In this article, I want to talk about how I receive 3-5 invitations per month for interviews in the international market through my LinkedIn profile without spending a lot of time on it.
I don’t claim to be an expert, I’m just sharing my personal experience, which helped me save time and energy at the very beginning of my journey. Perhaps someone else will find it useful too.
The first thing you will see when searching for LinkedIn guides is the SSI index. I will not discuss SSI in this article. First, there seems to be no consensus among experts on how much ordinary people (us) should pay attention to the numbers in the SSI index and whether it is worth it at all. Second, almost all of the actions I will describe in this article will increase your SSI.
But our main goal is to make it possible for HR to find you and understand that they are looking at a great specialist, so we will fill out your profile. This should be enough, provided there is demand for your technology stack.
Steps for filling out your LinkedIn profile
- Notifications about changes to your profile
It’s better to turn off notifications to your connections (friends) about profile changes right away so you don’t spam them when you edit your profile. Settings
- Profile language
Set English as the language for your profile.
- Profile link
Create a nice link to your profile — you will add it to your resume later.
- Profile photo
Your FACE should be clearly visible in the photo. And only your face. Your face should take up 60% of the photo. If you want to get really fancy, you can play around here or on similar photo evaluation services to choose the best option.
After that, don’t forget to check here that your photo is visible to all LinkedIn members.
- Profile banner
You can choose a banner here and write your key skills/achievements/characteristics on it so that recruiters can quickly understand how awesome you are. It’s best to add 2-3 such points. You can take your skills and achievements from your resume, and if you don’t have one yet, welcome to the Telegram channel, where I have tried to cover this topic – what to write and a template.
- Fill in the main block – first name, last name, industry, title, etc.
The title can be filled in as Position + Employment/Industry. - Set the location where recruiters should come to you.
From personal experience, recruiters start finding you in a new location in about 2-4 weeks, I’m not sure exactly why. - Fill in your work experience at previous companies.
It is better to remove the location for each job that may confuse the recruiter.
- Recommendations section
It’s time to look up your old colleagues and ask them to leave a review. Better yet, write the review yourself and just give your colleague the finished text. But don’t rush to ask them to submit their reviews right away, because in the next step you’ll need to ask them to confirm your skills. It’s better to do this all at once so that people don’t waste too much of their time.
- Skills section
Add the skills you have to the Skills section and sort them in order of importance. If you don’t know what to add, try looking at other people in your profession.
Also, check that all the necessary skills are marked in all the companies where you have used them. Now is the time to find colleagues and ask them to write reviews and confirm your skills.
- Certificates, Publications, Awards, etc.
In your profile, you can also fill in smaller sections, which you can find via the Add Profile Section button. If you have any certificates, publications, or awards, you can add them.
- About section
You will need to write quite a lot here. In general, this is where you write general information about what a great specialist you are, your strengths, areas of interest, duplicate your skills, and you can duplicate your contacts. It’s kind of like the header of your resume. You can find a more detailed breakdown of how to fill it out at the link in the telegram.
- Open to work
Your employer will most likely find out about this, but if you are ready (and it’s better to be ready), then set your profile to Open To Work — add all relevant positions, select all On-Site & Hybrid & Remote options at once, and add locations of interest (add the maximum number just in case).
Conclusion
We could also talk about how to add connections, respond to job openings, and what to do with leads (HR). It’s impossible to cover everything in one article. And the goal was to talk about how to create an attractive profile. Maybe I’ll write a separate article on these issues later.