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Today we’re talking about LinkedIn profiles and several mistakes you could be making. Your profile is a key piece of marketing collateral, and it’s important for every business owner, particularly if you work in the recruitment sector and you want to attract attention from clients and candidates.
When we talk to people online who are considering working with us, we look at their LinkedIn profile and their social media, website, and online presence.
We often notice some business owners making several mistakes with their profiles, not realising how important their profiles are.
As a recruiter, you have one of the highest-trafficked profiles of any business owner or person who works in a recruitment company across the whole spectrum of sectors because you consistently reach out to new people to work with, whether candidates or clients.
One thing that people do when recruiting or looking for a new role is to jump online to search for people who can help them and, of course, to check out who they are and their level of expertise.
Our online world means we can Google people, we can have a good look at their LinkedIn profile, and decide whether that is the sort of person we want to work with.
Unfortunately, many people forget that their LinkedIn profile is searchable. Remember, LinkedIn is a huge website and search engine in its own right. People will find you online, and they will make a value judgment on you and how you can help the business.
So, logically, it is important to make the most of it.
Today, let’s go through seven areas that you might not have considered, or might have forgotten about, or need to update if you want to make the most of your profile this year, so you stand out as THE recruiter to work with.
1. Fill Out Your Profile In Full
In at one is taking it seriously #fillitoutinfull
Now, that might surprise me, but as I mentioned before, we look at many profiles, and you can see how people have started to fill them out, then got a bit bored and left them!
They have not completed things, and there are significant gaps. They haven’t filled it out in detail with all the important things, like calls to action, telephone numbers, contact details, and why they are the recruiter to work with.
One thing to remember is that, over time, what you do and how you communicate with your market might change. You might have slightly moved sectors or bolted on some additional sectors.
Have you updated your profile to make sure this is what you are now communicating?
Because there are many people, and we’ve even had people that we are connected to, who work in the circle, who have added new sectors and have forgotten to add them to the profile, or they were rushing and didn’t fill out their telephone number in detail, or they’ve moved into a new market, or they’ve moved into working in Europe, and they haven’t added alternative phone numbers for people to contact them.
My first plea is to take it seriously and complete it in full. Remember that LinkedIn is always updating the different things that you can add to your profile. You can add the different services that you do now.
You are subscribed to this podcast, so you will get updates from me and Sharon about different things happening in the market and changes.
Number one is to take it seriously.
2. Make Your LinkedIn Profile Stand Out Visually
Now, number two is that LinkedIn is a business networking platform. You will be reaching out to people and connecting with more people, and they will go and check out your profile.
One of the things that’s important is to make it visually appealing.
You can grab your client’s attention by giving your profile some TLC regarding its visual impact. This is around the banner. There’s another area as well, which I’ll come onto later.
A question: Are you using the standard banner, or have you created a more compelling banner that will attract people?
This is easy to do. If you can go to Canva, you can create your banner. You can even go to Fiverr, a freelance website. If you click this link, they will give you 10% off your first order.
Now, here’s something to consider when it comes to visual impact.
That is when we are scrolling, looking at things, we are wired as human beings to notice differences. I know I’ve recorded multiple podcasts about the science around this.
If you imagine your profile banner, if your brand colours allow it, make it a different colour from LinkedIn. Now, many of us, us included, have blue as part of our brand colours, and we have blue. Because we change our banners quite regularly, we change the colours and keep our font the same, but our colours sometimes change; currently, as I’m recording this, we have a darker blue, which is similar to everything else we do.
We use white font on our banner to help it stand out. That’s a hot tip.
The other thing is to have a photograph rather than a picture of your brand in your photograph area. We always recommend having a professional photograph, not something taken at somebody’s wedding.
If you’ve got something that could communicate your personality. You’ll notice Sharon’s is a professional photograph. Mine is a professional photograph, and I’m not looking directly at the camera. You can use a different style, but it communicates more about my personality. It was taken at an event when I was presenting. You will see that it’s a professional photograph.
Make sure that you communicate who you are through your photograph. Get a professional photograph or get somebody to photograph you with a smartphone. Think about the lighting you use and upload it because it makes an impact. People want to know who they’re working with. Is this a professional person?
Now, the other thing people often miss out on their banner is that they don’t use all the real estate they can. What I mean by that is ideally, you want to have your name on it quite bold and big and how people can contact you.
For instance, your direct-dial phone number if you want people to ring you, and, of course, an email address.
You want to communicate who you are and how you help people. You want to stop people in their tracks. Have a look at my profile. If we’re not connected, reach out and connect with me, and you’ll be able to see some of the things that I share.
Both Sharon and I have questions in our profile banner.
As we know, the brain loves to answer questions. What question could you put into your profile banner that will stop people in their tracks, and they could then start to ask, “I wonder if this person could help me?”
3. A Compelling Strap Line
Now, the third part of your LinkedIn profile is your strapline. This strapline needs to communicate clearly how you help your target market.
My banner states, for example, “I help experienced solo, micro, small SME recruiters globally stand out in the sector as the people to work with.” This statement is pretty clear about what I do.
