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How to Build a LinkedIn Profile That Gets You Hired, with Portia Obeng

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We all know we need to be active on LinkedIn and that our profile is the key piece of a LinkedIn strategy. How do you begin to build a profile that gets you noticed? You begin by understanding the platform, says Find Your Dream Job guest Portia Obeng. Portia stresses the importance of keywords. LinkedIn is a keyword-driven platform, so using the keywords that match your industry is your first step. Your LinkedIn profile should tell the reader what you do, how you’ve done it in the past, and the transformation you offer to those you work with and for. 

About Our Guest:

Portia Obeng is a social media strategist and a career coach. Portia helps women level up on LinkedIn so they can attract the money-making opportunities they deserve.

Resources in This Episode:

Transcript

Find Your Dream Job, Episode 458:

How to Build a LinkedIn Profile That Gets You Hired, with Portia Obeng

Airdate: July 10, 2024

Mac Prichard:

This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life.

I’m your host, Mac Prichard. I’m also the founder of Mac’s List. It’s a job board in the Pacific Northwest that helps you find a fulfilling career.

Every Wednesday, I talk to a different expert about the tools you need to get the work you want.

LinkedIn matters when you look for work.

Recruiters use it every day to find and evaluate candidates.

Portia  Obeng is here to talk about how to build a LinkedIn profile that gets you hired.

She’s a social media strategist and a career coach.

Portia helps women level up on LinkedIn so they can attract the money-making opportunities they deserve.

She joins us from Washington, DC.

Well, let’s jump right into it, Portia. Why do employers care about your LinkedIn profile? Why does it matter to recruiters?

Portia Obeng:

Well, it’s one of the easiest ways for recruiters to find you online. These days, when you interview for a job, there is a very high probability that a recruiter is going to Google you, and if you have your LinkedIn profile set up correctly, you will show up on that first-page result of the Google search. The recruiter is going to look at your profile and see if you have the skill set that they’re looking for when it comes to the job that you’re potentially interviewing for.

Mac Prichard:

Can you get hired if you don’t have a LinkedIn profile?

Portia Obeng:

These days, you can get hired if you do not have a LinkedIn profile, but it’s probably going to be a bit challenging. LinkedIn did studies, and they found that people are now, in terms of recruiters, about 87% of recruiters are using LinkedIn to find talent. If you’re not on there, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities.

I would say, these days, if you’re not on LinkedIn, you have to have an extremely robust network offline and a network that you’re nurturing very heavily, but if you want to make your life easier, just go ahead and get a great LinkedIn profile with those keywords in there.

Mac Prichard:

So recruiters are out there every day, using LinkedIn, looking for candidates. When a recruiter is doing the search that you just described a moment ago, what matters the most in a LinkedIn profile? What are they considering when they’re reviewing your page?

Portia Obeng:

Yes, LinkedIn is a keyword-driven platform, and the more keywords you include in your profile, the better, and the place where you want to include those keywords is your headline, about section, and experience section. The more keywords that you include, the higher the probability that your profile will show up when these recruiters are doing searches.

Therefore, you want to include the keywords from the industry that you’re currently in or the industry that you desire to go into, so that when the recruiter goes on LinkedIn, and they type in the keywords from their industry, for example, me, they might be looking for someone who’s really great at TikTok and Instagram, I want to make sure that I have those keywords, TikTok and Instagram, in my headline, my about section, and experience section.

Those are the words that the recruiter is going to be looking for and those are the words that they want to see in my profile.

Mac Prichard:

I want to dig into that in a moment, especially the importance of keywords in a headline.

Before we get there, Portia, let’s back up. Sometimes, when people are thinking about doing LinkedIn, they think, “I don’t have time for that, it’s another inbox. I’m already stretched thin.” How much time does it take to optimize your LinkedIn profile to be attractive to employers?

Portia Obeng:

Yes, well, for people, it really depends on what you’re trying to do. I tell people to take it in small baby steps because if you try to do your entire profile in one sitting without getting help, you’re going to get frustrated and overwhelmed. Baby steps are the key when it comes to your headline.

Just update one keyword. It will take you all of five minutes to do this trick that I like to show people in how you can find the keywords from your industry to include in your profile.

It will take you all of five minutes to find the keywords. Just add one to your profile on Monday, and then, the next following Monday, add another keyword to your about section.

Take it in baby steps, maybe five to ten minutes a week, and then you can have your profile optimized if you take those baby steps.

Mac Prichard:

What if you’re not looking for a job, Portia? Do you still need to pay attention to LinkedIn?

