Colleen’s LinkedIn Profile Tips

A complete or ‘all star’ profile can attract opportunity and connections to you instead of you needing to put in all the effort to find them. These will help the algorithm work for you.

LinkedIn says that users with complete profiles are 3x more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn.

LinkedIn tells your story going forward; write it to support you to get where you want to go. Use your profile to communicate your brand – your why – as well as your skills and experience. Highlight the skills you most want to continue to use and grow in your profile to support you to navigate your career in this direction.

You will need the following sections for an All Star Profile:

• Headline – visible under your name and specifies what you do, who you do it for and why that’s important to them. If you have a name that may be hard to say, record how you say it using the feature available when editing via your mobile
• About – align this with your Why, the Highlights of Skills or Professional Profile from your CV and use that as a base for your ‘about’ section
• Experience – to start, copy and paste from your master CV or merge a few parts of your targeted CV’s to keep your possibilities open; highlight key skills and share story examples to add flavour to your profile
• Education – copy paste from CV and add in a story of what you learned from that experience that wasn’t part of the degree
• Licenses, Certifications – similar to education, can be uploaded and verified
• Skills – Add in a minimum of 5 skills for which you want to be found. You can highlight skills in your About section as well as within each Experience
• Recommendations – these are gold so if you can get a few colleagues to write you a recommendation on LinkedIn that would be great. Give recommendations too!
• Banner – use Canva.com to create a banner for yourself. Incorporate the Psychology of Colours in Marketing to help you make choices that will support your why and values. Communicate elements of your ‘why’ in the banner.
• Profile Picture – make the first impression you want by getting a professional profile picture taken or by using these tips

Remember to use keywords well throughout your profile

If you don’t already have a profile, create a draft in Word to get started

You will need 50 contacts in order to reach All Star status

Take a look at LinkedIn trainer Petra Fisher’s LinkedIn Strategy.