Level Up Your LinkedIn Profile: WorkShop Recap

So this week on the podcast, we are going to take you behind the scenes of a seminar that I ran. What did I do? Six of them, a lot of them. Before the holidays, they were so popular, we had over 400 people come to them.

But I just can't run them every.

Week because they take a lot of time and I'm busy coaching in the community, so I wanted to just give you a little sneak peek of what it is. So it's a LinkedIn seminar, and from my perspective as a Recruiter, I use LinkedIn in a very specific way. I think about LinkedIn as a tool for networking, but also as a search engine. It's very powerful as a search engine, but only if you have this elusive LinkedIn recruiter seat, which you do not need if you're a job seeker. But you do need to know how to create a profile that stands out in the recruiter search. So to that end, I made a seminar that shows you exactly how to organize your profile, what to do, why you're doing it, and it takes you behind the scenes of LinkedIn recruiters. So you can see what I see.

On the back end, because knowing the.

Tool is half the battle.

I mean, I think it's interesting because.

I definitely work with you for a recruiting company and I just don't do the recruiting of our actual candidates. So I learned so much because I don't look at the back end and I don't look at what candidates profiles look like. But it was really interesting. I learned a lot of stuff that I'm applying to my own profile for that exact reason.

Yeah. So it's about 45 minutes, the full. The full seminar I'm going to give you. The problem is that we are putting some of this on YouTube, but I can't put all of that on YouTube for a lot of reasons. We definitely take you deep undercover, so I really want to give you a good sneak peek into what the back end of LinkedIn looks like. So in this podcast episode, I'm going.

To give you some high notes.

But if you want the full seminar, it's totally free. You can watch it at any time you want. We're going to drop the link for that into the show notes so you can feel free to go and watch.

The whole thing and really, really get.

Your profile ready for 2024.

I think my favorite part of it is all the psychology we get into as well.

Oh, yeah.

Why do certain numbers attract people? What are some colors? What are just some really easy little tricks that grab people's eyes. So it's the psychology of it really. It all goes back to what we always say, that half the battle is just selling yourself and knowing how to market yourself. And that's means applying psychology.

I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees.

So I know what works and what.

Doesn'T work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply start striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted.

You'Re in the right place.

Now if you think that somebody in your network would benefit from this workshop.

Share the link to register I just wanted to make it freely available to.

People so that they could all learn together.

