Top 10 ways to optimize your LinkedIn to get recruiter DMs
Practical and easy suggestions to get results
There are about 830 million members on LinkedIn. It is getting really popular amongst recruiters for talent search. How do we increase exposure and optimize our LinkedIn for maximum search matches? Here are my top 10 suggestions.
Profile picture: This is the most viewed area of your profile. Make sure you have an attractive picture of yourself with a good view of your face.
Cover picture: Use this area to display what your work is about. For example, if you are a product manager, show a picture of your product or service. Great scenic pictures are great too but I would suggest using the opportunity to illustrate what you do to the recruiters.
Title summary: Recruiters search for certain titles and summaries so it is important to have words that they might search for. Avoid using general terms like “customer advocate” or “product strategy” or “I love to build products”. Use industry-specific terms if possible. For example, if you are a product manager, your title summary can be “Product @ xcompany | SaaS, Supply chain, API development”. If you are a software engineer, it can be “Software engineer @ xcompany | Payment services | Node, JS”
Open to network: Make sure you go to your settings and change “open to network”.
Job preferences: edit your preferred job titles and locations.
About section: Have 1–3 paragraphs explaining your experiences and expertise. At the bottom, list down industry-specific keywords or skills. Recruiters also search for keywords.
Skills: Make sure you have relevant skills. Recruiters search for skills sometimes. For product managers, road mapping, UI/UX, stakeholder management, API, and machine learning, are popular ones. I suggest you search for popular skills for your job title.
Links: If you have links to articles or videos that you can showcase in your experience section, add them.
Experiences section: Make sure to include relevant experiences. Also, include 2–3 bullet points for each experience that highlights your impact.
Recommendations: It is a good idea to have 3 recommendations that will let recruiters know about your working style, your personality, and your strengths. I normally ask a former colleague to write me a short one-paragraph recommendation