How to optimise your LinkedIn profile and be noticed by a headhunter?

LinkedIn is strongly known as a job search channel, although it offers its users much more. LinkedIn serves as a modern business card, networking platform and social media where information, news and experiences are actively shared.

LinkedIn is an important channel for recruiters and headhunters to find potential candidates for open direct search positions. Those looking for a new job or career path may be wondering how to get noticed by a headhunter on LinkedIn, even without a well-established personal brand or a strong digital footprint. In this article, we’ll take a step-by-step look at how you can improve your chances of being noticed by a recruitment consultant by properly optimising your LinkedIn profile.

Work experience

An optimised and informative LinkedIn profile presents your work experience in a clear and structured way. LinkedIn’s algorithm carefully examines the work history and role descriptions of different profiles when performing searches. For this reason, we recommend that you always include the main duties and responsibilities of the job in addition to the role title. This will also help the recruitment consultant to get a better idea of your skills and compare them with the criteria for the assignment. You can further deepen your knowledge by including your greatest achievements and successes in the job description.

We also recommend that for each work experience, you clearly highlight the tools, software and digital skills you have managed in the role. In addition, it is a good idea to record your previous management-level work experience for each job role. This will allow the headhunter to quickly identify your experience for any management responsibilities that may be required for the role. If you wish, you can tell more about yourself as a supervisor or team leader in your introductory text.

Profile title and keywords:

The headhunter is looking for suitable candidates for the role based on predefined criteria. The headhunter will use specific keywords based on criteria to help identify potential profiles. Keywords are short descriptions or terms of the role, skills or industry knowledge. It is therefore worth considering which keywords best describe your work experience and then use these to form the title of your profile (e.g. Sales Manager |B2B| Ecommerce.)

It is worth noting that LinkedIn does not offer a Finnish language interface, and this also affects the keywords, search terms and tools used by recruitment consultants. We therefore recommend that you always write the title of your profile in English, so that you will be noticed in a larger number of searches.

Presentation text:

The introduction text appears at the top of your profile, and here you have the opportunity to be creative, distinctive and personal. So, in the summary, tell us about your experience, achievements and interests in a short and concise way. You can highlight the types of jobs you are interested in and what you dream of doing next in your career.

Skills:

LinkedIn predicts that by 2023, skills-based candidate searches will have increased significantly. What this means in practice is that the skills listed on LinkedIn will play a stronger role than before, and will be used by more headhunters when looking for an employee for a specific role. For this reason, we recommend that you update your profile with the most important skills you have accumulated during your career. These can be either soft skills, hard skills or technical skills.

Open to new opportunities:

Active job seekers can set a public open-to-work frame on LinkedIn for their profile, so that networks and recruitment professionals know that you are actively seeking new opportunities. You can also discreetly tell recruitment professionals that you are an active job seeker, without it being publicly visible to your network. You can set this in the job settings of your profile. You should also list here the types of roles (titles, locations, telecommuting model) you are interested in as a starting point.

Activity and Connections:

An optimized and informative profile can take you a long way in direct search situations, but we still encourage activity and expanding your network on LinkedIn, as it adds significant value in many ways. Actively connecting with other professionals in your field, commenting, and engaging in discussions are all valuable. You can also boldly reach out to recruitment professionals with connection requests to increase your chances of being noticed.

Other considerations and tips:

Profile Picture: A well-structured and informative profile is also supported by a clear and professional profile picture. A high-quality image ensures a positive first impression.

Education and Courses: In an optimized profile, your education, specializations, and any relevant courses you’ve taken as part of your further education or job responsibilities should be up to date.

Location: Location can often be of significant importance in executive searches, so make sure your current location is accurately listed on your profile.

English Language: We recommend that you write your profile information in English and, if necessary, in Finnish.

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We hope that with these tips, updating your LinkedIn profile becomes easier, and it will rise to the top of headhunters’ search results in the next direct search that matches your work experience. Good luck with the optimization!