b5media.com

Advertise with us

Enjoying this blog? Check out the rest of the Business Channel Subscribe to this Feed

Pimp Your Work

Pimp and optimize your LinkedIn profile

by Celine on October 24th, 2007

Pinny Cohen talks about how to keyword optimize your resume. He brings up some interesting points.

I’ll take for example a site like Monster.com or Craigslist, both sites with tons of resumes posted on there. How do you get your resume seen by as many recruiters as possible?

The answer is of course, to include information that they are looking for. Just like there are ways of getting data on popular search words on Google, we can look at the most popular keyword searches by recruiters on job sites, and learn from that. Marc Cenedella, of TheLadders.com, a recruiting site that specializes in jobs paying $100,000 or more, wondered the same thing and developed a list of the 100 most-searched for terms by recruiters on the site.

This is definitely something to consider if you’re posting your credentials on sites like Monster.com, LinkedIn, or Craigslist. The only thing that the list doesn’t consider is how to measure the effectiveness of each keyword. How can you tell how much competition you have and whether you’ll rank ahead of them?

I did a quick search for several types of job-related keywords in LinkedIn, and this is what I can gather from the results:

  • You can view results from within your network or the Top 20 results from the overall LinkedIn network. Regardless of what you choose, featured members come out on top. If you choose to view results from within your network only, they are displayed by default according to “keyword relevance”.
  • Users can also choose whether to arrange results by degree of separation, number of connections, and number of recommendations. Since the default setting is for keyword relevance, there’s an advantage to ranking ahead for this criterion - but it is only applicable for people within your network. So the more connections you have, the more people are going to see you in their search results.
  • It seems like keyword relevance is mostly measured according to keyword density (how many times a keyword is repeated in a profile). However, the location of the keywords is also important. For example, if the keyword is in your title, you’ll have a better chance of ranking high rather than if it were just in your profile body.

Now, I’m only speculating on these points based on what I’ve seen so far. If anyone has access to actual data and how the LinkedIn search algorithm goes, feel free to contribute in the comments section.

POSTED IN: Workplace pimps, Workplace hacks, General work pimps

1 opinion for Pimp and optimize your LinkedIn profile

Have an opinion? Leave a comment: