I’ve built this, I’ve built that — You are highly respected by all your peers as the developer who can build just about anything within days. Your skills are top-notch and you aspire to be taking your coffee-break from work in one of the tech giants in Silicon Valley.
…but now what?
Hard truth: If the recruiter at the other end has no way of knowing how good you are, all your skills and achievements (that you have worked hard for) are as good as nothing.
LinkedIn is not just your online resume, it’s also a network full of opportunity to advance your career. In order to use LinkedIn to its full potential, you want your profile to stand out. You want to GET NOTICED.
NOTE: This is not to say that a well crafted LinkedIn profile can get you employed in any company. At the end of the day, it is your skills and experiences that matters the most. Having a good LinkedIn profile helps in the FIRST determining (and crucial) step: to get NOTICED.
TLDR: Refer to the 7 tips below.
“Developers receive 7–10 interview offers in 1 week on NodeFlair with just 1 application. Do a quick 7 min sign-up here to get notified of opportunities and find your worth (no upfront commitment required).”
You should aim to list out all the technologies used for YOUR scope of work (tech stack). When recruiters are looking for engineers with a similar tech stack, say Javascript, chances are they will search by looking for the keyword Javascript. If that is not listed anywhere in your profile, you will be excluded out from the search immediately (duh). Many engineers spend huge amount of time to document all the features that they built, but left out the most basic of all — the tech stack used to achieve it.
Another common mistake is to list out ALL the tech stack used by your company, in which some might not necessarily even be within your scope of work. You should never spam keywords — only put the tech stack RELEVANT to you (the ones you’ve worked with).
If you are a back-end engineer who used NodeJS to build the back-end of the system, there is no need to include your company’s front-end tech stack (say ReactJS & ReduxJS) in your profile. You won’t want irrelevant job opportunities to come knocking on your door. Relevance is key.
Recruiters are not mind readers — we do not know what you do with the tech stack. If you do not provide CONTEXT about the use case of your tech stack, it is not meaningful information to us.
For this example, you can already tell that without providing context, there is no way we could figure which technology was used for the respective features. If a payments company is looking for someone with experience building checkout pages specifically using PHP, there may be hesitation on his/her end to send a message across. Why put yourself in such disadvantage and risk losing a great opportunity?
You helped scale the back-end system, great. You helped clean up the code base, great. So what? How will doing all these help the company in any way? You have to think from an outcome perspective: “How does my work impact outcomes?” By stating the outcomes clearly, you can showcase how your work has impacted the company positively.
There is an old saying that you must squeeze the contents of your CV into one page. Anything beyond is too long. For a start, allow me to remind that LinkedIn has only one page (the argument above is hence irrelevant). What I noticed from many profiles (applicable to CVs as well) is that they tend to have gaps in information.
“Succinct doesn’t mean short. It means a high ratio of ideas to words.” — Paul Graham
A good profile should be one that recruiters could understand deeply with spending merely seconds reading. Point form is highly recommended. Also, aim to remove unnecessary sentences that has low impact. There is always a way to deliver content succinctly. Take a look at the examples:
The Summary section is a powerful portion of the profile that allows recruiters to quickly understand who you are, instead of what you do (under the Experience section). You should dedicate this section to a few pointers:
Though this does not contribute much to gaming of the search engine, it does make a huge impression to a recruiter who emphasises more on cultural fit and personality.
Under the influence from the Valley where work spaces are designed to look more like funky playgrounds than offices, job titles are no exception. Sure, the title Software Engineer doesn’t sound as badass as Coding Ninja, but unfortunately, Coding Ninja is not widely adopted — you can be sure that no recruiter fancy such a title. LinkedIn recommends conventional titles for a recruiter and chances are, no recruiter will ever put Coding Ninja into the search bar.
Also, do not overcomplicate titles. If you are a Software Engineer working on Java, you don’t have to write Software Engineer (Java) — Software Engineer alone will do the trick. There is a place for everything — tech stack (or any other unthinkable possibilities) should never appear in your title.
Should you diligently follow the valuable tips above, you will notice some key improvements:
Increased profile views: LinkedIn provides a weekly summary of your page views. It even breaks it down into detailed information and statistics.
More relevant job opportunities: With better clarity on your achievements, you can be sure that your personal branding is not only ENHANCED, but more ACCURATE. If done correctly, you should NOT be poached by companies looking for a iOS developer when you are actually developing apps for Android.
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