How to stand out in the LinkedIn crowd: Make your profile work for you

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LinkedIn has fast become the go-to place to look for your next move, whether you are looking for that next permanent or interim opportunity. It can at times, feel overwhelming knowing where to start to make sure your profile is one that will be found by companies and recruiters alongside the millions of professionals using the site for job seeking.

Fear not, Eton Bridge Partners Interim CFO & Finance Researcher, Emily Egginton, says you needn’t worry – she’s written a downloadable guide highlighting top tips you need to know…

LinkedIn has progressed over the last few years from a place where you stay connected with current or past business contacts, sharing ideas and opportunities, to real community. There are so many different ways to feel supported on LinkedIn, from personal posts, groups, blogs, news, to webinars and events, with approximately 2 million videos/ articles/ posts every day. In fact, LinkedIn has become the number 1 choice for professionally relevant content, surpassing news sites, X, Facebook and Google.

Worldwide LinkedIn has more than 1 billion users, 310 million of which use it at least once every month. Of those that use it this frequently, 49 million users are actively searching for a new job on a weekly basis, and around 134.5 million visit daily and on average spend around 7 minutes on the site/app. The UK alone has 35 million members (making UK LinkedIn members the 5th most globally connected).

Almost since day one LinkedIn has (thanks to the data contained) become a recruiter’s dream. The site is now one of the top 25 most visited globally, and a sizeable proportion comes from those questing for top talent. According to data published on LinkedIn, the “Jobs for you” feature has helped 4 million people secure new roles. At the time of writing there are approximately 14 million open jobs on LinkedIn, with 97% of staffing and recruiting professionals using the site/app as part of their recruitment process. Additionally candidates who have a more comprehensive profile have a 71% higher chance of getting a job interview.

For those that haven’t though, this means their talent still has to be found. Despite LinkedIn providing ever-better mining technology (with LinkedIn Recruiter being a staple to most recruitment professionals – using powerful algorithms/ AI to make skill searches more accurate), this still involves deploying lots of painstaking manual searching.

With years of experience doing just this, Eton Bridge Partners counts itself amongst the best at doing this, but what we’ve also found is that successful professionals (even those at executive and C-suite level) often don’t maximise the potential and searchability of their LinkedIn profile. They may be up for new opportunities; and welcome introductions or in-mails coming their way, but if their profile isn’t making them visible enough to be found, they’re less likely to succeed. Even if they’ve successfully been found, they’re often not conveying everything they need to for a recruiter or staffing professional to send that initial message.

That’s why we have produced a new guide aimed squarely at giving executives the information they need to not only be found, but also how they should present themselves.

Our learnings are based on thousands of searches we do every year. Setting up a successful LinkedIn profile isn’t difficult, but it does require considering those sometimes ‘not-so obvious’ basics, like updating job titles, end dates, thinking hard about the skills, experiences and development projects you have and the tone of voice you use. It’s been proven that members with a profile picture result in 36 times more messages and 21 times more views than those who don’t include a photo, and that doesn’t have to be an expensive, shiny, professional headshot, any normal looking photo of how you would present yourself will do.

Active users are the most easily found, while the best LinkedIn members also cultivate their connections – they curate who they link with, who they talk to and what they post. Their profile reflects this – they don’t accept each and every invitation they receive. The average CEO apparently has 930 connections.

These are just some of the useful insights our guide looks at. What we want to convey more than anything is that living on LinkedIn needn’t be a chore, but what it does need is an awareness and certain level of attention to often the smallest details. It’s often forgotten, for instance, that headhunters are just as interested in the scope of someone’s network as it indicates the circle they move in, the people they know and the standing they have. Maybe a headhunter already knows one of your connections – these are all things to consider.