17 Steps To Revamp Your LinkedIn Profile To Attract Recruiters -Part 2

8 min readApr 13, 2021

Photo by inlytics | LinkedIn Analytics Tool on Unsplash

Part 1 of the article talked about your real name, profile picture, background cover photo, headline, summary, featured section and your job experiences.

In Part 2, we talk about your education, volunteering, recommendations, skills, and projects.

8. Add education

Education plays an important role in your LinkedIn profile. Not only is this information placed at the very top of your profile, visible within your search result listing, but also it helps your profile achieve All-Star ranking.

All-Star profiles are profiles that are 100% complete and may perform better in search. When creating an optimized, robust profile, achieving the rank of All-Star is important and a goal to strive for.

Not everyone graduates college, and it’s a shame LinkedIn forces you to fill out this section. Whether you graduated from college or not, it’s time to add education to your profile.

Here’s how to do it:

Scroll to the Education section of your profile and click the pencil (edit) icon to edit a pre-existing school or select + Add Education to add a new school.
In the School field, start to type the name of your school. A drop-down list with schools matching the characters you type appears.
Select the school name from the list. By selecting your school from the drop-down list, the school’s logo appears alongside your education section, the LinkedIn university page for your school is dynamically linked to your profile, and you are included in the alumni data. LinkedIn also may show you other alumni who graduated with you in the People You May Know page, helping you create an even more robust LinkedIn network.
Under Dates Attended, choose the year you started to attend the school and the year you left the school in the drop-down lists. For the end date, choose the date you graduated or the year you expect to graduate.
Under Field of Study, start to type your major and choose your major from the drop-down list LinkedIn provides. If your major or course you studied doesn’t match what LinkedIn suggests, add your own major by simply not selecting LinkedIn’s suggestions.
In the Grade field, If you don’t have a respectable GPA or can’t remember back that far, don’t worry. Leave this field blank.
In the Activities and Societies field, enter the clubs and activities you participated in during your time at that school. You can leave it blank if you don’t have any or can’t remember.
In the Description field, enter your educational background and experiences that will impress your reader. You can leave it blank if you don’t have any or can’t remember.
In the media section, you can upload any media like pictures or documents relating to your time in the school.
You can decide to turn “share with network” to share with your network.
Click Save.

9. Add volunteering experience

LinkedIn is a place to sneak in pieces of your personality and passions in a professional manner– like through volunteer experience. Adding volunteer experience to your LinkedIn profile is an ideal way to add a little bit of you to your professional profile.

It’s great if your volunteer experience relates directly to your profession, but even if it doesn’t, a hiring manager will learn a lot about your work ethic through it.

Volunteer experience can also help beef up your LinkedIn profile if you’re new to the workforce or changing careers. It may give you the opportunity to include transferable skills that can help hiring managers locate your profile when using the LinkedIn search function.

How to Add Volunteer Experience:

Click “Add Profile Section” in your bio

From the drop-down menu, select the “+” beside “Volunteer Experience”

Fill out the Volunteer Experience section form and hit “Save”.

10. List your relevant skills

It’s one of the quickest of quick wins on LinkedIn — scroll through the list of skills and identify those that are relevant to you. Doing so helps to substantiate the description in your Headline and Summary, and provides a platform for others to endorse you. However, the key here is staying relevant. A long list of skills that aren’t really core to who you are and what you do, can start to feel unwieldy. Take time for a spring clean of your skills list every now and then.

11. Spread the endorsement love

Endorsements from other members substantiate your skills and increase your credibility. How do you get endorsed on LinkedIn? For starters, go through your network and identify connections who you feel genuinely deserve an endorsement from you — that’s often the trigger for people to return the favor. Don’t be afraid to reach out with a polite message asking for endorsement for a few key skills as well. Remember though — relevance matters. Reach out to people whose endorsement you’d really value.

12. Request recommendations

Endorsements give people viewing your profile a quick, visual sense of what you’re valued for. Recommendations take things a step further. They are personal testimonials written to illustrate the experience of working with you. There’s a handy drop-down menu in the Recommendations section of your profile that makes it easy to reach out to specific contacts and request recommendations. Take the time to think about who you would most value a recommendation from — and personalize your request. It’s worth the extra effort.

13. Add projects if any

The Projects section is a powerful part of LinkedIn, impacting the site’s search algorithm.

Some projects have formal names like NASA’s Project Gemini, but most projects have unofficial names simply describing the task being accomplished, like the website conversion, the emailed newsletter, or the inventory update. Those unofficial projects are fine.

The Projects section can facilitate your visibility as a candidate, especially when you add a substantial number of keywords associated with those projects.

Add Projects that show desirable skill sets, group and individual work efforts, new capabilities, or informal use of valuable skills that reinforce your brand message.

Projects must be “linked” to either jobs in your Experience section or entries in your Education section — whether these are current activities or from your professional history.

To add Projects:

Navigate to Add profile section (shown left) in a blue box near the top, right of your Profile.
Then, click on the down arrow beside Accomplishments.
Scroll down until you find the Projects link.
Click on the word “Projects” or the “+” button to the right.

A form will open which you can complete for each project.

Keep in mind that not only will Projects show employers that you’ve undertaken extra efforts in your work, this area of LinkedIn will provide more keyword strength for your Profile. You’ll benefit from trying out the Projects Section, and gaining more traffic and interest on LinkedIn.

14. Take a skills assessment

A skills assessment is an online test that enables you to demonstrate the level of your skills, and display a Verified Skills badge on your profile. Data shows that candidates with verified skills are around 30% more likely to be hired for the roles they apply for — and displaying proof your abilities strengthens your personal brand more generally as well. Displaying the results of your skills assessments is entirely voluntary, and you can retake the tests as often as you like before showing that you’ve passed.

15. Customize your public profile URL

This custom URL typically serves as the Web address of your profile page and can be shared and bookmarked by other users.

When you first set up your profile on LinkedIn, the site will automatically assign a URL or web address to access your public profile on LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn URL is a combination of your first and last name plus some numbers and letters, and random slashes “/” for reasons unknown.

Example: www.linkedin.com/pub/brenda-demo-meller/2a/412/523
(don’t try to access this link — it’s a demo account I’ve set up to illustrate this point and I have not activated this profile to make it accessible yet)

People like things simple. Simple is good. When it comes to your LinkedIn profile, simple can mean the difference between someone accessing your profile (and eventually hiring you) and taking you out of consideration.

My recommendation is to make this as simple as possible: first name and last name with no spaces. The goal is to delete all the random letters and numbers that were automatically assigned to you when you first set up your LinkedIn account.

Steps to simplify your profile URL:

On your profile page, In the upper right corner, click “Edit public profile & URL”

It will open a new tab, then click the pencil icon below “Edit your custom URL”

Click “save”

16. Grow your network

One of the easiest and yet most relevant ways to grow your LinkedIn network is to sync your profile with your email address book. This enables LinkedIn to suggest people you could connect with. It’s amazing how effective this can be at surfacing relevant people for you to reach out to — and no connection requests are sent without your permission, so you can vet all of the potential connections. Beyond this, get into the habit of following up meetings and conversations with LinkedIn connection requests — it’s a great way of keeping your network vibrant and up to date.

17. Follow relevant influencers for your industry

Following relevant influencers on LinkedIn helps to put a range of interesting content in your feed, which you can then share with others when you think it adds value. It also helps to give context to your LinkedIn profile, demonstrating your passion for what you do.

The next step after revamping your LinkedIn profile is to attract the right Recruiters to your LinkedIn profile. Click here(How To Attract The Right Recruiters To Your LinkedIn Profile) to follow a detailed step by step guide.

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