How to Make Your LinkedIn Profile Really Work for You

Are you concerned that you’re not getting the most from your LinkedIn profile? Is the content of your LinkedIn profile merely replicating the content of your CV? Did you know that 85% of Hiring Managers will check you out on LinkedIn?

Statistically, once you make it onto a shortlist, 85% of those hiring managers will want to have a nosy at your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn now has over 250 million members so recruiters and hiring managers naturally use it as one big pond to fish for and select candidates. As a consequence, having a great LinkedIn Profile is not optional, it is essential.

As with your CV, structuring your LinkedIn profile in a similar fashion to that of a job seeker in the permanent market is certainly not going to win you any favours with HMRC, and that’s before we start worrying about providing clients with something that will compel them to take an interest in your talents.

In order to provide Contractor Weekly readers with high quality value added resources, we would like to invite you to a FREE one-hour online webinar on Tuesday 25th March at 7.15pm all about writing an effective, business-winning LinkedIn profile for the contract market. The event will cover the latest thinking around this important topic.

Matt Craven, the UK’s leading authority on contractor / interim CVs, will be delivering this webinar for us. Matt’s sessions have been described as “outstanding” and “truly inspirational”.
In this fast-paced and engaging webinar you will learn:

  • Why your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t replicate the contents of your CV
  • How to create an attention grabbing Professional Headline and Summary
  • What you should and shouldn’t put in the Experience section
  • How to sell yourself through your profile
  • How to use Projects to gain maximum impact
  • How to network on LinkedIn to secure a new contract
  • How to create a positive professional footprint

If you want more interviews, more contracts and more money, then investing one hour of your life watching this webinar is an absolute must.

Please use this link to register.

7 Comments

  • Barry Aitken says:

    I would love to join you on this webinar as I do think my LinkedIn profile is hampering my job search but my Cub Pack meeting is on Tuesday nights from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Will there be another opportunity to join or will a replay of the session be made available afterwards?

  • Alistair Morris says:

    Barry, I will be hosting the webinar. Could you drop me a line at Alistair@cvandinterviewadvisors.co.uk or call me on 01273 841 388 when it’s convenient?

  • C says:

    I gave up using LinkedIn after a short time. When people who worked for me in the past ask fro a recommendation… am I supposed to do that without reading what they’ve written about the work they did?

    Most of it is inflated – and yes, I do realise that a CV is a marketing document first and foremost, this isn’t the Apprentice after all. But when I give someone a reference in real life, I don’t see the cv they’ve put forward to prospective employers.

    The last straw for me was when people were asking me to give them the thumbs up on LinkedIn and were claiming to do the job I’d done on a very successful programme. I mean, c’mon.

    That’s always the problem with successful programmes of course – everyone claims to have been there doing really, really important stuff.

    I would counter the above article using the one statistic that we can all be sure of – if I don’t have a profile on LinkedIn then 100% of hiring managers will be unable to check anything about me on LinkedIn.

    And… one has to wonder why anyone would feel the urge to write an article plugging usage of a commercial site anyway.

    If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – I prefer to recruit (and sell my own skills) via the traditional methods (albeit using modern web-based job sites).

  • Matt Craven says:

    Thanks to C for contributing to the discussion – we welcome all opinions and it’s listening to them along with extensive primary and secondaty research that allows us to stay close to the market. Certainly some people prefer more traditional routes than others but the movement in the direction of LinkedIn is undeniable – I did some consultancy work for a top tier recruitment provider to some of the big banks and half their recruitment team spent the day mining candidates on LinkedIn so it’s the place to be if you want to be visible to an important “winning work” channel. In terms of the point about plugging a commercial website – we are certainly not plugging LinkedIn – we are merely stating it’s importance to Contractors and showing people how to make it work for them. Have a great weekend all!

  • C says:

    Any article that ends with “Please use this link to register.” is definitely a plug.

