How to Get Your Personal Brand Into Your LinkedIn Profile

Why is your LinkedIn profile so important in executive job search?

In part because a great executive resume is not enough any more to land your next great gig.

You’ll need a strong, on-brand online presence so executive recruiters and hiring decision makers, searching for and assessing candidates like you, will find plenty of diverse information about you.

Hands down, LinkedIn is the most important social network for any job seeker, but especially for executive job seekers.

Outpace your competition

Many savvy executives competing for the jobs you want have already embraced much, if not all, of what LinkedIn has to offer. Even if you don’t use all of LinkedIn’s features, you should at least have a great profile there, just to keep pace with them.

Executive recruiters and other hiring authorities routinely search LinkedIn for good-fit candidates. And they have special tools, like LinkedIn Recruiter and Talent Solutions, to help find and hire the right candidates.

If they don’t find you on LinkedIn, or if you have a skimpy, anemic profile, you may be invisible to them.

And if they do find you elsewhere, they may wonder why you’re not on LinkedIn. They may wonder whether you’re up-to-date with the new world of work.

Merely throwing together your LinkedIn profile without strategizing its impact on your target audience may render it ineffectual or even be a detriment to you.

Your LinkedIn profile needs to be as fully complete as possible, with content in as many profile sections as possible.

And it needs to contain all the right keywords and phrases, positioned in the right way so that your profile lands high in search results for those keywords, when the right people are searching for candidates like you.

Once these people land on your profile, it needs to immediately capture and hold their attention, and provide evidence of your potential value to them.

Your LinkedIn profile and executive resume work in tandem, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to just copy and paste your resume into the various sections of your profile.

These two personal marketing pieces overlap somewhat, but are distinctly unique in other ways.

For one thing, your LinkedIn profile is an opportunity to provide much more information about you than you can reasonably stuff into a resume.

First things first: Work on personal branding

Why is personal branding no longer optional in your LinkedIn profile?

Because your brand compellingly differentiates your potential value to the select employers you want to work for.

Very simply put,

Your Personal Attributes (or “soft” skills) + Your Functional Areas of Expertise (or “hard” skills) = Your Personal Brand

Recruiters and other hiring professionals want to see more than just your job responsibilities and duties in your LinkedIn profile.

They want to see what kind of person you are at work. They want to see what personal attributes of yours enabled you to accomplish the things that benefited your employers. You need to get some of your personality into your profile.

One method to link your hard and soft skills in a way that will resonate with your target employers is through storytelling.

Perhaps this is obvious:

Before you can write the personally branded content you’ll use in your LinkedIn profile and elsewhere on the site, you first have to work on defining your personal brand.

My proprietary personal branding and job search worksheets will help you.

Tips to Get Your Personal Brand into Your LinkedIn Profile

Below you’ll find several ways to brand your LinkedIn profile. You’ll find more of them, and more specifics about those below, in my Essential LinkedIn Guide for Executive Job Search.

LinkedIn Profile Headline (directly below your name)

Pump it up with the relevant keywords your target audience will be searching for. You can pack quite a punch with the 220 characters allowed in the headline.

Which of these headlines, for the same executive, do you think will make her profile more searchable and compelling?

VP Human Resources – [Current Company]

OR, this one in 212 characters:

Vice President Human Resources | Employee Engagement | Retained 90% of Employees and Grew Team by 50%. I am committed to creating an inclusive and equitable experience for all. Our employees’ success is my success.

The first example is the default headline LinkedIn will place on your profile, based on your job title at your most recent job.

Get the idea? The formula is:

Job Title + Expertise + Differentiation + Tagline or Value Statement

LinkedIn Photo

Choose your photo wisely. This is the first thing people are likely to see when they open your LinkedIn profile.

Go with an appealing photo that strikes the right image and professional tone for your industry and niche. Use the same photo in your other online profiles, so people can easily identify you.

Why is it important to include a photo in your LinkedIn profile?

Branding is about creating emotional connections. People believe content more when it’s accompanied by the author’s photo.

A LinkedIn profile with no photo is a missed opportunity to reinforce your brand and engage people. And not having a profile photo could be a red flag for some of the people assessing your qualifications.

