Attract Recruiters to Your LinkedIn Profile Now

If you’re looking for your next job, one of the most powerful tools available to you is LinkedIn: a social network based entirely around people’s professional skills, where your main presence is your CV.

As with all the best tools, it’s possible to use LinkedIn badly and well, and getting good at it takes some time and skill. If you’re trying to get an Executive Recruitment firm interested in your LinkedIn profile, here are some steps you can take right now.

Key Words

Think about the sort of job you want to do: the job title, key skills, and qualifications and reduce this down to three key terms. You could this by looking at current job postings you want to compete for and selecting the most important terms from them. For example, let’s say you’re looking for ‘Senior Accountant’ roles with ‘ACA Qualification’ and experience in ‘Profitability Analysis’.

Make sure you add these terms multiple times to your profile. You have opportunities in the Headline below your name, the Summary section and throughout your work history, skills and education. Loading your profile in this way ensures you appear when recruiters search for those terms and put you on their radar right away.

Sell Yourself Straight Away

So, you’ve stacked the deck to ensure you’re appearing on the first page of results when recruiters search for candidates for the jobs you want. How do you capture their attention and make sure they shortlist your profile?

Your ‘tagline’ is a great place to start: it’s one of the first things recruiters look at and it’s a chance to get a short, punchy message that imprints on them that you’re worth looking at. Be dynamic, and include at least one of the key search terms you identified above. This reassures them that their search has returned a useful result. “Senior ACA Qualified Accountant, making the numbers add up” is a short, memorable introduction reinforcing one of your important identifiers, for example.

Maximise Your Summary

Your summary is the most important part of your profile: it’s like the covering letter for the rest of the page.  This is where recruiters will decide to contact you or not.

Shamelessly top load it with relevant information: this is no time for false modesty. People are only reading this because they want to know about your qualifications and experience. Use the first person to introduce yourself to the length of your experience, and your professional qualifications.

Go on to list your specialisms and the projects that you’ve used them in. Make sure you’re using your keywords, and recruiters will be beating a path to your door.