This guest article is written by Austin Belcak, founder of Cultivated Culture.

If you’re a job seeker and you haven’t optimized your LinkedIn profile, you’re missing out on a ton of opportunities.

In today’s market, 87% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find and vet new candidates. But not everyone is capitalizing on what the platform has to offer.

In this post, I’m going to walk you through three highly actionable tactics that will help you appear in more searches, get more profile views, and land more jobs. Let’s dive in:

Tip #1: Optimize Your Headline For Visibility And Value

Most people know that their LinkedIn headline is important, but they don’t know exactly how to maximize that opportunity.

Your headline is one of the most valuable parts of your profile for two reasons:

1. LinkedIn emphasizes the keywords in your headline when serving up search results. The more relevant keywords you have, the more visibility you’ll get.

2. Your headline is your hook. It shows up in search results and it’s one of the first things people see on your profile. A bad headline can cause people to click away while a great headline can convert more views into job opportunities.

If you want to capitalize on the opportunity here, you need a keyword optimized headline that sells your value. The LinkedIn headline formula I use with clients consists of two parts:

A keyword filled overview of your role/abilities followed by an illustration of value (preferably with measurable metrics). 

For example, let’s say we’re a sales person in the market for an account executive or sales manager role. Our headline might look like this:

Account Executive, Business Development, Sales Manager | Helping SaaS Companies Accelerate Revenue To $10M+ In ARR

The beginning of the headline is packed with relevant keywords and the second half of this headline creates a clear illustration of the value we bring to the table.

If you optimize your headline using this formula, you’ll not only show up in more search results, but you’ll win more clicks and generate more opportunities.

Tip #2: Double Down On Your Skills & Endorsements

Speaking of search results, I want you to run a quick search for your current job title on LinkedIn.

How many results does LinkedIn give you? 1,000? 10,000? One million?

There’s a specific way that LinkedIn ranks its search results and the secret lies in your Skills & Endorsements section.

LinkedIn uses this section to stack rank candidates in search results.

Let’s say you have a recruiter who is searching for a software engineer with Node.js experience. 

Three candidates pop up. Candidate A has 5 endorsements for Node.js, Candidate B has 10, and Candidate C has 15. All else being equal on their profiles, Candidate C will show up highest in the search results for this instance.

What does that mean for you?

If you want to appear higher in more searches (and increase your chances of getting a click!), you need to make sure you have the right skills on your profile and they need to have endorsements.

How To Find The Right Skills To Add

The first thing we need to do is find the right skills that are relevant to the roles we want. Here’s how to do that in three simple steps:

1. Open LinkedIn Jobs and run searches for all of the titles you’re targeting, same as you would if you were planning to apply for a job.

2. Browse through each job description and, when you find one that matches your goals, copy and paste the job description into a Word doc. Rinse and repeat until you have 20-30 job descriptions.

3. Open ResyMatch’s job description scanner and paste in the entire Word Doc, all of the contents from the 20-30 job descriptions, then hit scan.

ResyMatch will show you the keywords and skills that appear most frequently across all of these job descriptions! You want to prioritize the skills that appear the most and then work your way down.

How To Gain Endorsements

Endorsements can be a tricky thing to get because most people don’t know how to endorse skills on LinkedIn, and they’re also afraid to ask.

The good news is that I have an easy trick to help you with both!

First, you can learn how to endorse someone on LinkedIn in this post (feel free to bookmark that so you can send it to people when you make the ask).

Second, all you need to do is ask! Make a list of all of the people – friends, family, colleagues you trust, who would be willing to endorse you for a set of skills. When making the ask, be sure to call out the specific skills you want them to endorse and offer to endorse theirs as well.

Here’s a template:

Hi [Name],

I hope you’re doing well!

I wanted to shoot you a quick note because I’m doing a bit of an overhaul on my LinkedIn profile and I’m aiming to get some more endorsements. I’m aiming to get more support for skills like [Skill 1 ], [Skill 2], and [Skill 3] because I’m targeting [Job Title] roles. Would you be up to endorse me for those skills? Here’s a quick guide on how to do that.

If you’d like, I’d be more than happy to reciprocate with endorsements or a recommendation for you. Either way, I appreciate you!

Best,

[Your Name]

Now all you need to do is rinse, repeat, and watch your endorsement count grow!

Tip #3: Start Leaving Thoughtful Comments

Now that your headline and your Skills section are optimized for visibility, you should start to see more views roll in.

But optimizing for search visibility is only one piece of the puzzle. There is still a LOT of competition out there and there are only so many searches happening every month.

If you really want to skyrocket your LinkedIn profile views, you need another strategy that will allow you to push people to your profile.

That’s where comments and engagement come into play.

Commenting and engaging on the right posts, in the right way, can send massive surges of traffic to your profile. People see your comment, they think, “wow, this is a great take, I want to learn more about this person” and boom! They click on your profile.

Here’s how to execute on this in less than 15 minutes per day:

1. Find people in your target market who post regularly and have followings who engage with them. This way you’ll be able to piggyback off of the views that their post is getting.

You can find them by going to Google and searching for “[Industry] influencers to follow on LinkedIn” or you can use LinkedIn to run a search for your job title and then filter by “Content.”

2. When you see a post that resonates with you and is picking up traction, you’ve found your mark (it helps if the post has been shared in the past 24 hours). Read through the post and think of a thoughtful comment that adds to the conversation. Aim for a few sentences vs. “love this” or “great tips.”

3. Set a timer on your phone for 15 minutes and knock out as many comments as you can before the timer goes off.

If you do that every day, you’ll see a significant jump in profile views and you’ll spark up a connection or two!

Happy searching 🙂

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels.com