Welcome back to the Executive Leap podcast. In this episode, I’ll begin discussing how to optimize your LinkedIn profile to attract recruiters or attract people looking to hire you and your expertise for a open position they have in their organization. And I’m going to save you a massive amount of time and frustration. That’s because I recently googled LinkedIn, and there were 699 97 million hits in just under one second. I’m not sure how you can even sift through a couple hundred pieces of information, let alone 600 million on how to improve your LinkedIn profile. So I’m going to assemble all of this information for you over the next two or three episodes. So tune in daily, take notes, and let’s get started. So let me boil it all down for you and start with some important LinkedIn stats. There are 30 million companies on LinkedIn, 14 million open jobs at any given time. 90 % of recruiters regularly use LinkedIn to identify prospective candidates for open positions. There are 660 million profiles worldwide on LinkedIn, and about 200 million of those are based in the United States. There are 61 million profiles owned by people in a senior leadership capacity.
Now, these are important statistics for you to be aware of. But the bottom line is, your competition is on LinkedIn, and I’m not saying 100 %, but darn close. It’s always been a competitive market, with just over 40 % of the gainfully employed looking to make a job change prior to COVID-19. Now, thanks to the pandemic, according to the labor department, there’s been over 20 million Job losses and unemployment has skyrocket. You’d have to be living under a rock not to know this information. Unemployment rose from 4.4 % to 14.7 %. That’s a huge jump. So with this said, it’s imperative that you optimize your LinkedIn profile to be found and identified for your expertise, especially if you’re in the market to land or leap into a new position. So what What do you have to do first to optimize your LinkedIn profile and attract recruiters or people that will view your profile? The first must have is a professional picture. Linkedin profiles with photos get 21 times more views and 36 times more messages. Now, your profile picture doesn’t have to be an expensive headshot, and most smartphones nowadays take great pictures. So add a picture to your profile.
And I’ll tell you as a side note, from my point of view, as an executive recruiter, if I don’t see a picture on your profile, I’m going to pass. And I know a lot of executive recruiters who feel the same way. Number two is your headline. If you’re in a finance capacity, let’s say you’re a chief financial officer and you just put the acronym CFO or even chief financial officer, that’s not going to cut through Two, the chaos of 600 plus million profiles. You need to be specific, and LinkedIn wants you to be specific. They provide 120 characters for you on your headline, so use keywords associated with your expertise. Number three, if you’re unemployed and looking for a new role, take the guesswork out of it for people looking at your profile. You can put your title on your headline and a few keywords, and again, you get 120 characters. So add in something like seeking new opportunity. And if you’re really good at selecting the right keywords, you might have enough space to even include your phone number. You want to make it easy for people to contact you. I see LinkedIn profiles all the time that have zero contact information.
Again, make it easy for people, especially recruiters, hiring managers, human resources, to reach you. Number four is your About section, formerly called a summary. Most people skip this, and it’s a big mistake. You used to get a couple thousand characters, and now I believe it’s been bumped up to around 2,600 characters. It gives you plenty of room to talk about your expertise. You can include bullets and numbers to convey your ROI that you’re going to provide a new organization. And as they say, past experiences predict future results. So when you’re building out this About section, keep all this in mind and use a variety of keywords. Do not regurgitate your resume. Number five, ask for recommendations and give them in return, at least three each. Number six, keywords are critically important. I just mentioned them a second ago. Sprinkle them throughout profile, and you cannot have enough keywords. You might ask, why is this so important? Well, it’s because the algorithm that Google uses is very similar to what LinkedIn uses. So when someone’s searching or typing a keyword into the search bar on Google, that word, if it’s in your profile, is highly likely to show up in the Google results.
So again, you cannot have enough keywords sprinkled throughout your LinkedIn profile. All right, that’s it for this episode. I have many more LinkedIn optimization tips for you, so tune in again tomorrow. I appreciate you listening to my executive search, Insider Secrets, to leaping into your next great job. I’m Mike Sudermann. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.