to your community that you’re looking

With the Open To Work feature on your LinkedIn profile, you can quietly signal to recruiters that you’re open to new opportunities, and you can now engage your entire professional community in your search. To let the broader LinkedIn community know you are looking, just add an #OpenToWork photo frame on your profile photo. By doing so, when your profile comes up in a search or shows up in the feed because you comment on or “like” a post, professionals beyond your LinkedIn connections will see your #OpenToWork photo frame and can connect you to job openings they’re aware of or facilitate an introduction to a hiring manager. We know that candidates on LinkedIn are nearly four times more likely to land a job at a company where they have connections, so imagine the possibilities of reaching LinkedIn’s community of 700+ million professionals.

2) Spotlight your skills

Recruiters view skills as critical when looking at job candidates. In fact, we’ve found that members with five or more skills listed on their LinkedIn profile are discovered up to 27 times more in searches by recruiters. That’s why it’s important to list your skills—both hard and soft—on your profile.  If you want to turn it up a notch, you can now validate your hard skills with 95 Skill Assessments that you can test against. Once you complete an assessment, a badge gets added to your profile which highlights your proficiency.
And if you don’t have all of the required skills for the job you want, online learning is a great way to build them and increase your chances of getting hired.

See all 4 updates and the complete Fast Company article

Here Is A LinkedIn Secret Weapon To Land A Job

Robin Ryan

Kathleen contacted me because this baby boomer needed career assistance. Her husband had gotten an executive position in a new state, and they were moving halfway across the country for his opportunity. That meant that she was going to be leaving her program manager position behind as the job had was only part-time after the COVID-19 pandemic happened.

She found a Program Manager job that she was exceptionally well-qualified for at a Fortune 500 tech company. She said she wanted to apply, but marketing herself was not her strong suit. Kathleen stated she needed a professional resume writer and LinkedIn Creator to be able to demonstrate that she had the skills to do the job. We discussed the challenges and culture of trying to switch industries as she was coming from a nonprofit organization wanting to move to a tech company. One of the things I mentioned to her was it would be beneficial if Kathleen looked through her LinkedIn connections to see if she knew anybody at the targeted organization. To my surprise, she said, “Oh yes, I do know someone there. The two of us met at a conference I attended, and he was sitting next to me in one of the sessions.” My next question was, “Will he remember you?” And she said,” I don’t know, but I’ll reach out and see if he does.” 

So she sent him a message and didn’t hear back. She had his phone number and then called him. After some prompting about where they met, he vaguely recalled who she was. Kathleen did ask if he was willing to pass on her resume to his employer. He said,  “Sure, send it along.” That led to the resume going to the appropriate people internally. A few days later, she got a call from the internal recruiter talking to her about the job. She described this as her dream job. It took four interviews, but she did indeed land the coveted position. 

As the job market heats up and gets more crowded due to all the layoffs from the pandemic, internal employee referrals are going to make even more of a difference than before. Some companies also pay their employees a fee if they refer someone who is hired and remains at least a few months. 

Michael worked in the finance office for a small manufacturer that had 600 employees and his company was looking for a new sales rep. Lief found the opening and then checked his LinkedIn connections to determine if anyone he knew worked their. He had Michael as a connection. He reached out and ask Michael if he’d send his resume on to the company’s recruiter. It worked. Leif got an interview. After two interviews and passing the company’s personality test, Leif started working there two days ago. 

Referrals are powerful. And today, getting a referral is a secret weapon to get through the crowd and be seen by recruiters, HR, and hiring managers. Anytime an internal employee refers someone, that person receives a solid review. Jobvite, a talent acquisition system reported that employee referrals only make up about 7% of potential candidates, but the number of those referred candidates hired is 44%. That makes this well worth the effort to try and locate a connection to someone inside the company. LinkedIn is the ideal place to search for connections and get a referral. 

Here are some Dos and Don’ts to follow when you utilize this strategy.

Read the Dos and Don'ts and the complete Forbes article

90 Trending LinkedIn Hashtags to Expand your network and engagement

Ketan Parmar

 
When it comes to using social media for professional purposes, no other platform can match the level of LinkedIn, itself. LinkedIn is the best professional platform, allows us to connect and socialize with likeminded people having the same career aspects. As social media for professionals, LinkedIn is a reliable platform amongst online marketers, business owners, HR departments, and content creators, to develop their networks.

Linkedin hashtags are a very powerful tool to use, especially when you are actively using it for building your brand. Similarly, on most other social media hashtags, LinkedIn hashtags are also a way to reach a larger audience with targeted interest. For that understanding which hashtags to use in your content, becomes crucial to growing your network.

So in this post, we are sharing you some of the best trending LinkedIn hashtags, you better to use in your next posts. Such hashtags are widely used by professionals, and support your post to reach its maximum post expectations. Ultimately, that helps you to present your message in front of the right audience. But, the first question is,

Do Hashtags Work on Linkedin?

The short answer is, absolutely. Yes.  As a social media community and not just a job searching platform, Linkedin is the top leading online communities for professional peoples. And yes, hashtags at LinkedIn are also a powerful way to promote your post and reach it to the maximum exposure.

Like other social media like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn hashtags are also widely used to push the content to a wider audience. When being used wisely, mean relevant topical hashtags can boost the post impressions and so the engagements in return.

These are also a better way to reach the target audience and present them with your unique ideas through the posts. You can use hashtags on Linkedin at every type of content from text to visual format contents.

So, if you are at Linkedin to promote your brand and drive more brand mentions, then you better to use relevant hashtags that fit your industry area. For that, search with some relevant hashtags that you can add in your regular posts.

Not limited to marketing perspective only, but as you know that Linkedin is a better place to find your next job and project as well, you can share the post about vacancies at your company there too. And, yes with using the right hashtag in a job updating post you can reach the right candidate seeking the same job profile.

If you are looking for some trending LinkedIn hashtags to grow your network and promoting your services right way, then here is the list for you.

Trending LinkedIn Hashtags 2020

1. #Networking
2. #Workfromhome
3. #Homeoffice
4. #workingathome
5. #Life
6. #Entrepreneurship
7. #Work
8. #Success
9. #Creativity
10. #Inspiration

See more Trending Hashtags plus Hashtags on:

Popular LinkedIn Hashtags for Management

LinkedIn Hashtags for Digital Marketing

Best LinkedIn Hashtags for Business

LinkedIn Hashtags for Hiring

Top LinkedIn Hashtags for Lawyers

Best LinkedIn Hashtags for Self-help Posts

LinkedIn Hashtags for Job Seekers

AND

Why Using LinkedIn Hashtags is Important?

Quick Tips to Use LinkedIn Hashtags

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 Ways to Increase Your Profile's Ranking on LinkedIn - What can job seekers do to attract a recruiter’s attention on LinkedIn

By Nancy Collamer

It’s critical to increase your profile’s ranking on LinkedIn so you’re more visible to recruiters. There are four ways to do that.

Two: Expand your network. Having a large network boosts your LinkedIn search ranking. So, be sure to reach out to people like former colleagues, classmates and neighbors on a regular basis. The more people you have in your network, the greater the likelihood that a recruiter will find you through your connections.

This is especially useful for connecting with recruiters at smaller companies, who typically don’t pay for the premium LinkedIn Recruiter tools. Since they don’t have access to expanded search capabilities, they depend on first and second-degree connections to source candidates.

Four: Be active on the site. Maintaining an updated LinkedIn profile shows recruiters that you’re professionally engaged. Share relevant content, comment on other people’s articles and link to articles you’ve written.

See all 4 ways and the complete Forbes article with more tips and info