The Basics: Add Skills to Your LinkedIn Profile
The full version of this post was originally published on the Getting the Nod newsletter on Substack. You can get these posts sent to you by subscribing there. Most content is free but paid subscribers get archive access and discounts on services.
I've already told you what to do in the title. Add skills to your LinkedIn profile.
Photo by Cookie the Pom on Unsplash
No big philosophy today, just some job seeker low-hanging fruit: Add skills to your LinkedIn profile. You could stop reading there. Go add skills to your LinkedIn. If you insist on more context, keep reading and I'll share why but if you're just looking for what to do, it's add skills to your LinkedIn. It only takes a few minutes. Then come back out of curiosity.
Back? Great. One of the recent "trends" in the People space has been toward skills based hiring. It's hardly new, but rather than looking at degrees and past titles, skills based hiring looks at actual competency. It seems silly that there needs to be a tectonic shift in order for companies to filter based on ability to perform a job rather than degrees but here we are. Skills based hiring can help with equity by reducing bias, deepening the hiring pool (by including people with nontraditional or practical experience), and generally making hiring more objective. There are other benefits to organizations that fully adopt the philosophy as well.
Another trend in recent years is the adoption of machine learning and AI in hiring platforms. Job listing sites and applicant tracking systems all boast about how much more effective their platform is in getting the right candidates into and through the pipeline. Since they have the candidate information and application along with the "transaction" history of contact, pipeline progression, etc., those platforms can "learn" how a successful candidate looks and optimize the experience for both applicants and hiring managers/recruiters. Yes, this is the sort of thing that can reintroduce bias but that's not the focus of this piece.
It used to be that including the right keywords was a good idea to optimize for a quick skim by a busy recruiter. Now it’s part of optimizing for an algorithm as well. Say you know Javascript, not just that you're a web developer. Say you’re familiar with Kanban, not just agile. That specificity helps "the machine" separate the wheat from the chaff at unfathomable speed and scale while still being helpful for the people in the process as well.
LinkedIn's version of streamlining makes this even easier. Rather than training an algorithm to “read” your profile, you can add up to 50 skills to your profile (and you should add some). You can also attach those skills to individual roles. Because it’s defined terms, you’re automatically using the same terms that hiring manager are and you're helping LI know what roles make the most sense for you. On the hiring side, LI presents candidates whose skills match the requirements. Either way it's a boon to the process. However it only works if you take the few minutes to add skills to your LinkedIn. So go do that.