Portia Obeng:

Yes, because your personal brand is one of the most valuable assets that you have, even if you’re not looking for a job. I have – one of my one-on-one clients, she was looking for a promotion internally, and we used LinkedIn to increase visibility to the head of her department. And he loved her presence so much on LinkedIn that he would go to meetings and say, “You should follow her on LinkedIn, she’s really good on LinkedIn.”

The visibility on LinkedIn increased the visibility in her organization, and that also helped her get the promotion. LinkedIn is a great place for you to strengthen your personal brand and help take your talents wherever you want to go. Whether you want to get that promotion internally or if you want to go externally. It’s very important that you own your personal brand, and LinkedIn is a great tool to help you do that.

Mac Prichard:

Well, let’s talk about how to do that.

You talked at the beginning of our conversation about the importance of keywords, especially in a headline. Tell us more about that. You said you have a trick for learning those keywords. What is that, Portia?

Portia Obeng:

Oh, it’s a trick that I love to show people. It’s hard to explain if I do it, but I like to show them; you’ve got to go to your LinkedIn profile, and then from there, when you’re on your profile, you click a button right underneath your headline that says “More.” After you click on that button, you’ll get a drop-down that says, “Build a resume,” and you’re not actually building a resume to apply for anything, but after you click on “Build a resume,” you’ll get a prompt that tells you that you can build a resume using your LinkedIn profile.

After you do that, it’s going to ask you to put in the desired job title that you’re looking for. So for me, I put in social media director, and then what LinkedIn does is they take your LinkedIn profile, and they make it into a pdf, and they call it a resume, but it’s literally just your LinkedIn profile made into a pdf, but then if you look to the right of where LinkedIn has made your profile into a pdf, it tells you “keyword check” in terms of your resume.

I tell people, ignore that it says resume and pretend that it says LinkedIn profile. It will show you a lot of the keywords you have in your LinkedIn profile that are in alignment with the job postings of whatever the job title that you put in when you were searching for your desired job title.

It’s easier for me to explain via video, but if you go through those steps, it will let you know what keywords you have in your profile, and then if you scroll down a little bit, it’ll show you suggested keywords that you should include in your LinkedIn profile.

Mac Prichard:

How do you sort out those keywords and which ones should you put into a headline and how long should the headline be, Portia?

Portia Obeng:

That’s a great question. You should put in the keywords, the hard skills that are in alignment with your job role or your desired job role, the softwares or platforms that are well-known in your desired job role, and your headline, you get 220 characters with spaces to use in your headline, but that can get a little bit jumbled. If you can keep it down to about 150-170 characters with spaces, and those characters are letters, numbers, emojis, and special characters such as dollar signs or exclamation points.

If you can keep it to 150-170 characters with spaces, you can use a combination of keywords. If you want to have maybe 3 or 4 keywords at the beginning of your headline followed by something that is well-known called a “value proposition statement.” You can have that in your headline, but then also there are words that you do not want to include in your headline as well.

I would avoid soft skills that have really nothing to do with your industry. I tell people all the time if you have hard-working, seeking opportunities, open to work, jack or jill-of-all-trades, those are completely useless. Do not include those in your headline.

Mac Prichard:

Why are they useless? I imagine people put them there because they want to say, “I’m looking, and I’m a hard worker, and these are values that I’m proud of and will be valuable to you.” Why would you encourage someone to not use them?

Portia Obeng:

It is very likely that a recruiter would never go on LinkedIn and search for the words “hard working.” They will search for the keywords of the hard skills that are in the job that they’re searching for. Again, I’ll use me as an example, for social media, they’re going to look for the words, “Instagram,” or “TikTok” or maybe a social media management platform like Buffer or Later. The recruiter is going to make sure that I have those skills.

The recruiter doesn’t care if I’m hard-working or seasoned, or experienced. They want to know that I have those hard skills to get the job done. That’s why I tell people, “Those are fluff words that aren’t going to help you,” and as I mentioned, you only have 220 characters in that headline space. Use those characters wisely.

If you put “Seeking opportunities,” that’s how many characters are wasted when you could’ve said, “Instagram expert, TikTok video expert, I am excellent at using Later,” and things like that.

Those are much better to use in your headlines, those hard skills and the softwares and platforms, and then also, if you have any certifications or licenses, those are better used in the headline. Let’s say I had a certification in social media management from a well-known institution that does certifications. I would want to include that in my headline. Much better things than the soft skills that are very passive.

Mac Prichard:

Terrific.

We’re going to take a break. Stay with us. When we come back, Portia Obeng will continue to share her advice on how to build a LinkedIn profile that gets you hired.

We’re back in the Mac’s List studio. I’m talking with Portia Obeng.

She’s a social media strategist and a career coach.

Portia helps women level up on LinkedIn so they can attract the money-making opportunities they deserve.

She joins us from Washington, DC.

