Since its launch in 2002, LinkedIn has continued to grow in popularity and is now the world’s largest professional network. You probably already have an account on LinkedIn, but before you start job hunting, it’s in your best interest to have an up-to-date and consistent professional LinkedIn profile. Because you don’t want to risk missing a great engineering job over something as avoidable as your resume saying one thing and your LinkedIn profile saying something else. So by taking the time to match your two most essential job seeking assets you will be one step closer to landing an interview and safe from making mistakes that can exclude you from a job you want and are qualified for.
A lot of us have been taught to tailor our resumes to each job that we apply for. Which still good advice to a certain extent, just don’t go overboard. You can tailor your accomplishment by emphasizing those particular skills that relate to each job posting. Be sure to keep things such as your job titles, dates and education the same. After all these are all facts, and should be consistent.
Your perfect resume and profile should obviously list your employment history, skills and education. But it’s also a good idea to list your accomplishments in the first or second segment of your social profile. That way it motivates the hiring manager or recruiter to continue reading. And of course you don’t want to forget to place your contact information at the top.
When you want to find something or someone online, you probably Google it, right? And when you Google something, you search for specific keywords or names that relate to whatever it is you’re looking for. Well, we do the same thing when we are looking for you. But with a database of approximately half a billion profiles, what can you do to increase your chances of showing up in our LinkedIn search?
Well, LinkedIn uses an algorithm based on among other things: keywords. And when we perform a LinkedIn search it will typically be for specific keywords relating to the engineering job(s) we are looking to fill. Which keywords do we use? Simple, the keywords are the skill sets that make you a candidate for that engineering job. For example: when we run a search for engineering candidates with a specific skill set we might use keywords terms like “3D CAD modeling” or “Abaqus”. And if you want to show up in the search results, you need to showcase these keywords / skill sets on your LinkedIn profile.
Keep in mind that if you want to have an international engineering career, it’s a good idea to have your resume and LinkedIn profile in English, as well as Spanish. You can also choose to include a hyperlink to your LinkedIn profile in your resume. These basic components make it easy for you to get the engineering job, that you want.