LinkedIn Profile Glow Up with Carina Clingman

I'm going to run you through part of a workshop that I did on using your LinkedIn profile to attract more recruiters attention to market yourself to companies. So this is going to be a pretty information rich workshop and you should be able to at the end, take the advice that I give and make your LinkedIn profile instantly better. Stay tuned at the end because I want to let you know how we can work together a little bit more deeply. We do have a free community just for advice like this that you're welcome to join. So I'll walk you through that after we finish up this quick workshop. Going to be really respectful of your time and cut out all the things you don't need to know. I'm going to cut out all my pauses, all my ums, going to be right to the point and you will get a lot of value from this. So let's go. Hey everyone, thanks so much for joining. I am excited to share with you this LinkedIn masterclass. We are going to work directly on how to make your LinkedIn profile really attractive to recruiters and also to employers. So I have a few little tips and tricks that I'm going to hit along the way. I hope this is really informative. Please ask questions in the chat. I will get to your questions after a word and if you have anything that comes up for you about your own LinkedIn profile, I will try and address that in the time that we have. So first of all, here is my profile. Now you're getting a behind the scenes look at my profile. So know that you're not gonna be able to see all these things on other people's profiles, but you should see them on your own. So the first thing I want you to do is put your profile into creator mode. Creator mode allows you a lot of extra analytics and to find that you're gonna scroll down until you see resources and you're gonna wanna make sure creator mode is on. And once you've turned it on, you're going to be able to do a couple of great things. So first of all, you are going to be able to choose five hashtags that you want to be found. For now, throughout this, I'm going to talk a lot about marketing. You are marketing yourself on this platform. Okay? So it's not about what you were talking about five years ago, it's not what you have been talking about. Make sure that these hashtags are what you want to be talking about. So that means you have full control over what you want to appear as on the platform. If, for example, I am a biochemist and I have removed, as you notice, any mention of biochemistry here because I don't want to be found for those things right now. Yes, I'm proud to be a biochemist, but right now I want to be found for recruiting, biotech, pharmaceuticals, candidate experience and dei. Those are the things I talk about and that's what I want to show up for. So keep that in mind. You are marketing who you want to be, who you want to show up as and the job you want next. You're also going to be able to dig into your analytics once you're in creator mode. So this is really powerful. I'm going to show you how to get to this from your homepage. When you go look at your homepage right at the top, you're going to see your analytics and tools. And when you click into that, you will see the following. So if you are posting actively, which I highly recommend, we'll talk about that in a little while. You will start to see your post impressions and how you're doing and how you're trending over time. There's some handy graphs in here. You can see how things are going. I'm a little less active this week. It is what it is. And I would say that for you as a job seeker, you are going to be looking mostly at your profile viewers and your search appearances. And this is where you can put on your scientific hat. And we do have a worksheet that lets you track your analytics over time. I recommend doing that from today forward once a week, just come in and check your analytics. Make sure that you are on track and you're showing up for things you want to be showing up for. So let's go into viewers here. You can see again over time how many profile views you have. What's really interesting is that you can see who viewed your profile in some cases. Now, this depends on a few factors like how connected you are to them. I recommend if you're not LinkedIn with me, link in with me. Link in with anyone on my team because you instantly get access to our entire network and you're going to see more people on the platform, period. So definitely link in with us. We're quite well connected in the biotech space. But what I want to show you is that you are able to see who's been viewing your profile and if somebody of interest is viewing your profile, you can follow up with them right here. You're able to message them right here, which is great. You can also Drill down by company, by industry and location. There are some other filters that you may be able to turn on. Again, depends on your level of LinkedIn. I don't think you need to pay for LinkedIn, let me just be clear about that. But you can, and if you do, you have a few more options. I don't think it's necessary, but it's an option to you in your search appearances. This is really powerful for job seekers. Here you can see what titles you're being found for. And this is so important because if you're being found for the wrong titles, you know that you need to alter your LinkedIn profile. So keep an eye on this, start to track these. You're also able to see where the folks that are searching for you and finding you are coming from. So which companies they're coming from. This is really interesting because if you notice a company that you're particularly excited about is searching for you, you have an opportunity to go follow up a network. And again, you can see the job titles of your searchers. So who is searching for you? If you're starting to see recruiter, that means you're showing up in the searches, which is great. All right, going back, that's why you want to be in creator mode. The other thing that I want to show you is when you're in creator mode, those five hashtags will show up right here underneath your your powerful headline statement. Okay, so I'm going to go top to bottom on this profile. Let me just preface this with, there are two ways you're going to be using LinkedIn. One is you are going to be courting people to come to your profile and view it. And two is you're going to be trying to show up in the LinkedIn recruiter searches. And in that case, you still show up as a profile. It just shows up a little bit differently. So I'll explain