How to hack your LinkedIn profile to the top of search results
LinkedIn has 1.6 million members in Singapore, or 44 per cent of Singapore’s workforce including foreigners, according to Olivier Legrand, managing director of LinkedIn for Asia-Pacific and Japan.
If you have a LinkedIn account, you face intense competition to get your profile noticed by potential employers or headhunters. Don’t worry, there are ways you can hack your profile to the top of LinkedIn search results.
1. What do you want headhunters to know you for?
Firstly, know what your keyword branding is. Define the search string that you want to be associated with.
For example, if you wish to be hired as an accountant in Singapore’s marine industry and you have SAP experience, you would need these four keywords to appear in your profile.
These are some key places to put in those keywords:
• Headline
• Summary
• Job Title
• Name of Employer (You can select the original one and customise your display name to your liking)
2. How do I get to level 1?
You need to know how LinkedIn displays its results. It shows level 1 (your direct connections), level 2 (your connections’ connections) and level 3 (your connections’ connections’ connections).
For users of LinkedIn’s recruiting solutions, they can see everyone in the ecosystem because it comes with the package.
But for people like you and me on the free-to-use LinkedIn account, the way to get results closest to paid users is to have many connections.
3. How do I increase my connections?
I grew my connections organically from day one. It took me at least four years to reach my current number of connections of more than 8,000.
The good news is there is a way to hack this. The key is to be connected to someone with lots of connections so you will appear as his or her level 2 results.
For readers of this article, that person would be me. Just go to my LinkedIn profile page and send me a connection invite under “Others” and enter adrian.tan@careerladder.sg under the email address.
Once I have accepted your request, do the same search again. You should have access to thousands of results now.
4. Creating a powerful statement with your profile
Make sure your LinkedIn profile is 100 per cent complete.
This is because the completeness of a profile will impact your search ranking too. If there are two identical profiles with similar content, the one with a 100 per cent completed profile will rank higher than the one with an 80 per cent completed profile.
LinkedIn makes it really easy for you to know that with its levels system for profiles. There are five levels with the “All Star” level indicating 100 per cent profile completion:
(5) All Star (4) Expert (3) Advanced (2) Intermediate (1) Beginner
To attain the ‘All Star’ level, here are the details you need to fill in:
• Your industry and location
• An up-to-date current position (with a description)
• Two past positions
• Your education
• Your skills (minimum of three)
• A profile photo
• At least 50 connections
While you are at it, claim your vanity url.
5. Increasing your expertise in LinkedIn
Here are some resources you can use to boost your LinkedIn profile:
• Tips from LinkedIn videos
• Be a LinkedIn thought leader
• Increase lead generation from LinkedIn
Source: NTUC U Future Leaders, powered by Black Marketing
Adrian Tan is a blogger who writes about entrepreneurship and human resource issues.
