LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with more than 562 million users worldwide. Over the past several years, LinkedIn has been popularized by its amazing features that allow brands and jobseekers to establish connections and build personal, professional relationships. In several cases, LinkedIn has become the new platform for online applications and resumes.
As a job seeker or working professional, your LinkedIn profile and your simple resume are personal marketing tools. If a job seeker has a LinkedIn profile, employers and hiring managers will look to view a job applicant’s credentials on both their profile and their resume. LinkedIn’s purpose is to serve as an extension of a job seeker’s simple resume to further validate their skills, accomplishments, and employment history. Here’s how a LinkedIn profile can BOOST your simple resume.
LinkedIn Job Applications
In the “Jobs” feature on LinkedIn, a job seeker can find thousands of job applications. Within the jobs posted, companies have the option to direct applicants to their own sites or use the “Easy Apply” feature to collect applicants on LinkedIn’s platform. With this feature, these applications require you to upload your simple resume. Utilizing LinkedIn’s profile features to optimize your profile can make your simple resume stand out from others when submitted.
Headline
Your headline is one of the most important features for optimization in LinkedIn. When crafting your simple resume to a job application for the desired position, your headline should be keyword optimized and expanded on your LinkedIn profile. For example, you may have the headline of “Account Manager”. In order to better qualify you for account manager positions, you may want your headline to be “Account Manager | Customer Relationship Management (CRM) | Forecasting | Data Analysis”. This will allow your name to be at the top of search engines and will give hiring managers detailed information before looking into your simple resume.
Information
LinkedIn enables you to include detailed information that you cannot fit into your simple resume. A resume is a brief, summarized document of your skills, expertise, and employment history. Having a LinkedIn profile provides you with more space to include more specific details on job responsibilities and accomplishments. This also allows you to include more previously held positions on your page which can be beneficial if you have held many positions relevant to your desired role.