Better practices for LinkedIn profiles.

LinkedIn is a social network in which most profesionals have a profile. There are some activities you can do on the platform, from exchanging mesages with your conections, creating content or writting comments on content that others have created. There is also the function that has become the core business of LinkedIn: Recruitment, from recruiting to finding a new job or project. 

The best practices that we'll board in this article are based on my own 11 year experience suing LinkedIn as a Technical Recruiter and as candidate; there are hundreds of ways to write a LinkedIn profile but I wanted to share the most simple and useful way,  it will only take a little more than 5 minutes to improve yours. 

For this theme we will have two versions available: 
Short version, go to the last page and check the "Profesional Experience Format on LinkedIn".
Long version, keep reading...

First let's talk about what the platform shows us if we search, afterwards, we'll focus on what a profile should have to appear on the search results.  

The two most popular search methods are: 

1. By actual and past title.
2. By key word.

1. By actual and past title
This search ​allows us to find candidates by the title of the actual and past job. To search for an Frontend, we do the following to bring up the list of possible people: 

2. By key word
Using Keyword we can find people that have said words written in any part of their profiles, including: Skills & Endorsements. Let's search JavaScript:

As we can see, when doing searches on LinkedIn, it guves us the results very similar to the criteria we used. Advanced searches also exist, they're called Boolean Search, if you have interest you can read the complete article here. 

 LinkedIn Profesional Experience Format

Now that we know what LinkedIn shows us when we search, we can prepare our profile to be found much more easily, using the following format for each job. 

Title: It's recomended to write something specific, for example: Frontend Developer, Python Developer. If you used "Software Engineer" as a title it wouldn't be that easy to locate us, because it's a ver ambiguous term.

Employment type: Explain if it is / was complete or partial time.

Company: The name of the company by which the contract was signed with; if you work or worked in a consultancy it is recommended to use the name of the consultancy as a Company and within the description write the name of the client. 

Location: Physical address where the work was performed, if it's remote, it's recomended to use the city where you work. In here you usually write where the company is located, if we do this and a potential employer searches by location (80% of the cases) we will not appear in the searches. 

Start date - End Date: Month and year when you started working and when the contract ended, if there is more than one project on the same company, LinkedIn has the option to list them inside the same company but different position, this helps when searching with a time filter on the current job. 

Headline: Here we will describe what we do in a general way, form example "Software Engineer" instead of "Frontend Developer".

Description: Activities made during the period that we worked in the company, it's recomended to use at least 5 bullets per job and add a section for Technologies used. 

Conclusion

Being LinkedIn a focused network on connecting people if we spend a few minutes writing more about us in our profile, we improve significantly our opportunities of being found. What other good practices do you know? You can contact me by LinkedIn to have a conversation about the subject. 

If you are unemployed and you are an IT professional! Contact me! I can gladly support you in your search with tips for your interviews and CV at no cost.

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​Luis Lozano
Co Founder and CEO ​