Table of Contents

1. Start With Your Headline
2. Match the Skills to the Job Postings
3. Align Your Career Path
4. Update Your Profile Picture

LinkedIn is a great tool to help you expand your network and find potential job opportunities. One restaurant manager simply shared her thoughts on the 2020 job search and connected with hospitality leaders for potential job opportunities, and a concierge shared some praise for his former employer and also found himself fielding interview offers. 

In order to make the most out of your LinkedIn profile, make sure it aligns with your resume so that anyone you may connect with can immediately see your up-to-date job history and steer you to an opportunity that matches your experience and skills. 

Start With Your Headline

LinkedIn by default will make your headline whatever your current job title is, or whatever your most recent job title was, which is fine, but you can take it one step further to optimize it more. By updating your headline, your profile will become:

• More interesting and more likely to grab someone’s attention because you give a viewer a synopsis of your experience and what opportunity would be the best fit. 
• More searchable if you integrate keywords. There are recruiters who spend their days looking through LinkedIn profiles for potential candidates, so why not increase your chances of showing up in those searches? 

You can manually go in and change your LinkedIn headline. Here are some headline examples:

“Accomplished hotel general manager with 10 years of leadership, hotel operations, and expertise in exceptional customer service.”

“Experiences housekeeping professional with 5+ years of quality inspections of hotel properties, inventory and budget management, and team motivation.”

Although most people don’t include a headline on their resume, the headline on your LinkedIn is a quick way to summarize your resume. 

Match the Skills to the Job Postings

When you are updating your resume and LinkedIn, it helps to read through a few job postings and pick out skills from that job posting that you have. This will not only help your resume pass the ATS systems but help recruiters find your LinkedIn profile in their searches. 

Keep these sections in bulleted lists. Find out how to add skills to your LinkedIn profile here. There is a new feature for a skill quiz you can take to show your level for specific skills as well.

Align Your Career Path

Both your LinkedIn profile and your resume should show the same career path. You may choose to leave off some of your earlier jobs that don’t lend any experience for your current career path, for example, a retail job when you were 16 years old if you are now applying to be a food and beverage manager, however, a recruiter or hiring manager should be able to look at both and essentially see the same information. Consistency is key.

Creating a cohesive personal brand helps build credibility. If you were researching a potential job opportunity, and all of the company’s platforms have the same visuals and information, they’re professional and committed to their brand. But if their platforms are all over the place you most likely won’t want to work there. The same concept applies to your resume and LinkedIn. 

See how to edit your job history section on LinkedIn here.

Update Your Profile Picture

LinkedIn members who include a profile photo receive 21 times more profile views and up to 36 times more messages. Although this is a tip for only your LinkedIn and not your resume, it’s an important one to mention. Make it a professional picture that is as recent as possible.

You can ask a friend or family member to help you out or take a selfie of yourself, just make sure to wear a professional shirt and fix your hair and/or makeup to make the best first impression. Don’t include any props, pets, or other people, and stand in front of a solid-colored wall or background if possible. 

Here are LinkedIn’s top 10 tips for picking your best profile picture.

Depending on your career path, you may also decide to upload a banner image as well. A banner image gives further insight into who you are and your personality. If you are applying to more creative-based roles, this is a great opportunity to showcase some of your work, or if you are applying for a leadership position, you could use the banner image to highlight some leadership qualities you have. 

Great connections can come from LinkedIn, especially as networking becomes more important during the job search, and if one of your connections asks for your resume for a potential job opportunity, you will be able to demonstrate your professionalism and attention to detail by having cohesive messaging.