    Looking at this again, you’ll have to excuse some healthy paranoia in analysing what’s been written so far:

    (1) There’s no author noted for this article. I compared to other articles and they have a date and also a “Written By”.

    (2) Then we have a claim “Matt Craven, the UK’s leading authority on contractor / interim CVs”. Errr… in whose judgement would that be, exactly? Are there national championships for CV assessing? Oscars?

    (3) And then Matt himself turns up responding to posts here. Leading to the obvious question… Did you write the above article yourself Matt?

    (4) And then looking down the page I see that Alistair, the “host of the session leaves an email address from “cvandinterviewadvisors”.

    Hmmm. I’m afraid I’m smelling a rat here, boys. I get a lot of people wanting to sell me cv writing advice, none of it ever goes much beyond what the average man would describe as “the bleedin’ obvious” and some of it is downright twaddle.

    By the way – one issue I seem to remember with LinkedIn is that it didn’t allow for the concept that more than one contract could be running at the same time. You had to end a previous role before starting another. Fine if you’re a permie, not so good for a genuine consultant. It may have changed or I may have mis-remembered but there were annoying things on the site that made it difficult to create a genuine consultancy profile rather than an employee one.

    I find it easy enough to find work using the 4 main web sites for posting cvs, I wouldn’t want the phone to ring any more than it already does!

    If LinkedIn wants to be a serious player in the marketplace, offering something different, then it should really allow people to hide their profile from other people and have distinct channels for recruiters versus work seekers. At least then I’m not endorsing someone’s “marketing version” when I give them a reference.

    Ah and I just remembered another problem. In giving a reference the options were very employer-employee oriented. You can’t have a relationship where two people represent two different organisations where one is signing off some work and the other is producing/presenting the proof on which sign-off is based i.e. a client-supplier POC relationship. Again, a permie-world viewpoint, not appropriate for real consultants. Wonder what HMRC would make of it IR35-wise!

  • Matt Craven says:

    Dear C – the webinar is not plugging LinkedIn – we are promoting a free webinar which is a Contractor Weekly event that we are delivering; we (The CV & Interview Advisors) are delivering this free webinar on how Contractors can maximise their visibility on LinkedIn (to win work). I am the MD of The CV & Interview Advisors (mattcraven@cvandinterviewadvisors.co.uk)and I wrote this article. Alistair is our Head of Sales & Partnerships (alistair@cvandinterviewadvisors.co.uk)- both of us deliver the webinars (we do 4 per week so too many for one person). Alistair will be delivering the next session with Contractor Weekly while I am delivering a webinar for someone else (The Professional Contractors Group). I would like to think that Contractor Weekly and PCG would be reluctant to partner with us if there were any ‘rats to smell’. I delivered the last session for Contractor Weekly on CV writing – I believe it was very well received. We work with other companies in the contract space as well several professional membership bodies and numerous recruitment businesses – I also do consultancy work with leading recruitment agencies so I believe my claim to be a leader in my industry for this sector is credible. May I ask you to contact me on 01274 408 222 so that we can clear up any other misunderstandings. Thank you.

  • C says:

    Matt

    1. When involved in a public forum discussion, it makes no sense to ask someone to call you. The whole point of this is that what’s said is in the public domain.

    2. Let’s allow people decide if your article was a plug or not.

    3. We can also allow people to form a view on how they feel about you writing the article, failing to use the normal “Written By” to establish your authorship and then making the claim “Matt Craven, the UK’s leading authority on contractor / interim CVs”. A little disingenuous, wouldn’t you say?

    4. The PCG, you say? Why would anyone trust them? That would be the same ineffectual organisation that put forward the Business Entity Tests to the IR35 forum, without so much as a by-your-leave to its members who heard about it for the first time when HMRC jumped at the chance (and subsequently twisted it to their own purposes). I wouldn’t trust those people to boil a kettle.

    All organisations in the IR35 sphere seem to end up with vested interests.

    Anyway, enough said on this.

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