Creating a Rockstar LinkedIn profile — 9 things no one told you about!
By: Vinodhini S D
Tags: LinkedIn, Hiring, Data, Jobs, Analytics

First — To be found for right keywords.

1. Profile Headline

Headline is the most important section of a LinkedIn profile. Effective headline is key to making a great first impression and highlight what you bring to the table. An example of a headline could be this.

“Career Coach and Consultant who helps people create fulfilling careers”

Secret sauce: If you want your LinkedIn account to be a way that people discover you, you’ll want to place an emphasis on keywords — words which people will search for on LinkedIn. This is why my headline is sprinkled with Job titles I’m looking for and my top skills.

Example: “Data Scientist | Data Engineer | Business Analyst | Data Analyst | Business Intelligence Analyst | Python, SQL, Tableau, Spark, Hive, Airflow | AWS Certified”

2. About Section

Everyone has their own professional/personal journey and “About” section is to share your unique experience, journey and skills that will set you apart from the rest.

Most of us use this section to summarize out past experience.

Secret sauce: Split this into 3 sub sections — What is your background & experience, what roles are you looking for and what skills do you have for that future role. Relevant keywords about your ideal future role would be effective in attracting recruiters to your profile. Most of us under utilize this section and have only 4 to 5 sentences. Aim to have at least 200–250 words.

3. Experience Section

Most of us simply copy our resume and use it in the experience section.

This partly serves us well because we usually follow STAR format in the resume.

Secret Sauce: Your resume has limited real estate and you can’t afford to have detailed pointers about your responsibilities, accomplishments and tech stack. Lucky for you, LinkedIn doesn’t have such restrictions so you better make use of it. Keywords! Keywords and more keywords! Writing the tech stack you used in each role is a good way to use keywords in this section without affecting the readability. Do not cram the points into long paragraphs. Use bullet points for better readability.

Remember to highlight the impacts, results and accomplishments not just your responsibilities. Read up on STAR format if you don’t know about it.

4. Licenses & Certifications

Add relevant licenses and certifications for the future role you are looking for.

Secret Sauce: In addition to establishing your subject matter expertise, it also highlights that you are a continuous learner which is a valued attitude in the knowledge economy.

5. Skills, Endorsements & Assessments

Most of us add a few skills but don’t focus enough on getting endorsements or taking LinkedIn skill assessments.

Secret Sauce: By now, you must understand the importance of using keywords in your profile. Of all the sections, this one is particularly designed for keyword search. To add to that, LinkedIn recently increased the cap on number of skills from 50 to 100. You can now list a 100 skills on your profile. Be wise and use this effectively!

Getting endorsements would increase the weightage of the skills you are endorsed for. So is taking LinkedIn assessments for the top skills. Do it! NOW!

6. Recommendations

Getting recommendations also helps you rank higher in recruiter search.

Some of us may have questions about the credibility of recommendations. If it’s going to be always full of praises, does it even matter? It may not! I haven’t fully understood the intent behind this feature. However, it helps with the search algorithm so we use it.

Secret Sauce: To ensure a holistic view try to get a “360-degree” recommendation — a good mix of recommendations from your managers/seniors, peers and subordinates. If you are a new college graduate who has no professional work experience, feel free to get recommendation from your fellow team mates if you worked on group projects. That’s a good start!

NOTE: You do not have to get recommendation from everyone you worked with. And don’t ask for a recommendation too soon. Only if you worked with the person for long enough, should you ask for a recommendation.

7. Projects

Most recent college graduates have this section covered in detail. Good for us!

Secret Sauce: Add GitHub links or power point presentation links, if possible. Let’s say you are a Data Scientist with 5 years of experience in Enterprise Tech companies only, but want to switch to DS roles in healthcare. This is your space to include healthcare related projects, and use healthcare related keywords to leverage the LinkedIn search. Remember? Keywords are our friends!

8. Courses

Most of the us have not leveraged this section.

Secret Sauce: Same as projects section. If you come from non-traditional background and pivoted your career to a different field, adding any relevant courses you may have done would help you with LinkedIn search algorithm. Yep, online courses are good too.

I’m an electronics undergrad but I studied electives like “Database management systems”, “Data Structures and Problem Solving”, “Operating Systems”, “Business Statistics” that are relevant for Data/Statistics space. So I added them!

9. All-Star Badge

Finally you should strive for an all-Star profile on LinkedIn.

Final thoughts

Throughout the post, I have emphasized the importance of relevant keywords. However, spamming your profile with tons of keywords would do no good for you either.

Why you ask? Two things!

Who is your audience? Who will read your LinkedIn profile? Fellow Humans, and the LinkedIn algorithm. You want to please them both!

The trick? Keywords — To please the algorithm. Readability — To please human readers. So, find a balance!

2. Even to leverage the search algorithm, you shouldn’t stuff your profile with keywords. Fellow data science aspirants reading this know how “TF-IDF” works in text analytics. Read up if you don’t!

Thanks for Reading!

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