For instance, if you work at the C-suite level, you need to ensure that people know that. If you are very sector-specific, let people know which sector you work in and what roles you can fill or place.
It could be, “I help technology companies recruit their next CMOs, their next CTOs.” Whatever it might be, be clear on your heading because, as human beings, we make snap judgments.
When people are scrolling through their mobile phones, they see who you are. You want to get them to read further. They don’t want to waste time. If they can see that “This person could help us,” this would work.
This is most certainly one area I would encourage you to look at, make it specific, and stand out in your market. One of the things we noticed is that many experienced recruiters (the market we work with) don’t always communicate how good they are and specifically who they can help.
In this section, you will notice that you can highlight your contact information along with your website details, again an area that people miss because they forget to fill it out.
When going through your profile, ensure you fill out all the areas you can.
For instance, you can add multiple links to your website with your contact information. You might want to add a link to some free content that they can download. You’ll notice that on ours, we have our marketing checklist and links to our testimonials and case studies. You can add multiple links to your website. As a recruiter, add a link to your jobs page.
Add your phone number, your company address, and your email. Make sure that you fill all that out if you want people to contact you because a lot of people don’t. I think they forget 🤷♀️
4. Your About Section Must Relate To Them
Now, as we come into number four, the next thing that I want to talk about is your About section, which is vital collateral. If you ever look at your Google Analytics, you’ll notice that people will look at your About page, and the same is true for your LinkedIn profile.
Here, remember that your About section needs to be not just about you but about them. It should relate to who you are and how you can help them because if people are scrolling down your LinkedIn profile, then they are checking you out and how you can help them.
It’s important to start with a positioning statement, such as “This is who I am; this is who I can help,” because when it comes to marketing, repetition is one of the first laws of learning.
When it comes to sharing who you are and how you can help, you’ve already stated who you are underneath your banner in that pre-statement. It’s important to repeat that in your About Us section.
Then, what is important next is to think about your market. These are your ideal clients and candidates you want to work with, known in marketing as your client and candidate avatars.
What’s going on for them? What questions are they having that are causing them frustration?
Your About section needs to remind them about their problems and how you can help them. This is a specific copywriting framework.
[Important: I share more about this framework in an email marketing webinar which you can access here. www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/ode]
On our profile, you’ll notice the framework that we use. We talk about Superfast Recruitment, and we talk about why us, and then we have a call to action at the end. The good news is you don’t need to overthink the About section on your profile.
5. Top Skills and Services
The next part is your top skills and services. You can add these to your profile. Think about what you might be searching for on LinkedIn because this will also help bump your profile up in the search engine when people start looking for help.
Don’t just think, “Oh, well, everyone knows what I do. I’ll not add that in.” Add your top skills and the services that you deliver for people because, for some people, it might be, “I work on retained” or “I work on RPO.”
You offer different types of recruitment services. You might also offer talent consultancy, and you can add all of these to your profile.
6. Use Your Features Section
The next thing is your features section. Now, depending on whether you have a paid-for or free profile, you can get additional features here. That’s why, as a recruiter, I would expect that you would have a paid-for profile that you then can leverage and use with all the benefits that it comes with for a small cost.
A lot of people miss utilising the featured section. In your featured section, you can add some of the top-performing posts that you’re sharing, documents, videos, and all kinds of media to help your marketing. This could be a PDF of your services or case studies.
Remember, I talked about visual media. For ours, we have some pretty bright images that reflect our case studies of people who work with us, demonstrating who we are and how we can help.
It’s a drag-and-drop menu on LinkedIn; you can move these things around. You can start with a particular case study, whatever it is. Say you’ve got a focus on a certain part of your business at the moment, say one specific subsector, and then you can always move things around.
7. Your Experience Section
Your LinkedIn profile can do many things, and finally, to round this off, let’s look at communicating your experience.
Make sure you highlight all of the roles you have had over time that support how you can help your clients and candidates.
When you have worked in different organisations across a whole spectrum, no matter if it’s been a year or two years, people see that as “They’ve got a rounded experience. They could help me fill these roles,” or “They could help me do X,” or “They could help me do Y.”
Of course, in your Experience section, you will have a section on the current company you’re working with, which can be similar to your About section.
Here, talk more about the company and the results deliver.
I do encourage you to make the most of your LinkedIn profile. One of the things that people miss out on when it comes to their profile is sharing content down your profile.
Don’t just share it on your company page. I know many people who don’t share enough content. This is about standing out to your market because as you start to share more content, people are going to look at your profile and check you out.
You now have several ideas about things that your LinkedIn profile has not leveraged as much as it could.
It will still be a tough market over the next few years, and you will have to do more outreach.
This means you will have to stand out in front of people AND sell who you are and what you do.
Your LinkedIn profile can do exactly that.
Thanks
Denise
How We Can Help You
As part of Superfast Circle, we give you access to detailed training to help with all aspects of your marketing; we even have a detailed module on how to set up LinkedIn to work for you. If you want to learn more about how this could work for you, book a quick call with us here.
