Are you ready for the fast lane?
➔ The new year is up and running and perhaps you’re feeling invigorated about your job search. If so, this could be an excellent time to review your job seeking materials.
After your resume, your LinkedIn profile may be your
most important weapon in your arsenal. So today, we take a minute to review some important considerations that will help make your presence on LinkedIn be all that it can be.
When you create your account, LinkedIn automatically generates a distinct URL for your profile. First, you can edit this URL to make it distinctly your own – which can be accomplished on the same page where you edit your profile. To help contacts find you, include this edited URL on all your contact information.
Speaking of contact information, be certain to ditch that old aol or yahoo email address. Nothing says “I’m old and unwilling to change” more than an aol email address. Gmail addresses are today’s preferred. They’re simple and free to establish. You can keep aol for family and friends, but the workplace world speaks gmail.
Speaking of old, in your profile settings, make sure that your date of birth and marital status are set to “not visible.” And, do you really need to show your home address?
Speaking of your address, your “hometown” is your metro area, not the suburb or small town where you actually live.
Speaking of your metro area, generally it serves no purpose to show a skyline photo of your local downtown or an image of your neighborhood as your background photo. Maybe an image that says more about you as a person or as a potential employee would be more appropriate.
Lucky for you, there are a plethora of free images available online to use. Googling “royalty free images” will produce any number of sites from which you can download quality, free images.
You can use these images as is, or you can make them truly unique with some applications that are free to use. Canva and Adobe Spark are two of the most popular, but there are others as well. Some will even give you the ability to format your image specifically for a LinkedIn profile.
Perhaps these tips will help you get your job-search year off on the right foot and help you land that next job more quickly and easily. Good luck!