Rock that LinkedIn Profile!

This past Friday, January 22nd, 2016, I along with a few of my fellow iOS developers had the pleasure of attending a workshop at the LinkedIn offices in New York. The workshop focused on best practices for LinkedIn profiles and a look into the company and its engineering team.

In this blog post I will talk about the things I learned from the visit.

I had to wake up early on Friday, as it takes some 45–50 minutes to get to the Empire State building and we had to be there by 9:45am. LinkedIn occupies floors 25–28 of the Empire State Building, so the office had some amazing views of the city. We were told that LinkedIn employees have a special pass that they can use to skip the lines to get to the observation deck upstairs (just one of the many perks of working at LinkedIn I guess)!

Alright, so the presentation started with three friendly and engaging customer success representatives telling us about the do’s and dont’s of LinkedIn Profiles.

Summary Section

The summary section, often overlooked by many users, is actually a very important component of your profile. A summary serves as your elevator pitch, a section you should use to highlight your passion, what you would bring to a new team, and what makes you stand out from other candidates.

One of the customer success representatives said that we should create a profile that makes us marketable to a position we seek to be in, rather than the current position we are in.

Throughout the presentation the representatives stressed that most of the sections on LinkedIn profiles are searchable (i.e. skills section, experience section), so we should focus on taking advantage of that. One way we can do that is through a key word section.

While your summary is not supposed to be verbose you should leave some space for a keyword section or a specialties section, that way when recruiters are doing a keyword search your name will pop up. Example of a keyword section :

“Specialties include: Training, Account Management, iOS development, Cooking, Blogging”

They also told us that many recruiters don’t read the rest of the profile if the summary section does not engage them. So make sure to spend some time working on that summary section!

Skills Section

The skills section was another section we discussed in depth. We found out that you can have a maximum of 50 skills listed and the top 10 are displayed. If you have skills that have not garnered enough endorsements you can change the order of your skills to better display them. They also mentioned that displaying Microsoft Word or PowerPoint in the skills section doesn’t really help in making your profile shine.

Experience Section

Often LinkedIn users use bullet points to highlight their responsibilities at a certain position, just a list of duties they performed at the time. We were told we should instead focus on using this section to highlight what we brought to the company, talk about any quantitative or qualitative changes we made and focus on the impact we had at the company. Highlighting accomplishments and showcasing how you succeeded at a company, perhaps through rich media, lets a potential employer or recruiter know that you are worth talking to.

“Rich media is an Internet advertising term for a Web page ad that uses advanced technology such as streaming video, downloaded applets (programs) that interact instantly with the user, and ads that change when the user’s mouse passes over it.”

In the context of the LinkedIn workshop, rich media refers to adding photos, videos and project portfolios to better engage visitors of your profile.

It’s also worth noting that including elements that highlight a job that you want and adding volunteer experience (if you have any) is beneficial.

Profile Picture and Headline

For this section, they suggested taking a professional picture, but they did not insist in wearing suits. They said causal attire such as t-shirts were fine as long as the t-shirt was not controversial. As for the background of the picture they said it shouldn’t overtake your profile picture and the main focus should be on you.

Headlines currently default to your most recent position, and while that is fine they suggested getting creative with it. For example, “UX Designer and Animal Whisperer”…Try to come up with attention grabbing headlines.

Job Search

LinkedIn has a lot of job search features. The website as well as their mobile platform are excellent places to begin your job search. You also have the added bonus of using your LinkedIn profile when you apply directly from their website.

Additional suggestions:

• Join groups — groups have now been updated to be more conversational so being vocal in groups related to an industry you are interested in might get you that connection you have been looking for.
• Pulse — LinkedIn’s news aggregator is another great resource to keep up with the latest news in a range of industries.
• Follow companies you are interested in — the customer success representatives told us that when recruiters come to them looking for candidates they often suggest that they first look at the people following their company. So this might be a great way to get noticed by a recruiter.
• Recommendations — getting a recommendation from the right person, be it a professor, a boss, a mentor or even a colleague with whom you worked on a project can really help strengthen your resume.

Engineering Team

After this informational presentation we had a quick sit down with engineering leads at LinkedIn. The conversation focused on their journeys in tech, how they ended up at LinkedIn and a brief look into their day-to-day lives.

All of them had very interesting and unique backgrounds in tech but one thing that stuck with me from the discussion was when we started talking about imposter syndrome.

Some of the engineering leads mentioned that they sometimes feel imposter syndrome even in their current position, however they said feeling discomfort is good.

One of the engineers said:

“Whenever I start feeling comfortable at my current position I start to panic because it means I am not stretching myself to learn.”

I thought this was very powerful and something we should keep in mind when we start working at a new company.

To all my fellow Access Coders, I say if engineering leads at LinkedIn feel imposter syndrome, who are we to not embrace it. Let’s go out there, get awesome jobs and get comfortable with discomfort!

I hope you enjoyed this blog post. Let me know if you like it. Thanks!