LinkedIn Posts

You’ll see the phrase “start a post”, toward the top of the middle column, when you’re in “Home” mode, accessed in the menu along the top of your profile.

Whatever content you post here (videos, links to other things online, images, etc.) will go out to your followers.

Regular posting keeps you and your brand top of mind with your network. Because your posts land on your profile, under “Activity”, they also represent another opportunity to brand your profile with relevant keywords.

LinkedIn Recommendations

Keep building up LinkedIn recommendations that support your brand, within each job you’ve held. Nothing speaks to your unique value proposition better than what others who know your work best have to say about you.

If they’re amenable, it’s okay to help them write a brief paragraph or two by providing them a little information about the kinds of positions you’re seeking, so that they can align what they write with what you know your target employers are looking for.

LinkedIn Connections

Opinions differ on whether it’s more important to amass a lot of LinkedIn connections or concentrate on building quality connections.

That’s up to you, and it’s probably a good idea to take the time to assess people before accepting their requests to connect.

If you’re having trouble deciding what to do, think of it this way.

The more people you’re connected with, the wider you’ve cast your net for opportunities, the more people you’re staying top-of-mind with . . . thus the more likely more good-fit opportunities will come your way.

And, the more connections you have, the more people who are likely to share or like or comment on anything you publish on LinkedIn – posts, articles, comments, etc. – therefore spreading the word about your personal brand and unique value.

LinkedIn Profile URL

The default URL that leads people to your profile contains an indistinct jumble of letters and numbers. Change it to your name. And remember to change the URL wherever you’ve placed the old one, like on your resume.

This is what my customized LinkedIn URL looks like:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/megguiseppi

If you have a common name or one that’s already taken in a URL, you’ll have to play around with this. Include your middle initial, or just use your first initial, or first and middle initials. Also see if the URL for “yournametitle” is available, such as “tomsmithcfo”.

About Section

Why is the About section so important?

According to LinkedIn Content Strategist Kate Reilly:

“Your summary or About section is the one place you define yourself in your own words, free of start dates and titles. Whether you use it to put career choices in context, highlight your biggest achievements, or show off your personality, the summary is your chance to put your best self out there. It strengthens your first impression in a way no other Profile section can.

You’re allowed 2,600 characters in this section. Try your best to use them all. More content = more relevant keywords = better potential for being found.

Add “Projects” and Other Sections

Anywhere you can add content that includes the right relevant keywords for you, the more SEO-friendly your profile will be.

The Projects section is somewhat hidden, so it’s a little-used gem. You’ll need to add it to your profile itself, before you can make use of it. Access it with the “Add profile section” button, just below your name.

Since each Project is tied to a particular job of yours in the Experience section, a project becomes a powerful way to add more content to that job if you’ve used up all the 2,000 characters and spaces allowed for each job description in the Experience section.

You essentially get an extra 2,000 characters and spaces for each entry in the Experience section.

You can get creative with Projects. For example, if you worked on a challenging project, write up a description of it with the details and plop it into a Project. Tell the story of:

• How it all came about,
• The situation you walked into,
• What needed to be done,
• What wasn’t working,
• Exactly what you did to fix things, and
• What the various outcomes were.

Experience Section

You can repurpose some of what’s in your resume for your LinkedIn profile Experience section, but try to add more info.

You’ll probably have room for more achievements and contributions than you did in your resume. 2,000 characters are allowed here. Use them all, if you can.

Remember to lead your achievement statements with the WOW result first and surround each with white space for better visual impact.

Some General Tips

Pay attention to all that lands “above the fold” in your profile – whatever is on the screen when you open your profile. This is what people will see first, and can make or break your chances to be considered. Capture their attention and make them want to scroll down to read your entire profile.

Also pay attention to what shows up in the first few lines of each profile section, before you click on “see more”. Make sure you’ve teased people enough for them to want to read the rest.

Include a link to your LinkedIn profile on your resume, along with your contact information at the top. And put the link in your email signature, on your blog, website, and anywhere else job search related.

More LinkedIn Help

Should I Use #OpenToWork on LinkedIn?

YIKES! My LinkedIn Profile is Missing!

LinkedIn FAQs for Executive Job Search