The online community Skillcrush recently released a brilliant and easy-to-follow infographic illustrating 23 steps you can take to update your LinkedIn profile. Here are a few highlights:
- Make sure the basics of your profile are up-to-date and work-relevant. Be sure to personalize your individual profile URL, provide current contact information, and incorporate both an eye-grabbing headline that effectively communicates your professional identity, as well as a photo of yourself that does the same. (Read: Save the vacation pics for Facebook.)
- Before sitting down to fill in past experiences and accomplishments, take a look at online postings for jobs that interest you. Highlight keywords that appear repeatedly, and incorporate those words into the “Summary” and “Experience” sections of your profile. That way, recruiters and hiring managers searching for those specific skills will be more likely to come across your profile. (Also, check out CAC’s Sample Keywords tool to help you in this process).
- It is also vital that you tailor your privacy settings, in order to maintain control over who sees your information. As Skillcrush points out, if you are overhauling your profile in one sitting, you may want to turn off notifications while doing so, to avoid flooding your feed with alerts on every single update — or to prevent your current employer from finding out about an active job search. For cancer survivors, in particular, it’s important to keep in mind that the online privacy conversation extends well beyond managing your profile settings. For more on privacy issues, check out our upcoming webinar on Disclosure, Privacy & Online Brand as well as the additional resources listed below.
For the complete Skillcrush article, click here.
And for more valuable tips on using LinkedIn, consult Cancer and Careers’ Guide to LinkedIn and our archived webinar Building an Effective LinkedIn Profile.
Additional Resources:
Building and Protecting Your Online Image
Online Reputation Management
Cancer and Careers’ Job Search Toolkit