So let's jump in. Okay, who am I? So if you don't know me, I am Karina. I have a PhD in biochemistry and molecular pharmacology and about a decade ago I founded Reconomics Consulting. Reconomics is a talent acquisition strategy consulting firm. We work primarily in the biotech space, really the early, early stage biotechs. So I love startups. At this point we've worked with over 85 biotechs and have hired well over 4,000 candidates. So I really know what works in terms of what a good resume is, what a good LinkedIn profile is. And so that's what I'm going to be teaching you a little bit about today. But focusing on LinkedIn, a lot of these things are transferable to the resume as well. But I think that LinkedIn is a huge tool for getting you noticed in the job space. And recently we founded the collaboratory Career Hub, which is an educational platform. That's that Slack community I was telling you about where we work with job seekers to help them to learn these skills. So I just want to start out by saying that, make no mistake, LinkedIn is social media. It's not traditionally thought of as a social media platform because you're not going to be sharing pictures of your dogs and your kids and things like that. But it is social media just geared toward your professional development. So we want to use LinkedIn in four main ways and job seeking spoiler alert is the least important way to use it. First and foremost, I want to teach you how to network on LinkedIn, and I am going to teach you how to use it for your job search. But this is going to be the highest use of LinkedIn. Networking is so critically important and I'm going to teach you how to do it in an introvert friendly way. But most job seekers in our space especially, really only use LinkedIn during their job search. But people who are really, really savvy about their careers and playing the long game in their career know that LinkedIn is actually critical for that long game career. The second way I'm going to teach you to use LinkedIn is your personal branding. So personal branding and networking go hand in hand. And I get it. It is really scary to think about this in terms of personal branding. I was very resistant to using LinkedIn for personal branding. I am an introvert. You can use LinkedIn if you're an introvert because you don't actually have to put yourself out there all that much. There's no live stuff, you don't have to get on camera, you don't have to talk in real time with anyone, you can take time to formulate your responses, et cetera. So I like to think of LinkedIn as your superpower if you're an introvert or an extrovert. Next, I'm going to talk about LinkedIn as an extension of your resume. LinkedIn is not your resume and a lot of people get that mixed up. LinkedIn is supporting evidence for your resume. So you can put a little bit of personality into LinkedIn. It can be an extension of your resume in that you have a, a really nice, compact, highly tailored resume that when someone clicks through to visit your LinkedIn profile and 87% of recruiters will go visit your LinkedIn profile. So just be ready for that. When somebody clicks through to visit it, they should land on a page that supports your resume and doesn't surprise them. So when I land on a LinkedIn page that does not have anything to do with the resume that I'm looking at, it is shocking. And that is not what you want to do. You do not want to shock your recruiter or the hiring team in that way. You want them to land on your page and go, this all makes sense. So this is really, really important. I'm going to teach you how to do this. And the last and final thing that I'm going to tell you about with respect to LinkedIn is finding jobs. This should be the last consideration for LinkedIn. I know it's probably your first consideration right now, but if you are doing all the things I teach you to do, it's going to help with your job search right now, but it's more so going to help with future job searches because you're laying a really good foundation. So I'd like to convince you that leaving this seminar, you are going to think of LinkedIn as just part of your daily job right now, as you're looking for jobs, once you land a job and all through your future, are you sending connection requests to the right people? So by the right people, I mean a lot of people will find a company they're interested in and a job they're interested in, and they'll go to the company page and they'll see, okay, there's the CEO and they're going to link in with that person, or there's the VP of XYZ or that looks like the hiring manager. Maybe I'll link in with them for this. We actually don't want to be linking in with people that are really outside of the bubble of our job title that we're looking for. So if you, for instance, are applying for a senior scientist position, you're going to want to be linking in with your peers. And your peer group in that space would be, let's say, principal scientists, scientists, senior scientists, research associates, the people you would actually be interacting with in that job function. And the reason this is important is that you are going to spend a lot of time in your career. I don't care where you are in your career, you probably have time left in your career. Those peers are going to continue progressing through their career as you're progressing through your career. And you are going to be building a network of people that are at similar stages as you because they'll be getting promotions and moving along just like you. So next time you do need a job, when you put your hand up and you say, hey, I just got laid off, you're going to have a bunch of people surrounding you in this network that are poised to help you because they're your peers. Those people in companies get a referral bonus, often for referring great people into roles in their company. So they are going to be uniquely positioned to help you. So when you're thinking about who to link in with, think about linking in with peers. And I'm going to teach you exactly how to do that. So let's say I am applying for a senior scientist role and I'm excited about applying to, let's say, Biogen. So I've identified Jennifer. Jennifer is a principal scientist at Biogen. So I might say something like, hey, Jennifer, we share a few mutual connections and I'd love to add you to my network. I follow Biogen. Seems like a really great place to work. How do you like being a scientist there? So I want to break this down. There's an anatomy to a connection request note and it's based in psychology. Okay. So Jennifer, I've used the person's name. Names are powerful, very powerful. The second is a reason. This is just silly psychology. But there's a ton of evidence about this. If you give somebody a reason for asking to do something. So I'm asking to link in with them. Very low lift, but I'm giving them a reason. We share some mutual connections and I'd like to add you to the network. It's not a strong reason, it's not a life or death reason. It's just a small reason. They are much more likely to say yes, the next piece is a compliment, but it's not an overt compliment. I'm not complimenting their hair or their clothing or anything like that. I'm complimenting their choice company. So I'm saying I follow Biogen and it seems like a really great place to work. It's a very small compliment, but psychologically it's powerful. You are complimenting their decisions and then I follow that with an open ended question, not a yes or no question, just how do you like being a scientist there? So you're trying to open a dialogue and this is important because if you're able to open a small back and forth, they're going to remember you and you're not going to ask for help. At that point you're just going to see how they like being a scientist there. They may naturally say, oh, what role are you interested in? And that may give you an opening. They may get a referral bonus for bringing you in if you're a good match for the role. So there's a lot of power in this. Now that you've learned about the networking piece, I want you to start to work on your profile. Hey, I just want to cut in.

To say that if you are enjoying this podcast, you may enjoy the Building Biotechs podcast from our sister company, Recruitomics Consulting, which is a talent acquisition strategy firm that specializes in helping small biotechs hire exceptional talent. In that podcast, we interview amazing people who are building biotechs. They are industry leaders in all different verticals and it will allow you to explore career paths in biotech and to get to know companies that Maybe you've never heard about. So if you are a biotech fan, you are exploring careers in biotech. I highly recommend the Building Biotechs podcast. We'll link that in the show notes, or you can search for it on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. All right, back to our show.

