How can I improve my LinkedIn profile to get a data scientist job?

This is a great question for any profession!

Optimizing LinkedIn to match your preferred job requirements is a must in today’s digital world.

Here are a few tips that will be very helpful in your dream job pursuit:

1. Headline

The first thing you should thing about is your headline. LinkedIn allows you to put a brief description about what you do right under your name. As a data scientist, you need to find a way to show how you can impact somebody’s business.

Some examples are: “I can make your data tell a story” or “I can make your data sell more goods” etc. However, the way I tell people to think about it is: If you caught me in an elevator for 30 seconds, how would you convey to me what you do?That’s what you need to put in your headline.

The other way is to implement Einstein’s saying: “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

How would you explain to a six-year old or someone who is not familiar with your industry, what is it that you do exactly?

The goal is not to regurgitate everything you do or how you do it, but to get them interested to say: “Oh, I need to understand more about what he/she does.”

2. Career Summary

This is the most important part of your entire LinkedIn profile, and it’s right under the headline. The best thing to do here is to put number driven stats about what you’ve done or improvements you’ve brought to businesses because of your expertise. I would make 1 to 3 bullet points about the things you have accomplished in your career.

Underneath, I would make a line that says “Specialties” and make a list that will include the keywords — think of LinkedIn as a SEO in its own world — the more people search for things, the more your name will pop-up if you have the appropriate keywords included. I wouldn’t want to go insane with the keywords — you don’t want to be obnoxious — but I would focus on 3–5 keywords that you want people to find you for.

3. Experience

The biggest mistake that I see people make is including every single thing they’ve done so far in their lives — like in a resume. I wouldn’t worry too much about that.

The most important thing in the ‘Experience’ section is making sure that you are connected to one of the companies that you’d worked for. When you type the name of the company you’d worked for in the ‘Experience’ section, the logo of the company should pop up. That’s essentially what you need to be looking for.

If you work(ed) for “XYZ” company that’s known for producing great data scientists in your industry, then the recruiters will search that company and look for people from the company.

So, you need to make sure that you are ‘attached’ to the companies you’d worked for under your ‘Experience’ section.

4. Details, Details

If you haven’t edited your profile URL yet, you should do so.

The default public profile is something like linkedin.com/in/yourname/alphanumericcharacters’ and that’s not helping to brand yourself. LinkedIn gives you the ability to create your own URL, so I would advise you to do that.

For example my URL is: ‘www. linkedin.com/in/ChristienLouviere’. It’s easier to remember, people know my name and I own it.

5. Go Public To Excel

The last piece of advice is to make your profile visible to everyone if you haven’t done so already. If you want people to find you, make sure it’s visible to them.

You can then decide which sections of your profile you want to make private, so only you can see them, or make them visible only to your connections. Personally, I would make everything public — there is no reason to hide anything, and you want people to find you according to the keywords.

You’ve got a lot of competition out there, but data scientists are in high demand. Make sure to stand out in the crowd and make yourself known.

Hope this helps! Good luck!