LinkedIn Profile Examples | How to Stand Out in a Crowded Job Market

We co-hosted a webinar on how to build a stand out LinkedIn profile with Alyson Weiss, Social Media Specialist at Career Moves, a division of JVS. In the webinar, Weiss outlined a few strategies for crafting a LinkedIn profile summary and headline, making the most of endorsements and recommendations, and how to organize your overall profile to fit your goals and stand out in a crowded job market. Here are a few tips that stood out:

Identify your audience and your purpose

Why are you using LinkedIn? To find a job? To make a career change? To build your network? A big factor in completing your profile is understanding the people and opportunities you want to attract.

This affects the keywords you include in your LinkedIn profile summary, the headline you choose, and even the way you organize your profile. It's worth spending a little time reflecting on this before jumping into writing. 

For instance, if you're job searching and want to help your LinkedIn profile stand out to hiring managers, here are some ways to edit your profile now:

• Add a tagline to your profile. Emphasize specific skills, years of experience, and the specific field/department you want to work. For some examples of what this looks like, check out: An Easy Formula To Help You Craft The Perfect Professional Summary on Career Advice.
• List accomplishments. There's a lot of space in the LinkedIn profile "About" section, so don't be afraid to get realllllly specific about what you've achieved in your career. Won an award? Earned a certificate? Helped onboard 300 volunteers during a specific recruitment event? Think about what you want to showcase to hiring managers and add those wins here.
• Include your top skills. This is where things can get overwhelming. Maybe you have a lot of experience doing a lot of different things. It's better to identify the right mix of hard and soft skills to add here for the specific jobs you're looking to get. And if you're just applying willy nilly to everything you see, well, you have to change up that strategy asap.

Add a headline to your LinkedIn profile

There are four kinds of headlines you can use, each emphasizing a different aspect of your work:

• Your transferable skills
• Your value-add
• Your mission statement
• Your various roles or 'hats'

Turn off notifications

Seems counter-intuitive, right? But if you don't do this, you'll spam your network every time you make a change on your profile. Turning off notifications is also key if you're job hunting and want to keep your search discreet.