Developing Your LinkedIn Presence

I recently visited a company and did a quick interactive workshop about developing a LinkedIn presence, particularly when looking for a new role, and how it can help in your job search, so I figured, why not post it as an article in case anyone else could benefit.

Your Profile:

1. If you don’t have a LinkedIn or you’ve not updated it in forever – do that! Recruiters (internal & agency) will use LinkedIn as one of their first ports of call when searching for people.

2. Have a clear job title – e.g. “Tester” doesn’t mean much, but “Senior Automation Test Engineer” or “Front End Developer” more accurately reflects your experience and what you may be interested in, meaning more relevant opportunities will make their way to you! I wouldn’t recommend putting “Actively seeking a new role” in your job title, as people don’t search for those terms so you may be missed.

3. Use the ‘About’ section to give recruiters/hiring managers a snapshot of who you are. For example: “Senior Test Engineer with X years of both manual & automation testing in a digital agency environment. Comfortable with XYZ tools.” Feel free to add some personality into this section about what you like doing outside of work as well or what you are looking for in a new position.

4. Fill your career history section in accurately – I’d recommend you only have to have detail in the last 4-5 roles rather than all the way back to the early 90s! But a brief synopsis of your responsibilities, technologies used and any big projects you might want to shout about.

5. Importantly, make sure you put skills you have used in each role – for example, you may have used C# in one role but then Java in the most recent role. Having both mentioned will mean you get found in searches for Java or C#.

Your Activity:

Being active on LinkedIn isn’t necessary to find a new role, and isn’t a requirement of being a technical person, but it definitely helps.

1. The easiest way to do this is to comment on things. Read people’s blogs and ask questions, agree, disagree etc.

2. Post your own articles – do you have a really strong opinion about something relevant in tech, whether it be remote working, a particular testing tool, methodology, mental health in tech. Have you been to a meetup, was it useful?

3. Top tip – post pictures along with your text. People pay more attention to that to just text.

Hopefully this is helpful – let me know if you have any other good tips!

As usual, if you are on the lookout for a new technical role across Scotland, North of England or the Bristol area, give us a shout on 0131 510 1500 and we’d be happy to help!