those differences. But either way, this top square is your most valuable piece of LinkedIn real estate. So you want to pack it full of information because anything below that, people are going to have to start scrolling. You want this kind of first impression to be really strong. So to that end, a lot of people just have the boring stock LinkedIn banner here. You can put whatever you want here. And we actually have a template that I'm happy to share with you. I'll actually link to a video on how to use it, just so I don't have to cover that here and make this video longer. But the free canva template will allow you to create A nice little headline photo with your name and your interests and just anything that kind of pertains to your job search. So what I recommend is, and I'm going to go through this in a little bit more detail later, but you can use your profile and you can update your profile at any time. Okay? So I would recommend putting to begin with, while you're doing your job search and you're applying and you're networking and you don't have any interviews pending, use a more generic kind of picture that shows who you are and what you want to be doing. If you then land an interview, you can change the picture to be more specifically targeted to the company. So, for example, if you get an interview with a company that does gene editing, you could choose to change to a picture that specifically shows some of the really cool renderings of a Cas9 enzyme or something like that. So you can target your companies as well. Please know that when you get an interview, 90% or more of hiring managers and interviewers on your panel are going to visit your LinkedIn profile in advance of your interview. So you have a great opportunity to show them how ideally suited for the role you are based on what you're putting into this top piece. Okay, next step is name. So your name should be very simple. I know recruiters who will not reach out to candidates if their first name is not clearly delineated. So that means no doctor in front of the name. That means no first initial. That means no abbreviation. That's confusing. We want to be reaching out to people in a personalized way. And if we can't figure out how to do that, it makes it harder to reach out. And I know recruiters that will just not reach out. They think there's plenty of candidates. I'm just not going to reach out because I'm not comfortable with how the name appears. So as an example, if I went by Karina, but my first name was actually Jelena. And so if I put J Karina Klingman, I might decrease the number of recruiters that are reaching out to me. Same thing if I put doctor. So just be really careful with how you're putting your name here. It does not need to be your legal name. This is the name that you want recruiters to call you by. So whatever you go by, put that in your first name box. Then make sure that you put your degrees behind your name. So again, going back to the doctor example, there's lots of types of Doctors, right? There's MDs, there's JDs, there's PharmDs, there's PhDs, there's EDDs. We know a lot of doctors and our jobs that we're recruiting for might call for one type of doctor over another. So it's really nice at a glance to have your degree here again. Going back to my marketing tips, you as a marketer want to be attracting the jobs that you want to attract and you want to be repelling the jobs that you don't want to attract. So you don't need to be attracting every single person to your profile. It's better for you to go out with a strong statement. This is who I am, this is what I do, this is what I'm seeking. Because you're going to get more high quality reach outs and less low quality reach outs. And at the end of the day, there's a lot of noise on LinkedIn. So this will increase your signal to noise, which is great for you. So the next thing let's talk about is your profile picture. See how my face is really big. Make sure that you have a smiling picture. You want to be friendly. This is your first impression, right? You want to look friendly, you want to look like somebody that people want to work with and you want your profile picture to be 60% or so of face. So not a big zoomed out picture of you, your full body or even waist up. Try and do shoulders up and use a free tool to remove the background and put in some sort of a contrasted fun background. I did this in Canva, but I did it with the paid version of Canva. If you're willing to pay a few dollars to use Canva, that's great. So powerful and quick and easy. And I do value my time, so I'm willing to pay a couple bucks to quickly get something done. But I did this background remove tool and then I put the little halo effect and then a contrasting picture color that actually was selected using one of those little eyedropper tools from the color palette of this gradient. So it all looks seamless. So when someone comes to visit my profile, what they should see is a welcoming, cohesive picture. And this tells people subliminally that I am put together, I'm organized and I am neat and tidy. Right? This all looks neat and tidy. So think about that. Your profile, just like your resume, is going to be communicating things that are not explicitly written. Right? In this case, I want to communicate that I am professional and well presented. Does that make sense? Hopefully. Next up, let's talk about your headline. So the headline is not your job. Title. Don't put your job title there. Put your value proposition. All right, here is a trick. I always think what would catch someone's attention? What would make somebody think what? I want to know more about that person. So for this, it's not senior scientist, it's not principal scientist, it's not anything related to necessarily your job title. For me, it's empowering biotech startups to thrive. And then I've put in these vertical lines here. You can make this as long as you want. Mine is three lines long. As you see. You can't make it as long as you want. That's an exaggeration. You can make it pretty long. So mine is three lines long and I have made these little vertical lines here to put in some things. Now, the most important thing is the top line. Okay, I'll show you why in a moment. But that is what most people are going to see. So now I put my titles on the second line. So founder of Recruitomics Consulting Co founder of Collaboratory Career Hub. Those are not. They're important to me, but they're not what I need people to see. What I want them to see is this so that they want to come visit me at my