The very first homework that I want you to take away from this is that you need to put your profile into creator mode. This will give you access to your analytics panel. The analytics panel is so powerful as a job seeker because you are going to be able to see how many people are viewing your profile. You're going to be able to see what searches you're appearing in. You can see things like keywords and titles that you're appearing for, which is huge, because as you are working on tweaking your profile, you will be able to see if you're coming up in the searches you want to be coming up in, or searches you don't want to be coming up in. And as you're starting to network and do things on the platform, you'll also be able to track what's working because you're going to start to see your profile views over time. There's some other analytics that are really powerful in here as well, but those are some real key ones. The next thing that creator mode does for you is it allows you to choose hashtags. So right at the top, under your headline, you'll be able to choose five broad tags. And these should be broad. These are sort of overarching. So for instance, if you are a molecular biologist, you could talk about molecular biology. That's broad for me. I talk about recruiting and biotech and pharmaceuticals. Right. Those are big, broad topics for me. The other thing it lets you do is create a link. Yours could be visit my research gate or visit my PubMed, and you could curate an offset platform resource for people with all of your publications. Okay, so then the next thing I want to talk about is this header section. This is the most important real estate of your entire profile because it loads first. And if this is not good, you're not going to convince people to scroll down and see more. So there's some easy things you can do. And just to let you know, for being here and taking this time to invest in yourself, you're actually going to get access to our full LinkedIn course. Tegan will help you do that a little bit later in this part of that is learning. I have a free canva template that you can actually design this kind of background photo. And I have a little video on how to use that free template so you'll get access to that. So don't worry too much about that right now. For mine, I put some images here that are a little bit science y, so pretty generic. A DNA strand. And then I consider myself a networker at heart. I connect people. I connect people to people. I connect people to companies. I connect all the different dots. And so that was sort of my visual that I wanted to put in here, sort of a network. And then I just like the color blue, so that was something I went with. So I'm putting a little personality in here. Love a good quote by Albert Einstein. So that's in there. So that is, you know, putting a little personality into your profile. You can put words on it in Canva, you can make it your own. The next thing is your photo. This photo is really, really important. I'm going to show you why in a minute. Throughout the pro the platform, this photo shows up in different ways. But for me, I used Canva again for this, but there's a lot of free background remover tools around the Internet. But I just background removed this photo. This photo is of me. My face is taking up most of it. I am smiling. I'm looking directly at the camera. You're going to hear me talk throughout this presentation about psychology. You are marketing yourself. That is what job seeking is. That is honestly what your whole career is to be, to be totally honest. But you are a marketer right now, so I'm telling you how to put your marketing hat on. You are going to want to work with human psychology, not against it. In a social media platform like this, your face is important. People want to make a human connection with you. They want to see your eyes, they want to see your smile. They want to see you. So choose a picture that is mostly of your face and that you just look happy and that's really how you work with psychology. Then I background removed so that I could put a complimentary color to my background header here. I also used a tool in Canva that kind of gave this halo effect. It just makes it pop a little bit. And this makes a nice striking photo where there's good contrast throughout the platform. The next thing is my name. This one's really important. So I'm not condoning this. I'm just going to tell you what the world is like. There are recruiters out there who have told me that they will not reach out to a candidate if it is not clear what their first name is because LinkedIn uses a lot of templates and we can't help it. That's just how the platform is set up. And we are always very worried about offending somebody or using the wrong name or whatever. So there are recruiters who flat will not reach out to a candidate if it's not immediately clear what their first name is. Right, wrong or indifferent. That is the world. So my suggestion is use your first name in that first name box and nothing else. For me, I have a simple first name with no special characters or capitalization throughout, but use title case, capitalize the first letter, lowercase, all the rest. Again, unless you have special characters or capitalization throughout your name. But I just see a lot of candidates who do all caps and things like that. Just don't do it. Put your degree behind your name. So I see a lot of the time people put, you know, doctor in front again, just the first name in front of and then put all of your letters behind your name. Also, I do recommend using the pronouns feature. And then the last piece of this header is your headline. This is not your job title. I repeat, this is not your job title. All right. Make sure that this is your value proposition. I go into this in more detail in some other videos that you will have access to and how to figure out what you want to call yourself or be in this. But this is your value proposition and it should be a little bit weird. So I would like to challenge you to go and think about what your value proposition is and how you can make it a little bit clickbait, not in a bad way, so that you are clickable on the platform. Mine says empowering biotech growth. If you are thinking about growing your biotech, you would want to click on that. You would want to know, how do I empower biotech growth? That is a little bit weird, It's a little bit curious. And that is the point. That's the point of a headline. It should make people want to know more about you. The about section is going to show up for you somewhere down below your header. So as you're scrolling down, you'll find the about section. And when somebody is on your profile, it first appears condensed where we're only seeing a couple of lines of text here. And your job is to make those lines of text interesting so that they want to click see more. And the way I have done that personally is I used a couple of emojis, I used a different font here, I used an italics here and I started with a bullet. So the Point is, if somebody's interested in growing their biotech, they're going to want to click see more. If they're not interested in growing their biotech, they're not going to click that. And that's okay with me because I'm attracting the people I want to attract. The other thing to note here is that you are also able to list your top skills here. This is another keyword, rich space. My advice is to use different top skills here, different keywords than you used up above in your hashtags so that you're showing up for more keywords. These ones I like to really drill down. So if molecular biology is your field, and so you said up, up above you said talks about molecular biology, but really you have specific expertise, let's say in NGS or something like that, this is where you would put those really specific hard skills. And those are going to show up really prominently on your profile. Okay, so if I've done my job right and somebody clicks see more. I use a lot of white space. I use that italics font to kind of break up the different sections. I use short bullets, not long bullets. Many of them are just little snippets. We live in the era of TikTok. I don't have a lot of time to communicate my value proposition and neither do you. So we need to make it really skimmable for people. This is actually going to carry through to what I teach on the resume as well. This should be something where someone's eyes can trip down the page and they can get the gist of what you are trying to get across. So really take some time on your about section. It's not a resume, it's more of a summary. But it should really use white space bullets, that sort of thing. And again, I teach you how to do that in a different video where I go a little deeper on this. There's some free tools around the Internet to help you with the fonts and the bullets and everything like that. All right, so the next piece is this is where we do get a little bit resume. Like this is your experience section. And within the experience section you're going to want to create impactful bullet points. You should be using statistics and data and things like that in these. This very much mirrors what we teach you to do on the resume. So the work here is sort of cloned over. We again want to work with human psychology and humans love odd numbers. We like 3, 5 and 7 particularly. 7 is too many bullet points. Do not use 7 bullet points, but use 3 or 5, 3 or 5. And then keep it consistent between each section. The reason is people love those odd numbers and they also love consistency. They love patterns. So they won't know why they like your profile so much or your resume. If you're using this on your resume, they'll just know they do like it. It's a soothing document, it looks nice and they're just happy reading it. And they won't know why and they don't need to know why. You're just working with human psychology in this instance. I hope that makes sense. I want to point out here that the other thing you can do is categorize your skills within each experience and if you haven't done that, please do. I'm going to show you why that's so important when I take you behind the scenes of LinkedIn Recruiter. It is very important. Categorize your skills. And then some of you are coming out of school right now. So I read that in our comments. If your experience is limited to things you've done in school, that is okay. That is still valid, good experience. So I want you to treat it just like a job. You'll also list it in your academic section, but you're going to want to put it in your experience section and again create impactful bullet points under that so that we know what you actually contributed to that role. Racing right along. I'm going to take you behind the scenes of LinkedIn Recruiter. Now, LinkedIn Recruiter is something that I pay for and all recruiters pay for or my team and companies pay for it for their internal in house recruiters.

