The Ultimate Guide To Building An All-Star LinkedIn Account

LinkedIn has become a professional ecosystem of thoughts and ideas. The platform also serves as a great way for you to showcase your skills and work experience. But besides getting on LinkedIn just to see who from your high school is killing it in the business world or who totally went off the grid (I’m talking about you, Sally), there’s so much more you can do!

In this article, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step guide to getting your account set up so you’ll be well on your way to becoming a LinkedIn All-Star

Step 1: Create An Account

This step is pretty straightforward — make an account! For whatever reason you’re getting on LinkedIn, whether you realized that you’ve never had a meaningful internship or you want to see which of your old high school friends went off the grid (talking about you again, Sally), you’ll need to set up an account.

Step 2: Set Up Your Profile

Now after you uploaded a photo of yourself that’s so incredibly photogenic that it borders on stock photo resemblance, let’s create a header for your profile! The great thing about LinkedIn is that it’s an amazing way to connect with recruiters from virtually every company out there. If you’re currently seeking employment opportunities we need to change our header to let people know that you’re on the market:

Looks good. Sometimes recruiters like candidates who are more transparent about their employment goals so let’s change it up a bit to be more realistic here:

This will probably get you more InMail messages from recruiters since you are so brutally upfront. Honesty is the best policy and it’s better to be up front now as opposed to 7 months down the line at a work party where you have five too many shots of Jose Cuervo.

Step 3: Add Your Employment History

Now, let’s get into your employment history. You’re going to need to list your past positions and the dates you were employed there:

Ok well, this isn’t gonna cut it. For maximum employable efficiency, you need to write a novel’s worth of bullet points about your responsibilities for each position regardless if they’re relevant at all to the job. This way, a recruiter will be so debilitated by the amount of work you put into your LinkedIn profile, they’ll assume you’ll be a super hard worker when they hire you.

Look at that, so much better. Now an employer will need to sit down by a fireplace with a bottle of whiskey just to digest your profile. Nice one!

Now you need to do this for every single one of your past positions and you’ll be on your way.

Step 4: List Your Skills and Endorsements

But just listing your past work experience and a stenographer’s level of detail for each position is not enough. LinkedIn also has an amazing feature where you can feature certain skills that your friends and colleagues can endorse you for. If you don’t have any hard skills — make sure to get endorsed by everyone for like 3 super basic skills that almost everyone has.

Now that potential employers know you have basic computer literacy, you’re right on track to getting that new job. If all else fails — just spam fuck recruiters and people who work at your dream company telling them that you “want to hear more about their experience working there” when you kinda just want them to patch you through to the recruiter like a 1930’s phone operator.

When you finally get that dream job of yours, you can change your header to something appropriate like this:

Or if you get a job at Oracle:

Step 5: Start Making Content About Your New Job Non-Stop

Now that you got the job, it’s your duty to be a hub of information for your LinkedIn followers by providing every little piece of news about your company all the time.

Your job will depend on whether or not you post that article about your company. Hiring new customer service reps? You better share that article your “Head of People” posted on their timeline. Winning top 10 best places to work in Bakersfield? You better share that shit with everyone who ever breathed in your direction.

Also, VERY IMPORTANT TIP: You are obligated to make a first-day post about how everyone was so sweet, kind, and supportive. Even though your first day was probably just filling out HR paperwork and waiting to have your monitor set up by IT, your network will never know!

But what if you aren’t looking for a job and just want to be a #LinkedInfluencer?

First things first, thank you for volunteering. If there’s anything in the world we need more of, it’s not fresh water or planted trees, it’s LinkedIn Influencers. Again, we need to set up your header. But this time, just list some things you enjoy doing:

Woah Woah Woah, what in the fuck are you doing? You can’t separate your interests with some plain old commas, you’ll be laughed out of Tech Disrupt 2018 with such a novice move. You need to use these vertical glyphs to exemplify the sleekness of your profile → ” | ”

It’s good, but not good enough. Let’s also add cryptocurrency:

Hmm…still looks a bit dull. Let’s spruce up those titles a bit to really show people that you mean business:

Now that we have our header set up — don’t bother with listing out your positions. People don’t care about that. You need to focus on generating great content for your readers. Now, there are three important details when it comes to writing meaningful LinkedIn content:

1. Hone in on your demographic
2. Provide relevant information and insight
3. Be a thought leader

Now, wipe those tips from your memory and follow this simple formula to make clickbatey LinkedIn influencer content that you can post all the time:

Start with a problem or failure (one sentence)

Make your life sound really sad (2–3 individual sentences)

Talk about working toward a goal (2–3 individual sentences)

Then you achieved the goal or had a realization (2–3 individual sentences)

The lesson you learned (1 sentence)

Bonus: Ask if your followers if they agree so you can create a useless dialogue of people agreeing with each other

Super — Bonus: add a hashtag!

Look at that, you just created your first piece of influencer content! Let the comments of people agreeing with you roll in!

We can go on and on about how to be a rockstar influencer, but we think it’ll be easier for you to learn on your own. To make an all-star LinkedIn account, avoid deviating from these tips and remember: you don’t need to be an ‘influencer’ to have an influence on your LinkedIn network, you just need to pretend to be one.