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.
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.
HIGHLIGHT YOUR BEST WORK
The more complete your profile, the better the odds that recruiters will find you, so it’s important to include examples of your past experience and accomplishments. The new Featured section lets you highlight the work you’re most proud of by pinning to your profile links to media presentations, articles you’ve written, or presentations from a previous job or speaking engagement. You can also showcase your posts or published articles on LinkedIn, which can help you stand out to new opportunities.
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.
HELP OTHERS PRONOUNCE YOUR NAME
We all know that pronouncing someone’s name correctly is important in making a good first impression, but sometimes we see someone’s name in writing and aren’t sure how to correctly say it. With LinkedIn’s new name pronunciation tool, you can add a recording of your name and attach it to your LinkedIn profile, so others can learn how to pronounce it correctly. If you’re a job seeker with an interview on the horizon, check to see if anyone interviewing you has this feature turned on. Pronouncing their name correctly will help you kick the meeting off on the right foot.
Making these updates to your LinkedIn profile is a great way to kick-start your job search, and show who you are, what you want, and why you’d make a great candidate to potential employers. But don’t wait until you’re looking for a new job to update your profile. A strong LinkedIn profile, highlighting your latest accomplishments and skills, could help you discover other exciting opportunities you may not have thought of and set you up for long-term career success.
Abhijit Tamhane is the director of product management for LinkedIn profile.