When it comes to LinkedIn, students are likely to start asking some questions: Is it too early to start? I’m not working/I’m not a professional, so what’s the point of a LinkedIn? But students born post-2000 know better than anyone that we live in a society that craves social media. Many markets are heavily driven by social media, and we’re the ones who truly get the first opportunity to take our knowledge and apply it to career searching.
A lot of adults will tell you how much they wish they had been in a position like we are today, yet many of us are completely unaware of the type of potential LinkedIn has to change our future. Here are five tips to hone your LinkedIn personal brand to be the best it can possibly be.
1. Start Early
What’s the main purpose for students to jump on early? Creating a strong LinkedIn profile allows you to build relationships with companies in fields in which you may be interested. It doesn’t matter what career you want to go into. Having a compelling LinkedIn account puts you one step ahead of the vast majority of your competition, no matter your age, your background, etc. Start following companies and connecting with people who work within those companies. It’s easy to see why this will help drastically when you move past the next threshold in your life.
2. Have an “All-Star” Profile
You need a 100% completed profile. No exceptions. According to LinkedIn, people that have a completed profile are 40 times more likely to be found than people that don’t. And get this: out of the 400 million members on LinkedIn, only 50% have a completed profile. Take it upon yourself to make sure everything is filled in, because at the end of the day, LinkedIn is essentially a search engine for recruiters. LinkedIn categorizes search results for recruiters by the level of completeness of candidate profiles. Don’t be in that 50% with incomplete profiles. LinkedIn will guide you, step-by-step in completing your account, so get to it!
3. Picture Quality
I cannot stress enough the importance of an awesome profile picture on LinkedIn. Whether it’s a portrait with a blurry background or a headshot with a solid color backdrop, a photo that includes just you looking at the camera with good lighting is really important. You can smile, straight-face it, whatever best represents you as a person and will catch the eye of a recruiter. No professional headshot? No problem. Put on a professional shirt, find a solid background and a friend with portrait mode. Time to put those Instagram skills to work.
4. The Summary
Yes, this is the daunting big white space where you can write whatever you want. You want to know what you need to do here? Sell yourself. You want to write a compelling summary so that people who came across your profile will say, “I need this candidate!” Main tip here: you don’t necessarily want dense paragraphs. Many people go through LinkedIn on their phones, so make sure your description is “mobile friendly.”
5. Your Connections
What’s more important–quality or quantity? Depends on the situation, right? Well in this situation, both are crucial.
For the quantity of your connections, a lot of recruiters will say it’s frowned upon to have fewer than 500 connections. However, as students, you can get away with not having this many, especially when recruiters are looking for interns. But just imagine a recruiter clicking through candidates and coming across an impressive young person with 500 connections. WOAH! Definitely a way to stand out.
It’s important to pay attention to the quality of your connections, not just quantity. As stated in Tip #2, LinkedIn is a search engine, so having numerous connections from a company that you are really interested in working for is definitely a plus. Let’s say for example, a recruiter from Google finds your profile. If they see you have 10, 20, maybe even 50 connections with employees at Google, that’s going to put them at ease and give them enough confidence to reach out to you.
If used correctly, LinkedIn can completely change your career trajectory. It allows you to flip the traditional model of applying and “hoping” a company is going to call you back. If your profile is what it has the potential to be, you could have recruiters coming to you. So make sure you update your résumé and transfer the information over to LinkedIn. It’s time the millennials get involved in the career searching process. Happy connecting!
