Think like a recruiter to tweak your LinkedIn profile

Over the last two years I have networked with many executives who were going through a career transition. I have also networked with  several top-notch executive level recruiters. I have identified some trends in the way recruiters are going about filling positions:
  1. Reliance on job boards is going away. By the time a position gets posted on job boards, it is more than likely suitable candidates have already been identified.
  2. LinkedIn has become the tool of choice for recruiters to search for suitable candidates.
How can you capitalize from those trends? Don’t rely too much on finding job postings and do everything you can to help recruiters find you! As I have stated before, it is not who you know, it is who can find you.

So this is the best advice I can give you:
  1. Write a job requisition for your ideal job. Pretend to be your mythical next employer and write a detailed job description. Imagine you are going to retain an a recruiter to find suitable candidates to fill this position.
  2. Now pretend you are that recruiter. Use LinkedIn and Google and conduct searches to find suitable candidates. Did your LinkedIn profile pop up on the first page? Did your name come up at all on the first couple of Google search results? If the answer is yes, congratulations! If not, you have work to do.
It is more than likely you are using fluff in describing yourself as a “charismatic leader able to achieve synergy by aligning resources to achieve corporate goals”. Do you really think a recruiter is out there using the words charismatic and synergy in their searches. A more likely search would include the keywords: Denver, VP, Director, Supply Chain Management.

Tweak your LinkedIn profile, wait a day or two for your changes to be indexed and search again.  Look at my earlier article on this blog about using search engine optimization (SEO) for ideas. Keep doing this until you consistently come up on the searches for someone trying to hire someone for your dream job.

Have fun with your job search!
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