Introduction - Why Your LinkedIn Profile Is More Important Than You Think

LinkedIn is basically a database of candidates profiles. When you are on LinkedIn, you are exposed to a sea of recruiters who are looking for suitable candidates to fill open roles.

This is a chance for you to get noticed by them and hopefully it leads you to a possible role change that comes with better pay or better opportunities.

However, far too often, people do not optimise their LinkedIn profiles. This decreases their probability of getting noticed by a recruiter.

Let’s jump into how you can optimise your LinkedIn profile and increase your visibility to get headhunted for your next role.

How to Optimise your LinkedIn Profile - The P.I.E. Method

1) Photo - you should use a “professional-looking” photo which means:

Preferably a clean background with no other people around.
You should be dressed appropriately and with an upright posture.
Aim to use a photo with only half of your body (in other words, not a full body shot). This is so that your face will be visible when it gets cropped into the circle.

2) Introduction - There is an “About” section in your LinkedIn profile.

I recommend including how you actually introduce yourself in an interview in this section. Don’t be too worried about it being too long. This is the first thing that people will read about you so it should be exactly how you want to be known.

3) Experience - This is the most important one. Whatever you have written in your resume, you should add that into the experiences section of your LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn is a tool for recruiters to find candidates, which means it contains search functions. If LinkedIn is a database of profiles, how do you get found? Keywords from your experiences. Use this to your advantage to get found by recruiters.

Here’s my own LinkedIn Profile to show you the P-I-E method

I can understand why people do not want to maintain their LinkedIn Profile…

8 out of 10 interactions on LinkedIn with recruiters tend to go like that:

Recruiter will ask “Are you interested in this role?”.
When you reply “Yes”, they reply with a separate request for your resume AGAIN - “Great, please send me your resume or submit your application via this link.”

Even if you updated your LinkedIn profile, recruiters still end up asking for your resume. Worse, after submitting your resume to the recruiter, you get ghosted.

This results in people thinking that there is no benefit to maintaining and updating their LinkedIn profiles.

So why is it that you may have everything updated on LinkedIn yet recruiters still ask for your resume? The answer is actually an operational answer.

How Recruiters Actually Work - this is why they still need your Resume

A recruiter’s job is simply to filter out a shortlist of candidates to present to the hiring manager. Imagine being a manager, do you think you prefer receiving candidates via 5 PDF resumes in an email or receive 5 LinkedIn Profile URLs?

In addition, there are also no strict standards to how people maintain their LinkedIn profiles. . Every candidate’s LinkedIn profile is going to look different and becomes hard to compare.

Thus, relying solely on LinkedIn profiles ends up not being a good way for recruiters to assess different candidates and share profiles. This is why the recruiters always prefer to receive a PDF version of a resume from you.

Concluding Thoughts - Why You Should Still Update Your LinkedIn

Although recruiters may still require you to provide a resume, it should not mean that you do not maintain your LinkedIn profile.

With the P-I-E method, you will not take much time to keep your LinkedIn profile updated. My recommendation is just dump whatever you have written in your resume into your LinkedIn profile. Regularly update your latest work experience every 6 months. When you actually need your resume, you have already documented most of the recent work experiences.

LinkedIn contains a treasure trove of job opportunities. When used properly to engage with recruiters, it can be a stepping stone for you to get opportunities that may not even be posted publicly by the companies. Use that to your advantage!

Even with the P-I-E method that I have shared, there are much more ways that you can optimise your LinkedIn Profile - for example, posting and commenting to create personal branding. However, that is an article for another day. Subscribe to my newsletter so that you are informed when that article is out.

Side Note:

This is one article of a series of 5 articles. In this series, I explore the relevance of resumes today and share how to optimise your resume. This came about because I had went onto a radio show on Money FM89.3 to discuss about this topic. You can watch this on YouTube by clicking here.

I highly encourage you to read this first article before moving on to the others as I want to preface the reason for why focusing on your resume is important. More importantly, illustrating to you the impact your resume could have on your financial wellbeing.

A Simple Guide to Optimising Your LinkedIn Profile - The P.I.E. Method