What do recruiters look for in your LinkedIn profile?

November 10th 2023 | Posted by phil scott

Having a LinkedIn profile is as essential as having a written CV or attending interviews in your job search.

As your professional online presence, LinkedIn is where accountancy recruiters can look immediately to find out about you, your education, experience and skills.

With this in mind, it’s vital to keep your LinkedIn profile up to date and fully reflective of what you’ve achieved in your career so far.

When recruiters are viewing your LinkedIn profile there are a number of key points they are looking for:

A complete profile:

A recruiter is looking to read a profile that is full and has completed all of the areas available. Filling out all of the sections on your LinkedIn profile shows that you are serious about your professional presence and that you’re committed to taking the time to present yourself well.

LinkedIn has space to present work experience, including key areas of responsibility in each role; education; skills and accomplishments, such as languages, courses and certificates. It gives many options so that an extensive picture of knowledge and experience can be shown. It pays to take the time to put in as much detail as possible!

At attention-grabbing headline:

Directly underneath your name is a space for your ‘headline’. If you’re looking for a new role, this is the place to sell yourself. It’s an opportunity for a punchy, mini-pitch to grab the attention of a potential new employer and set yourself apart. In just a few sentences you can highlight your unique selling points, demonstrate your ambition and communicate your individual skills and attributes.

A strong summary:

A LinkedIn profile has space for an introductory summary about you just underneath your headline. This is the place to strengthen your headline mini-pitch. Of course under Work Experience, you can go into detail about responsibilities and achievements in each job role, but in your introductory summary, you can combine your skills and achievements to showcase the best.

View your summary as a way to compile the key points about yourself and your experience that you wish to communicate. Think about what happens if somebody were to ONLY read your introduction – would they understand the essence of what you’ve got to offer and what you have achieved? Pull out the points that make you special and create an introduction that flows naturally from your Headline.

A broad network:

LinkedIn is also about making connections and building a professional network. Recruiters may be interested in any shared, mutual connections or seeing that you have a strong network of 1 or 2nd connections.

When boosting your LinkedIn presence, it makes sense to invest some time in building up your connections. This can be done by connecting with current or past colleagues, friends in the same industry, people you’ve met at conferences & seminars or linking with individuals you studied with at University or school.

Recommendations:

Following on from having a broad professional network, come recommendations. Part of the power of LinkedIn is personal recommendations from others and it pays to both recommend others and ask for your own recommendations.

Being endorsed by others gives credibility to the skills that you highlight in your profile. It demonstrates that other people who have worked with you believe that you excelled in those particular areas. There’s a real benefit to investing time to ask for recommendations to boost your profile and strengthen the areas that you specialise in.

An active profile:

You can keep your LinkedIn profile active by publishing articles. These will show up on your profile and also in your connection’s feed giving you exposure across the platform.

Publishing content about your field and areas of interest gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of the sector. It illustrates that you are up to date with issues in your industry and that you are knowledgeable enough to share commentary and insight.