LinkedIn 101
This cast goes over the minimum setup you need to do on your LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn is the ultimate professional network site. It
is a great tool to discover new connections and be
discovered. Most of us have a LinkedIn profile but
are unclear about how to optimize it.
that best summarize your background and indicate
what you are looking for: Finance professional with
MBA; or Software developer looking for PM roles
post-MBA.
Ultimately, your profile will tell a story and the nice
thing is that you control what is shown on your
profile. It’s a great way to complement what is not
on your résumé and to have people find you.
Keyword-optimize your summary, so that someone
looking for certain words you want to be associated
with, finds you. Same goes for skills, plus you can
have people endorse those. This will not only help
you get found easier, but also the number of
endorsements you get for certain skills will tell
others what your connections think you are good at.
Here are the four things we’ll cover:
1. Complete your profile
2. Tips for connecting
3. Use it as a job board
4. Premium account
1. Complete your profile
LinkedIn makes it really easy to complete your
profile because it has a wizard, which guides you
through the process. The advantage of a complete
profile is that it will show up higher in search results
(although LinkedIn does not officially reveal how
profile-ranks are determined). At a minimum,
complete these:
Add a professional picture
It is really easy these days to take a high quality
picture with your smartphone or even better with an
SLR. Yet it is surprising to me how many baby
pictures, cropped pictures from parties, or just low
resolution pictures I see on LinkedIn.
Dress up in a shirt or suit, stand in front of a neutral
background (outside lighting is usually better) like a
brick wall or a tree, and have someone take a
picture. Tip: Shallow depth of field will blur the
background and allow the subject to stand out.
Complete headline, summary & skills
The three things that will always show in search
results are your headline, location, and industry.
Make sure you complete those three.
Change your headline from the default option, which
is your current position and company. Choose words
Beware of overused buzzwords. 2013 top words:
responsible, strategic, creative, effective, patient,
expert, organizational, driven, innovative, analytical,
experimental, motivated, multinational, specialized.
List jobs you’ve held and where you went to school
At a minimum, list the dates and the places. I like
adding my job responsibilities in two or three lines as
well as I feel it makes it easy to quickly look at my
professional history.
You can of course add more detail and add your
achievements (same as on your résumé). This will
help to show up higher in search results because you
are using more keywords that could be searched for,
but it also makes your profile lengthier.
Make sure the information on your LinkedIn profile
is consistent with your résumé. If your résumé has
extra achievements or they are more adorned,
someone could infer that you are overstating
achievements on your résumé.
Get recommendations and endorsements
As a reader of your profile, it is always reassuring if
your connections think highly of you or can attest to
the skills and traits you have.
There are mixed views about recommendations and
endorsements. They are treated sometimes as a
quid pro quo and carry limited weight, although I
can’t think of a downside of having these show up
on your profile.
©2015 Tuck School of Business – Mathias Machado | Page 1
In any case, I do list my skills on my profile but have
disabled endorsements as I feel it makes my profile
look clunky and long.
When connecting with people on your smart-phone
app or through the ‘people you may know’ option,
you will not be able to customize your message.
Make your profile visible
What’s the point of being on a professional network
site if you are hiding information about yourself (i.e.
making it difficult to be discovered)?
I recommend that you always customize your
message to connect, even if you are connecting to
your buddy. It will take you ten seconds to write
something specific to you and to them, indicating
that the relationship matters to you.
My recommendation is to make all your profile
visible to everyone!
Change your settings by going to Profile. Hovering
over the little arrow next to ‘view your profile’ click
on ‘manage public profile settings’ and on the right
column click on ‘Make my public profile visible to
everyone’.
For those you don’t know, it is a good idea to reach
out via InMail with specific requests, such as an
informational call. InMail credits can be purchased
and you get credits back if the person responds to
your message within 90 days. (This changed in
January of 2015. You used to get your credits back if
the person did not respond.)
Claim your vanity URL
While you’re on this screen, under ‘Your public
profile URL’ you can claim your personalized URL so
that it is easier to find and remember your URL.
Remember that the person receiving the InMail
might not know you, so make sure you explain early
in your note your connection to her and why you are
reaching out.
Connect with at least 50, but more is better
The more people you connect with, the better.
Having less than 50 connections might give the
impression that you are not a good collaborator or
you don’t have many connections from your current
and past jobs.
Another way of connecting with people is to join
groups. Joining groups helps in several ways: Groups
will be visible on your profile and joining industryspecific groups can embellish your profile; any
activity within the group will also show up in your
home feed, so it is a nice way to stay up to date with
information; finally, you can reach out to anyone
within a group without spending any InMail credits.
But most importantly, the more connections you
have, the easier it will be to get in touch with people
you don’t know. A) because LinkedIn allows you to
see more of people’s profiles the closer connected
they are to you, and B) because chances are you and
the person you want to connect with will know
someone in common who can make an introduction
or share their contact information.
Finally, LinkedIn will show people who are closer
connected to you higher in search results. And so
will you when a first or second degree connection
uses LinkedIn search.
2. Tips for connecting
LinkedIn provides a great way to connect with
people and stay in touch with those you worked with
and met before. It is easy to send a request to
connect. Sometimes too easy.
Rather than sending an InMail through the person’s
profile, you have to go to the group, click on
members, find the connection, and finally clicking on
‘Send message’. Voilà!
3. Use it as a job board
You can use LinkedIn proactively as a job board as
well. LinkedIn has a couple of advantages compared
to other sites, but because more and more people
are using it to apply to jobs, those advantages are
starting to diminish.
The first important distinction is that LinkedIn is a
job board and not a job aggregator like Indeed for
example. This means you can see additional
information that is posted only on LinkedIn. For
instance the hiring manager is sometimes posted
and the number of people who already applied.
©2015 Tuck School of Business – Mathias Machado | Page 2
(With a premium account you can also compare
yourself to those applicants.)
In general LinkedIn provides other benefits, such as:
 You can see similar jobs or jobs people looked at
 LinkedIn will recommend jobs based on your
background and your geography
 ‘Apply now’ doesn’t need a résumé
What’s more, you are actually writing the content
yourself, so you control what information is shown
and how it is phrased.
These two are powerful heuristics called priming and
framing. Spend some time on your profile.
All in all, LinkedIn makes it easier for the applicant to
apply to more jobs, which is nice, but at the same
time because it is easier, more people will apply.
4. Premium account
You can update your account to a premium account,
although I would not recommend paying for it. The
features you get are good when you are actively
looking for a job, but at $30-$50 a month you might
choose to get the one month trial when you are in
active job search mode before deciding.
Some features are really neat, but in my opinion
they really seem more a nice to have than an
absolute must. Here’s what $50/month gets you:
 Larger profile picture and background
 Your profile appears 2x larger in search results,
showcasing more of your professional highlights
 Your job application will appear above job
applications from non-Premium members
 See who’s viewed your profile for the past 90 days
(as opposed to last five people)
 See how you compare to other job applicants and
see salary comps
 Premium search filters
 10 InMails a month
Wrap up
We’ve gone over setting up your LinkedIn profile and
how to best use it to connect with people and as a
job board.
In short, whether a recruiter is looking for you or
someone you have a call with wants to have more
information about you before the call, wouldn’t you
want that person to have information about you
beforehand rather than during a call or interview?
©2015 Tuck School of Business – Mathias Machado | Page 3