LinkedIn can be one of the biggest enabler of your career.
Knowing how to leverage it optimally can make the difference from:
Not having mentors in your career
Not having recruiters find your profile for high-quality jobs
Not having a network of people at great companies willing to refer you
To having all of that.
And more!
It is a powerful tool. And you should be leveraging it to the best you can.
This guide is meant to help you do exactly that.
So that you can:
Find mentors willing to help you grow your career
Have recruiters find you
Apply to jobs with strong referrals and a much higher chance to landing top-paying positions, like the jobs at Euro Top Tech Jobs
First things first, your LinkedIn should look decent
Luckily, it’s not that hard.
1) Have a good profile pictures
Ideally, a professional headshot.
You can look directly in the camera, or a bit sideways.
You can smile, or you can look normal.
You can dress pretty much how you like.
Ideally, you should have your face in the middle, and it shouldn’t go lower than your shoulders (otherwise, one can’t see your face).
Don’t:
Wear sunglasses
Have intimidating expressions / look like a psycho
Have shitty quality picture: low definition, bad colours, etc
Pro tip:
You can get a professional shooting and have it done well once and for all.
You can for example do that once you go on a holiday somewhere and want to take some pictures there: in this case, you could book a shooting from airbnb experiences (in some places it’s quite affordable).
If you’re single, you can even re-use these pics for your dating apps 😂
2) Have a good headline and a decent cover picture
Cover picture: keep it simple. You can put there the company you work for, or some picture of the city where you are based (like your city’s skyline), or a nature picture, or something minimalistic. I think less > more, but have a cover pic.
Headline: should explain what you do and what you can do. For me in this case it’s a bit different because I’m promoting my job board, content and newsletter. In general, as dev, you can put your title(s): software engineer, machine learning engineer, data scientist, etc. You can even combine them like: Machine Learning and Data Science, or Machine Learning Engineer and Data Scientist, or Software Engineer - Full Stack. You’re welcome to mention your company, especially if it’s a good company. Like: Software Engineer - Machine Learning at Google. You can also list some keywords related to your expertise, like: Software Engineer at Oracle | Backend, Distributed Systems, Big Data.
Location: put where you live. If your city is too small, put your country name. If you want to relocate somewhere, you can put the place where you’d like to relocate: i.e. if you’re in Milan but want to move to Switzerland, you can put Zurich instead of Milan. I did that when I was doing the internship at Amazon Barcelona (I put Zurich instead of Barcelona) because I wanted to go back to Switzerland (and that’s how the recruiters from Netlight found me and how I landed my role there). There’s a bit of risk in doing this in case you have a full-time job and you don’t want your manager or colleagues to question why you did that (they might think you’re looking for a job abroad): use judgment to evaluate pros and cons of doing it.
Experience Section
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