Most professionals over the age of 25 will find their next job through networking or recruiters.
Because of this fact, I have written plenty about networking techniques, including a recent blog Increasing Your Network 10x with this Simple Question.
Therefore, let’s discuss methods for recruiters to find you on LinkedIn with the effective use of keywords.
Without multi-word keywords on your LinkedIn profile, you’re a ghost
First, if you use single-word keywords, LinkedIn SEO will penalize you simply because many other professionals know and do better.
Second, recruiters can only search for keywords in the following areas of your LinkedIn profile:
- Headline (below your name)
- About Section
- Experience Section
- Skills and Endorsements section
Third, regardless of where you use them, the following single-word keywords are boring and won’t get you far:
- Marketing
- Financial
- IT
- Budgeting
- Teamwork
Try these multi-word keywords to have recruiters banging at your LinkedIn door
- Global Cross-Functional Team Leadership
- Multi-Channel Marketing
- Financial Statement Analysis
- Planning Budgeting and Forecasting
- Strategic Human Resource Planning
- Global Human Resources Management
My Banker client wasn’t getting noticed
Let’s focus on where my client fell down in her “Skills and Endorsements” section.
First, she only had 15 skills, but LinkedIn allows 50. Recruiters won’t find her if other bankers have more than triple her count.
Second, her “Skills and Endorsements” section contains 15 single-word skills, including:
- Financial
- M&A
- Equity
- Debt
- Accounting
- Banking
We got her 3x the recruiter inquiries within 1 week
How did we do this? First, I spent some time on LinkedIn finding the perfect multi-word keywords that matched her job goal and skill set.
Let’s see the before and after:
- Finance==> Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)
- M&A==> M&A Advisory Services
- Equity==> Debt & Equity Financing
- Debt==> Debt & Equity Capital Raising
- Accounting==> US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
- Banking==> Global Banking Relationships
Within a week of optimizing her LinkedIn profile, she told me she started getting 3x as many inquiries as she received before.
Within 2 months, hello JP Morgan.
For a complimentary discussion