You.

I always think that if you understand a tool, if you understand how a tool works, you're going to be more successful in using your profile so that you are maximizing for that tool. So I'm going to teach you what the tool of LinkedIn Recruiter looks like and does so that as you're working on your profile you can keep that in mind.

Okay? That was your quick crash course into making your LinkedIn profile so much more clickable, more discoverable and just an asset not just for your job search right now, but also for your career going forward. This is a skill just like learning to pipette. You can get good at LinkedIn. Did I cover everything? No, of course I didn't.

There's a lot more to learn.

I really just had a few minutes with you.

Outside of LinkedIn, we really haven't addressed how you do a resume, how you hone your interview skills, how you negotiate.

An offer and all the other good.

Things that I would love to be.

Able to teach you and work with you on. I hope though that you're at least.

Set up to go out and make.

Your LinkedIn profile a little bit better. In fact, I know you are. So with that, I'm excited to see you in the community and to start answering your questions.

I thank you so much for joining us today. And again, if you got anything out.

Of this and you think somebody in your network might also share it with a friend, that is the best compliment you can give me. Thanks so much.

All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. And again, if you missed the beginning of the podcast, we just want to remind you that we have produced and put out there for the world a webinar that will teach you how to level up your LinkedIn. If you are a biotech job seeker. It is really, it's just packed with so many cool insights, a lot of behind the scenes on what your profile looks like for a recruiter, and little tips and tricks that are really not hard to implement into your LinkedIn profile.

But if you don't know, you don't know.

So definitely worth a watch.

Yeah.

And I think we have a little bonus too. If you actually go to this seminar, you will get access to one of our courses where we go a little even deeper on the LinkedIn and the how to do it with templates. So it's worth doing. It's free. Prioritize yourself. I mean, it's. It'll cost you 45 minutes, but it is 45 minutes well spent if you are wanting to level your LinkedIn profile up this year.

Thanks so much for listening to the.

Biotech Career Coach podcast by the Collaboratory Career Hub. To join our free Slack group and to get access to other great free resources and materials, head over to CollaboratoryCareerHub.com and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn Pro Tip.

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Subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. And if you leave us an honest review, screenshot that review and send it to helloolaboratorycareerhub.com we'll give you totally free access to our popular LinkedIn course so that you can learn all of the secrets behind creating a magnetic LinkedIn profile that drives your career forward. Have an amazing week and we'll see.

You back here next Friday.