Now, Portia, before the break, we were talking about how to build a LinkedIn profile that gets you hired. We were talking about the headline, how to choose the keywords, and what to emphasize, and the length of the headline.

Before we move on to your other tips, you mentioned a value-proposition statement. Tell us more about that, how you use it, and how it can shape your LinkedIn headline and your profile in general.

Portia Obeng:

Yes, I love value-proposition statements. I use them with my clients all of the time. The example that I give is, I use a celebrity as the example, the rapper Meg the Stallion, and essentially the value-proposition is whatever value you offer to your audience and then what transformation or what outcome that they experience.

I use Meg the Stallion. I say that she creates entertainment experiences that leave her audiences talking. Therefore, the value is that she creates an entertainment experience and that entertainment experience is so amazing that her audience is talking.

Therefore, if you have a music festival or you have an award show, know that if you hire Megan, the value that she’s going to bring is that she’s going to perform a set that is so amazing, people are going to be talking about your award show, they’re going to be talking about your festival because she brought so much value.

That’s your value proposition statement, telling people what you do, that transformation that you give your audience, what they experience, and it’s very good for coaches and consultants to use.

Mac Prichard:

How about people that aren’t coaches or consultants? How can they create a value-proposition statement that communicates what they offer an employer and apply it to their LinkedIn profile?

Portia Obeng:

Yes, if you’re a professional, you’re going to focus on what you’re an expert in, say, for example, you are a marketing genius, and you’re very good at email campaigns. The value that you could bring to a company is that you create email campaigns that convert customers to purchase.

Therefore, you could say, “I am a marketing manager who creates email campaigns that convert customers and boost sales.” The value that you bring is that your email campaigns are so convincing and so great that they convert customers, and they actually get people to convert and take action. There’s a value that you bring.

Hopefully, someone will take that and use it.

Mac Prichard:

Who you are, what you do, and the results that you create for the employer that hires you. Is that the formula?

Portia Obeng:

Yep, that’s the formula.

Mac Prichard:

Great, terrific.

Now, some of your other tips for building a LinkedIn profile to get you hired; one that you’ve touched on already is outcomes and results in your experience section. Why is it important to focus on outcomes and results in that experience section? How does that help you, Portia?

Portia Obeng:

Yes, it goes back to people using more of those passive soft skills that aren’t communicating the value that they bring and the results that they deliver, as I talked about in the headline section. It’s the same with the experience section, where you want your experience section to read as somebody who has been working in the role and not as a job description.

When I go to the experience sections, they’re just listing out a lot of the responsibilities that you can read in a job description. Whereas, you want to take your bullet points in your experience section from responsibilities to results and outcomes.

An example of that would be using something called a CAR method, where you focus on the “challenge” or the task or the problem, whatever it is that you had to do, and the “action” that you had to take to solve that challenge, task, or problem, and then the “results.” The results are very, very important.

Therefore, you can structure your bullet points in a way that follows the CAR method, so the challenge may be that you needed to collect research for an article, and the action that you took is that you surveyed, let’s say the article was about a makeup brand, you surveyed some of the best makeup artists in your city, and the result is that you compiled the information and the data that you got from those makeup artists into a presentation to give to leadership.

Focus on those results. The result is that you were able to compile the data and present it to senior leadership, but then you’re also demonstrating that you know the skill set and the action that is required to achieve that result. That’s where a lot of people miss out, and they just list responsibilities, but recruiters and hiring managers are looking to see that you know how to do what is required for the job role.

Mac Prichard:

Why does that matter so much to recruiters and employers, those results versus responsibilities? What are they thinking when they look at two profile pages, one that talks about the responsibilities of a past job and the other that talks about results produced for an employer?

Portia Obeng:

Yes, I tell people all the time, when you think about a purchase that you make, in your life, personally, the higher the cost of the purchase, the more time and information you need to do this purchase. Not necessarily that when you’re getting a job, you’re being purchased, but the employer, the recruiter, and the hiring manager, they’re investing a lot of money in finding you and also investing a lot of money in your salary.

Therefore, they want as much information as possible to help them make this decision. You need to make it very easy for them to understand that you have the skill set to help them solve their problems. Companies hire people to help them solve their problems. Make it very easy for them to understand that you have the skill set to help them solve their problems by sharing in your experience section that “I have this experience where I have solved this problem, previously, in the past, and this is the result that happened from me solving the problem.”

If a recruiter is spending a couple of tens of thousands of dollars on your salary, they want as much information as possible to help them make an informed decision to hire you. Make it very easy for them. Spell it out for them so that they do not have to do a lot of thinking and making that decision to bring you in.

Mac Prichard:

Another recommendation that you have for building a LinkedIn page that gets you hired is to leverage your volunteer experience. What’s the best way to do this, Portia?