profile and learn more. It's enticing, it's weird. It's a little bit head scratchy, right? That's what we want. So think about that and try and understand what that title might be. Now, I would recommend using ChatGPT to help you brainstorm for this. And I do have resources for using ChatGPT for brainstorming. So if you're interested in those, you're going to want to ask for those resources within our Slack community. But we have a whole bunch of ways that you can use ChatGPT to get your brain storming and flowing. Start to think about how to structure these titles and these headlines. But that is my recommendation. Okay. Now when you're in creator mode, you also get to have a link here. So if you are somebody who's published a lot of papers, I would recommend having a link to your research gate or your Google Scholar page. If you have a personal website, that's great. But you can create a link here that's going to let people click right through to get more information. So definitely use that. And you can also put that you're open to work here if you'd like to do remember that people at your company may see that that's they try and keep it private, but it's not totally private. And then scrolling on down the Next thing that you're going to worry about is your about section. And so in your about section, notice how small the real estate is here. It's about three or four lines and then there's this little see more. And then check this out. You've got top skills here. So this little section is a pretty powerful section, but you have to entice people to click see more. So here it's okay to use emojis and things like that. You can use if You Google free LinkedIn text formatter, something like that. There are a number of websites that will allow you to create formatted text like I have right here and like I have up in my headline. You cannot actually do that in a Word document or a Google document. It has to be done in one of these tools. Let me just show you that free LinkedIn text formatter, something like that. Okay, so let's see. Here we go. Fancy fonts. That's the one I used. Obviously it's been clicked on. So here you can type whatever you want and it will format it. And there's all kinds of things you should not use. Don't use weird things, old English, wingdings, anything like that. But you can get a nice bold and things like that. Now you actually have to copy it here and then you can go paste it into LinkedIn. So that's a little trick. That's how I get that fancy formatting. And now that I've done that, I am enticing people to click into this so that they learn more. Now here is my pro tip. We don't want to see big blocks of text in here. As recruiters we look at hundreds of profiles in a day. So make it easy for us. Have a nice bulleted list. Just be kind to us. We see a lot of things, so this is not what you want to do. That's too much text. I need to reformat mine. It's bullets. I will do it, I promise. Try and bullet out a few things about yourself three to five bullets and make them really action oriented bullets with statistics. So not assay development but develop three specific crispr assays to modify xyz. So try and give us some details and some background. Now the reason for that is that when we do keyword searches, we see the keywords in context within LinkedIn Recruiter. So that's what I was saying earlier is that you're going to use your profile two different ways, if that makes sense. So one way is that people navigate directly to your profile. The other way is for recruiters in LinkedIn Recruiter, we are doing keyword searches, and there's a lot more that goes into it. But just know this, that when we search a keyword, it highlights the keyword right within the profile. So if I was searching for DEI specialist, it would show me the profile and a snapshot of the profile with the keyword in context so that I could quickly read the surrounding sentences and understand how that keyword fits in. So keep that in mind, because that's how you're showing up in the recruiter searches. So before I leave that your top skills you can put in here can be different than the hashtags you have up above. And these skills are things that, again, you want to be found for in the searches, and they should also be reiterated within the body of your about section. Okay, under your experience, again, do as I say, not as I do Here, you want three to five bullet points for each experience for the last 10 years or so. That is going to specifically highlight your skills for that experience. Then you can also categorize your skills under each role. Now, okay, so that is important down here. If you haven't seen this, I have to go all the way down. Where are the skills? Oh, somewhere. Okay, so under the skills section, now you have to. This will take you a little while, so I always recommend settling in for a TV show or something like that. But go through each skill that you want to be found for. Choose 30 or so skills that you would want to come up in searches for. Eliminate any skills you do not want to come up in searches for. All right, again, attract the jobs you want, repel the ones you don't, and go through and click the little pencil icon and categorize them into your experiences, your education, any projects. You can even categorize them under your publications so you can get really specific with these skills. And again, this is going to help us, as we're going through your profile, know where you've used the skills, not just that you possess the skills. So if that makes sense, that is a lot easier for us to do. And we love this new feature of LinkedIn. Okay, so that is the quick takes. My recommendations are to spend time on your experience section, putting in three or five bullet points. Actually, I'm gonna. I'm gonna stay there for a minute. Here's a hot tip. There is a lot of neurobiology research about how attractive the numbers 3, 5, and 7 are to people. There is something just very pleasing about those numbers. The odd numbers, not the even numbers. That is why I say three or five bullet points. It feels very neat and tidy to brains. Nobody's going to consciously realize that you've done it. But again, it comes back to they come to your profile, they see such a nice picture at the top. You look friendly, you have a beautiful banner photo, it's all tied together and then you have these nice sets of three and five bullet points and it just feels very calming. So this is getting into the deep neurobiology of why people like things. So three or five bullet points, seven is