Job fair season is coming up, which can be stressful for so many students. With resume review, interview prep, and company research, people tend to forget the most important part of their presentation to recruiters: LinkedIn! While all the other stuff is the meat of your portfolio, your LinkedIn profile is the bread that makes the sandwich look appetizing.
Headshots
The key to a good profile is generally 95% professionalism with about 5% personality. You can make sure your main photo passes the test with these guidelines.
Choose one that’s in color, because you’re not a deactivated account. Recency: if you’re still using that one good senior photo of yourself from 3 years ago on everything, you may need to go get a new one; it works for Lizzo but not for you.
Look energetic! Smile at the camera and seem excited; recruiters like to see smiling faces. When you get your headshot taken, wear business attire; dressing for the job you want is no joke. The most important rule is professionalism. LinkedIn is a professional network, not Instagram, so don’t use the photo of you posed up at the Tally Strip, even though you look really, really good in it.
Once your headshot is out of the way, the next thing an employer sees when they click on your profile is your banner.
Banners
Professionals, depending on the field they are in, either have a plain wallpaper-esque backdrop with their name and contact info typed near the left or right side, or they use an action photo of them in the field. If you’ve seen the TikToks of college students going to empty lecture halls and pretending to present for their LinkedIn banners, that’s a good approach; just make sure you’re dressed professionally, and there’s stuff written on the board!
After the banner, there’s a section of text where a title typically goes. It’s perfectly acceptable to fill in this spot with “(major) Student at (university)” if you don’t have any relevant jobs right now. Whatever job title you have that you think will make you the most hireable can also go in this section.
Under that is a spot where you can pin an entry from your Experience section, so it’s great to make sure that whatever you put here complements itself.
About Me Sections
The next section down is your About page. Many students and professionals use this section to describe their career inspirations and academic interests. This is also a great place to add some personality: what you envision for your future and some professional values that you’ve built your academics around, like sustainability, patient care, or transparency in journalism for starters. It’s also great to end your About paragraph with a sentence that invites people to connect with you.
Posting on LinkedIn can be a little scary at times since it’s so different than more casual social media, but there are some easy ways to make sure your profile looks active. Beyond the obvious posts about internships and research, you can literally post about anything. I’ve seen people post about projects, failures, rejections, and on one memorable occasion, a Fortnite Battle Royale.
Posting on LinkedIn
Your posts do a lot of heavy lifting to get your personality across in a very sterile type of social network. While not having any posts isn’t a bad thing, LinkedIn is essentially a skimmable, clickable resume, so posts are a great way to show more character and involvement, especially if you include pictures!
LinkedIn also has a projects section you can add that’s great for college students of any major. You can add writing samples, research, class projects, and any other deliverable that markets your hard skills in one easily navigable block.
All in all, throughout your career, it’s important to remember that LinkedIn is your friend. It allows you to access a network of established professionals and recruiters without even setting foot in a career fair, so while it’s scary at first to refine a professional profile, LinkedIn is one of the most important career resources for this generation!
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