Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile — New Developers

With that kind of reach as professional, we can’t afford to not take LinkedIn seriously. This blog focuses on optimizing the LinkedIn profile for developers.

Recruiters are often too busy to waste their time to go through an entire profile unless it has something to grab their attention. The aim should be to make your profile 100% complete. The more complete your profile, the better the odds of recruiters finding you in the first place. First, choose a clear, friendly, accessible, and professional image as your profile picture. If you’re not sure, go to your targeted company page look through their employees' profiles, and check the kind of pictures they posted.

Headline

Make your programing skills stand out immediately after a recruiter opens your profile. Pick your headline carefully, it doesn’t have to be a job title; instead of writing something as vague as “web developer”, be more specific, such as “Ruby on Rails Developer”, “Full-Stack Developer”, “Front-End Developer”, “Back-End Developer”.

Summary

After choosing a headline, dive into some details on your summary. Ideally, a summary should be no longer than 3 to 5 lines. This is where you want to talk about your passion for coding, mention key programming skills, and/or unique qualifications. Showcase all good things about you, while keeping the targeted audience in mind.

Target the job descriptions of the positions you’re aiming for. Use those keywords to your advantage; look for the words that stand out and sprinkle them all over your summary and also anywhere/everywhere where it makes sense on your LinkedIn profile.

Experience

This the where you’ll be talking about the experiences you gain through your past jobs and internships. If the experiences you mention are relevant to the technical field, it's good; but if it’s not, nothing to worry. You’ve some extra skills to showcase. Just make sure you use the right keywords while describing your achievements. Talk about the achievements which seem more relevant and exclude the part which is not important. Coding skills are not the only skills the hiring managers are looking for. If your responsibilities include teamwork, communication, leadership, or/and management skills you must include it all; these show your personality. This will help you to portray the best version of yourself!

Give a short description of your accomplishments at the company you worked for. Keep it simple, brief, and on point. Once again, use the keywords that will help the recruiters find you easily. LinkedIn allows you to add photos, videos, slideshow presentation to your profile. For example, instead of just talking about a project you worked on, add a picture of your work as a demo.

Education

List all your educational background. It might turn out to be less and less relevant as you gain more experience. But it can be really helpful for newbies. Plus, people who fill out the education section gets 10 times more profile views than those who leave it blank.

Skills & Endorsements

In this section list all your technical and non-technical skills and ask the people you’re connected with on LinkedIn to endorse your skills. The endorsement is a great way to show off your skills. Keep updating the skills as you process through your career.

Recommendations

Try to have 2 to 3 recommendations. It can be your teacher, or the people worked for. Whenever somebody tells you, “you did a great job”, ask them to write a recommendation on LinkedIn. Be specific about what do you want them to focus on.

Accomplishments

This section has multiple sub-sections but I’m just going to focus on the projects section. This is where you will include all the projects you worked on. Start by adding the title of the project, the month and year you worked on, description of the functionality of the project, and the programming tools you used to make it happen. Make sure to keep it simple, on point, and don’t forget to use your targeted keywords. You can provide evidence of your skills is by including links to your project on GitHub.

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