too long for this. So that's why I excluded seven. Even though seven's a great number. Three or five bullet points, they should be action packed, action oriented, results oriented bullet points. And I actually have a another Training on using ChatGPT for resume writing and you can use that exact same tactic to write your LinkedIn profile as well. Again, if you are looking for that training, just let us know in the in the slack room and, and we'll get you that training so that you can review it. Okay, so one quick recap. This is your top, most important section of real estate. Spend the most time here. Optimize your about section, make sure that looks really good. Start to track your metrics in your experience section. Ensure that you have skills categorized and some great bullet points. And that is going to get you a huge boost in how you're seen on the platform. Okay, here, here's my last tip. When you are using the platform, I recommend that job seekers, from now until you get a job, commit to spending an hour a day on LinkedIn networking. And to do that, you simply need to go to your home tab and start interacting. Okay, so here is a post I'll interact with and I just want to show you. I want to go to a post that's pretty well commented on and just show you. Okay, this one has a lot. This one's about the cheeky scientist, which is really interesting. Matteo has a really nice profile picture. I would say that it could be more contrasted. Look at how mine shows up comparatively. It's just a little bit more popped, right? And it partly has to do with that little halo effect I put on there. But let me just show you other people here. This person is lost to their background. More contrast could be used. Their face is a little bit too zoomed in. We could use more contrast. So you can see that as you're looking at these, you're starting to get a picture of what is popping and what's not popping. All right, so I'm going to congratulate Carolyn on starting with flagship. All right, so I'm going to like it and I'm going to comment. I'm just going to show you how I show up and why this networking is important. Okay. A lame post. I would normally write more, but okay, so as you can see here, my headline, that first line, the headline shows up right here and it is really striking compared with other ones because I've done a little fancy formatting and I'm not just putting my title. I'm very happy for Julie that she's senior Vice President but doesn't show me what she's passionate about or what she really cares about doing. So that is why I highly recommend to make your headline stand out and then have your profile picture be really bright. Let's just look at more comments here. So looking here, my profile picture really pops. I do think that it's if you can go with a yellow color, that's the most engaging color of any of any color in terms of marketing and advertising. Personally, it didn't work for my profile, but see if it does for yours. But you are. You can see here that a bright popping profile picture is going to be the most noticeable thing. So spend 30 minutes a day liking commenting, reposting, post some things of your own. Get really visible on the platform and find companies that you are excited about whether they have job openings or not. Follow companies. We know when you've been following companies, join groups that also shows up as well and start to link in strategically with folks. To link in with somebody you can go to connect and then add a note and in your note you can just say something pretty generic. But hey, we share some network connections in common. I would love to add you to my network so that I can follow your progress. Thanks so much. Just something very simple like that and that will get you a lot of connections. Aim to add 20 connections to your network a day from now until you get a job. And once you do get a job, ease up a little bit. But keep working on your LinkedIn network because this will serve you in all of your upcoming work. It will serve you to have a big robust network on the platform so that you can always have a steady stream of incoming inquiries, opportunities to partner, business development, all the things that you might need. So I hope that was helpful. Hopefully you have some really actionable tips to take home and you can immediately make a huge impact on your own LinkedIn profile. Okay, so there you go. That was my little LinkedIn training. I did cut out the hot seats that I did because I wanted to protect the privacy of the folks that participated. We put their LinkedIn profiles up. I made some suggestions about how they can improve them. But if you are interested in getting that sort of one on one help and participating in some of these hot seats and the coaching that we do, we have a free Slack community that I very much encourage you to join. My recruiters from Recruitomics Consulting are in there, I'm in there and we have a community manager who can help you find things and provide resources. Here's the thing. Recruitomics Consulting is a niche biotech recruiting firm. Over the past 10 years we have helped over 80 small startup biotechs grow and we've hired over 4,000 candidates into those companies. We maintain a fairly small slate of clients and so we're not necessarily going to have jobs that you can slot into, but what we can do and what we're passionate about doing is helping you learn to put your best foot forward in your job search. This includes helping with resumes, helping with LinkedIn profiles, helping with interviews and the negotiation process. So please join us in the free Slack community. We would love to have you there. And if you are interested in getting our entire library of resources, which includes all of our weekly coaching sessions, all the replays, all built on top of a searchable ChatGPT4 interface which means you can ask questions in natural language to find things you need. You are welcome to join that as well. I will link to that below. It's just 10 to get access to our entire library of things which we add to multiple times a week depending on how many sessions we do. So that should be a really good resource. It's very affordable for job seekers and we would love to help you out. Also, if you want a specific type of training that we don't yet have, let me know because I am always making new trainings two, three times a week. So if we don't have something I'll just make it for you and I'd love to help. Thanks so much for joining us and good luck in your job search. Let us know how we can assist you.