Update Your LinkedIn...Worry About Your Resume Later.

Close your eyes and picture your future CTO at your dream job. Now, open your eyes. The person that you pictured is not the person you should be targeting with your LinkedIn profile.

Most people believe that their LinkedIn profile needs to be as in-depth and detail-oriented as their resume, in order to impress the leadership in a company. However, the CTO is not the person who is reading your LinkedIn to decide if you should get an interview, the HR rep, internal recruiter or corporate recruiter is.

Who Your LinkedIn Target ACTUALLY Is

After leadership has exhausted their current company’s internal promotions as well as their own personal network, they’ll start to lean on their internal HR team or the internal/corporate recruiters to seek out the perfect candidate.

 What do we know about this person?

As of writing this, on LinkedIn there are close to 300,000 people in the U.S. with the title “recruiter” and about 25,000 of those are internal recruiters (People with the titles, “corporate recruiter”, “internal recruiter”, “hr recruiter”, or “human resources recruiter”)

• The average salary for a recruiter in the US is about $60,000

• Internal recruiters typically don’t make commission

• The median age of an HR worker is 41.5

• 72.3% of HR is women

Compare this to who you thought about at the beginning of the article. This recruiter is drastically different from the CTO you probably pictured earlier, whose average age is 54,average pay is $236,689 and 90% of which are men.

Curate Your Profile for Your LinkedIn Target

The overall appearance of your profile should be clean, easy to read, and have high-quality images so that the corporate recruiter can have an understanding of your personality and experience quickly. They will be reading through many profiles every day, and you need to make sure yours is the one that they take a pause on, look at in depth, and make the decision to call for an interview.

The broad overview is that if your profile is aimed at the typical recruiter and not the CTO of a company, you should be focused on legibility, and be wary of:

• Highly technical details

• Coding samples

• Industry jargon

Although there are many recruiters who are experts in technology, it is important to remember that not all HR reps or internal/corporate recruiters are technical or experts in the industry of their employer; they are generalists. You do not want to alienate recruiters who don’t understand the technical details of your work. Your technical skills will be evaluated by the hiring manager after a recruiter has contacted you for an initial interview. Keep in mind that “LinkedIn should be viewed as a sales tool to get an interview”, so creating a LinkedIn profile that is specific but uncomplicated by details is what will land you an interview for your dream job.

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Now that the target audience of your LinkedIn profile has been identified, I’ll show you how to make sure that recruiters can find you with LinkedIn’s premium search tools. Through this series Syfter on LinkedIn, I’ll show you how small fixes can maximize the time recruiters spend on your profile and increase the chance that they will reach out to you for an opportunity with your dream job.

This article is the second in the series, Syfter On LinkedIn (link provided to the 1st). In this series I will be pulling back the curtain to show you the industry tricks to land your next dream job. I’ll tell you all the dirty secrets of recruiters and show you how to make your LinkedIn pop to land the big interview.