Recruiters: Here Are 3 Ways to Build a Strong Profile on LinkedIn

By Danielle Wirsansky on August 30, 2017

As a recruiter, it is your job to find the best candidates possible for your company to employ. It takes a lot of ground work, research, and reaching out. You can work as hard as you can and still not be attracting the caliber of potential employees that you are interested in or the number of candidates you would prefer.

In order to raise the standards of your recruiting, you need to raise the standard of your LinkedIn profile. Your profile on LinkedIn is just like your profile on Facebook. People are going to go through it to get a better sense of who you are and what you do, so you want your profile to be as professional as possible.

Simply having a profile is not enough — there are ways to make your profile stand out from the rest. Read on to learn some of the ways that recruiters can build a strong profile on LinkedIn!

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Professional Head Shot

This might seem like a minor detail to your profile picture but it is actually very important. This is an online platform and so you cannot represent yourself in person — this profile picture is the only way they will be able to visualize you and recognize that you truly are a person and a real person at that. It is often the first thing that potential employees look at, and if your picture is unprofessional then they may not take the rest of your profile so seriously. An unprofessional profile picture will degrade the quality of your profile overall.

Your picture should not be a selfie. It should be a picture taken by another person or by a camera on a timer. There is a difference and most people recognize when a photo is a selfie. Ask a friend, set your camera on a timer, or hire a professional — it’s up to you.

Another factor to your profile picture should be that it is a photo of you alone. Group photos are never a good choice because it makes it incredibly difficult to recognize which person in the picture the profile is actually for. You can try cropping a photo so that you are the only one in it, but this is hard to do well and often makes the photo look awkward. You would be better off using a photo that is just of you to begin with.

You should be dressed professionally in your photo as well. You do not want to be just wearing a t-shirt in the photos as that makes you come across as too casual. Perhaps you do not wear a suit and tie when you are at work every day, but you want to show that you as well as your place of employment care about professionalism and that the company is serious. You want to show prospective employees that you are serious too.

The photo should also look like you. Why wouldn’t a photo of me actually look like me? you may be wondering. If a photo is overly edited and your hair and makeup are very different than what you wear in everyday life, it might not be the right choice for you. If you have recruited someone online and then meet them in person, they should and need to be able to recognize you.

The last element of your profile photo you should consider is its quality. High quality, professional head shots can be expensive but it may be worth the price. A low-quality photo can make you seem less serious and less professional. Employees will want to work with recruiters who seem to be cutting edge, including having a good quality profile picture.

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Thorough Summary

Many people gloss over summaries and just put basic information that can be gleaned from the rest of the profile. Do not do that. Make your summary more engaging. Use it to show what you do and what you are passionate about in a way that the rest of the information on the LinkedIn profile cannot tell to someone who views it.

Give details about the work that you do, why you do it, and what you are looking for. Show visitors to your profile how passionate you are about the work that you do and the company that you work for. You still need to be concise and not write pages upon pages of prose praising your company. Breaking up your summary into smaller paragraphs can also be helpful by making it easier to read than one large block of text.

Credibility

Another great way to make your LinkedIn profile stronger is to make it more credible. Do this by having many connections from your company, posting updates, linking articles you have written or press releases from your company to your profile so that visitors to your page can learn more about you and your company. This will also reassure them that your company is legitimate and that you are a legitimate recruiter.

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