Portia Obeng:

Especially, I like to recommend this to people- if you are unemployed. It’s a great way for you to get out of the rut of being online and applying for jobs all of the time, is finding an organization that you can volunteer with, that you can use the skill set that you used in your role, where you were laid off or maybe the industry that you’re looking to go into, and within LinkedIn you can add additional sections to your profile.

You get the core sections, your headline, and the about section, but then there are additional sections that you can add, and volunteer is one of them. If you’re unemployed or even if you are employed, being able to use your skills in a way to help people, it gets you out of the rut of applying for a job every single day. It helps to introduce you to a new network of people, figure out different organizations within your community, or maybe you could even do a remote volunteer thing and then use the skills that you have developed in that volunteer role.

You can include them on your LinkedIn profile, and it helps increase the visibility of your profile because then you have more keywords related to your industry on your LinkedIn profile, and you’re just adding them to your volunteer section.

Mac Prichard:

What’s the best way to talk about your volunteer experience on your LinkedIn page that’s going to be attractive to employers and recruiters?

Portia Obeng:

The same way that you would talk about your work experience, talking about those results and outcomes that you’re delivering for the volunteer organization. Say, for example, if I went to volunteer for a nonprofit that had an annual gala every year and I worked on their social media, I would say, “Developed social media campaign across Instagram, drafted 27 posts, and the post results,” at the end, I would say the post results, maybe it was 15% increase in engagement year over year.

The same way as you would do the CAR method for your experience section, you’re also going to use the car method for those tasks that you do in your volunteer work.

Mac Prichard:

A final suggestion that you have for building out your LinkedIn profile is to use your LinkedIn requests strategically. What do you have in mind here, Portia?

Portia Obeng:

Oh, yes, it used to be, back in the day, as of 2023, when you had LinkedIn basic, you could send as many connection requests, well, not as many, there was probably like a cap of about 200 connection requests that you could send each week to people and include a personalized note. Now, LinkedIn has changed that, and you only get a certain number that you can send each month.

I would recommend that if there are certain companies that you’re really interested in, sending the recruiter a connection request, even if they’re not hiring at the time. They can at least keep you in mind if things do come up. Maybe you want to send them a message every quarter, just checking in and seeing how things are going.

I would be more targeted with the people that you reach out to and connect with on LinkedIn. Recruiters who work at companies that you’re interested in working at, or maybe hiring managers who are doing roles that you’re interested in doing, and being very thoughtful, and I also recommend keeping track of the people who you’re sending connection requests to.

Whether you track that on your phone, or maybe you use a project management tool, or maybe you’re using Google Docs or Google Sheets, Excel, or whatever it might be. Keep track of the people that you’re reaching out to so that once a quarter, you can reach out to them again.

Like I said, you only get a certain number of people that you can send a connection request to if you have LinkedIn Basic. If you have LinkedIn Premium, you can send a lot more, but with LinkedIn Basic, I would be very thoughtful in targeting those companies that you’re interested in, those roles that you’re interested in, and sending them connection requests.

Mac Prichard:

It’s been a terrific conversation, Portia. Now, tell us, what’s next for you?

Portia Obeng:

I have a new course that I’m launching about LinkedIn, and it’s called the LinkedIn Glow Up. If you’re interested in that, you can find it on my website, it’s portiaobeng.com/courses. I want to give people as much information about LinkedIn as possible.

Mac Prichard:

Terrific. I know that listeners can find other resources on your website and learn more about your work by visiting your overall website, which is portiaobeng.com, and that you also invite listeners to connect with you on LinkedIn. When they do reach out to you there, I hope that they’ll mention they heard you on Find Your Dream Job.

Now, Portia, given all of the great advice that you’ve shared today, what’s the one thing that you want a listener to remember about how to build a LinkedIn profile that gets you hired?

Portia Obeng:

Do not sell yourself short. You have a lot of skills and talents and abilities and there are people who are waiting for you. They just need to find you, so don’t sell yourself short. Put yourself out there, really talk about yourself and your skill set, and make it easy for companies or clients to

give you money to help them solve their problems.

Mac Prichard:

Next week, our guest will be Lisa Virtue.

She’s an executive coach who helps you take actionable steps to make your career goals a reality.

Good networking isn’t about collecting business cards.

It’s about getting the people you know and meet to help you.

And not only during a job search but throughout your career.

Join us next Wednesday when Lisa Virtue and I talk about how to make your network work for you.

Until next time, thanks for letting us help you find your dream job.

This show is produced by Mac’s List.

Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media.

Our sound engineer and editor is Matt Fiorillo. Dawn Mole creates our transcripts. And our music is by Freddy Trujillo.

This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.