6 LinkedIn tips you may not have heard before

My name is Natalia Ostuni Sener and I work as Associate & Marketing Manager at Interim Search. I have been working with candidate search for over three years and I am an experienced user of LinkedIn's premium tool Recruiter Professional. In this guide, I will show you how you can easily improve your LinkedIn profile and increase your exposure.

Tips 1: write what you want (for the audience you want to reach). You may not want to spell out that you are actively looking for a job, but it is never wrong to write (preferably in the summary) what motivates you and what you are looking for in your career. Beware of using clichés and stick to useful information, such as the geography in which you operate and what your long-term goals are.

Tip 2: makes you approachable. Whether you're just looking for quality networking through LinkedIn or want to get job offers, I recommend reviewing how accessible you've made yourself to other members. Under settings, there are partial options to adjust who can send you contact requests, see your provided email address and who can send you Inmails. Surprisingly few users have printed mobile phone numbers and email addresses in the profiles, which becomes an obstacle for recruitment processes with short lead times.

If you go to your own LinkedIn profile, there is a button below the profile picture that allows you to show recruiters that you are available for work. When you change the settings to be open to new challenges, this is only visible to recruiters with LinkedIn's premium Recruiter Professional account. It's a great way to show that you're a job seeker without having to print it on your public profile.

Alex Vestergaard, Relationship Manager at LinkedIn explains: “I work at LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft. If I activate “Open to work” this can only be seen by users with Recruiter Professional or Recruiter Corporate who are not in some way linked to LinkedIn or Microsoft. People who are OpenToWork recieve 40% more messages from recruiters.”

Tip 3: make LinkedIn more relevant to you. Many recruitment agencies and employers post current jobs on LinkedIn. If you follow these companies or groups, the job ads will appear in your feed. Also, make sure to adjust the settings under settings/communication where you can customize notifications and the types of news that will appear in your news feed. Also, unfollow people in your network who post information that you don't think is relevant (you are still contacts but you won't see the person's posts)

For recruiters with Recruiter Professional, people who have an affiliation with your company or similar organizations receive a label that says “More likely to respond”. In recruitment processes where time is short, these candidates are naturally prioritized. The brands and companies you interact with on LinkedIn therefore have an impact on the job offers you might receive.

Tip 4: increase your exposure qualitatively. You can actively build followers and gain visibility by posting/ liking/ sharing relevant and quality content. There is a function for the content to be both visible in your network's feeds and posted in groups you choose, which can be good for exposure. Think twice before posting to groups to ensure that the content is relevant to the group in question and that the administrators allow this type of post. You can passively increase your exposure by making yourself more searchable to other members. Partly through the settings I mentioned but also through keywords. It works just like when you search via Google - have you consistently used the title ”Chief Financial Officer”, you will not come up in searches with the word ”finance director”. Therefore, be sure to vary the words and terms - both those you write as free text and the ”competences” you specify.

Tip 5: List all the competences that could make your profile interesting. Many LinkedIn users are very good at listing their skills under Skills & Expertise but there are many who have missed this feature. As a recruiter with a tight deadline, you often have to go for concrete competencies and requirements when looking for candidates. If a recruiter is looking for a Business Controller with Excel experience, we are happy to search with “Excel” in the free text, which means that only those Controllers who have indicated Excel as a competence will appear. Think of your LinkedIn profile as your CV, you don't want to leave questions about your skills unanswered. New this year, you can also verify your achievements and certificates by taking a quiz, just press the button Take a skills quiz under Competences and certificates on your profile. Select the competency you want to test yourself in, for example Microsoft Excel - a score of over 70% correct answers gives you a certification to add to your profile. Simple quality assurance for us recruiters! LinkedIn is also generous enough to offer free online courses on an ongoing basis to constantly improve your skills. They even target job offers that match the skills you listed and certified.

Tip 6: do not spice up the content. Keep in mind that, as mentioned earlier, the line between what you state on your LinkedIn and your traditional CV is largely blurred today and that a professional recruitment agency will compare the information with what you have written in your application and other sources, not least when taking references. Check with your CV that the year and information match what is written in your LinkedIn profile.