- Let's put aside the fact
there are currently 575 million users on LinkedIn,
of which 260 million are monthly active users.
Let's also forget a recent poll showing how 73%
of people would choose to keep their LinkedIn profiles
over their resumes.
Let's focus instead on just
how your LinkedIn profile looks today
to a recruiter, a potential hiring manager,
a colleague checking to see
if you kept your experiences honest.
How does it look?
In this video, I share my top five tips
that'll help your profile go from this to this.
to create an awesome profile picture and background banner.
Almost every single article or video talking
about LinkedIn profiles will recommend you
to have a professional looking profile picture
or LinkedIn banner,
but none of them tell you exactly how to do it.
My current LinkedIn profile picture has several issues.
You can barely see my face.
I'm not looking at the camera,
and it's hard to distinguish me from the background.
Here's what I'm gonna do to fix it.
First I'm gonna take a recent full-on photo of myself
with my upper half of my body showing,
looking directly at the camera,
and uploading it to a website called remove.bg,
removebackground.com.
After I upload my photo, the website automatically detects
and removes the background,
and I get to download this image for the next step.
Pro tip: in order to download the high-res option here,
you just need to sign up for a free account.
You only get one shot at this free high-resolution download,
so make sure you pick the right photo first.
Then I'm actually gonna go to something called canva.com.
If you don't an account, just create a free one.
And I'm gonna upload my photo
with a transparent background
to a 1,600 by 1,600 design page,
as you can just literally type the custom dimensions here
and create a new design.
The LinkedIn profile picture dimension
is actually usually 400 times 400,
but I'm using 1,600 by 1,600
just so I make sure I won't lose any pixels or resolutions
if I want to zoom in other profile picture later.
So as you can see, I already prepared ahead of time,
uploaded my transparent picture here to save some time.
And here is where you can get a little creative.
If you search for a background in the Elements tab here.
I'm just gonna show you guys.
There are tons of free backgrounds that you can use.
There are some that's pro. Don't use those.
But there are a lot of free backgrounds
that you can use as well.
Let me just check.
Yeah, see, there's a lot of free backgrounds.
And you can just go nuts with this.
I actually personally like the gradient paintbrush look
right over here, so I'm actually gonna select this
and change the colors up a little bit.
Instead of pink and orange,
I'm gonna select, let's say, green and light blue,
something like that.
So instead of this covering my face here,
I'm just going to enlarge.
Actually, no, hang on.
I'm gonna move this
and sort of design it a little bit better here.
Yup, you'll see where I'm going with this soon.
Basically get a little creative.
Okay, something like that.
Actually, the white background's a little too white,
so I'm just gonna select the background
and make it a gray color.
Put it right over here.
Okay, oh, see?
What I did there is literally I just clicked Position
and moved it backward.
Then I'm gonna put my picture right up front.
Make it look nice and big.
Yeah, look at that smile.
All right, cool, and there you go.
And now I can just download this.
Download this picture directly as a PNG file,
and I have my new upgraded profile picture.
So hopefully that was pretty painless and simple.
I actually also don't like the banner picture
I have right now.
I think I uploaded it
when I first started management consulting,
and I thought graphs
and statistics made me look really smart. (laughs)
So I'm gonna change it up as well.
So all I'm gonna do is create a new design here.
Click to create a new design.
Type in LinkedIn banner,
and select the first option that pops up.
To save some time, I already prepared this ahead of time.
And you will see this blank slot here,
and I actually went ahead,
already selected some pre-populated free templates
that Canva provides.
And you can see these on the left-hand side here.
So just for example,
let's say I wanna use this banner right here.
I'll just put it on here, and I can actually play around
with some of the elements here.
So instead of using this one,
I actually like this white tabletop one with the plants,
the alarm clock with a lot of pencils
without a notepad or anything.
And again, this is where you can play around
with your own creative, with creativity, rather.
So if I wanna add some text here
to the laptop background, I can.
I don't know what to put
without making me look narcissistic.
Maybe I just add my initials.
That's totally not gonna make me look narcissistic.
Enlarge it a little bit. Change the font up.
Let's see, Permanent Marker. I like that font.
I think that size is fine. Just put it right here.
And all I gotta do now is click Download
and select the first page, and then I am done.
All right, so first step done.
Updated my LinkedIn profile picture
and background banner in real time
for the first time in four years.
if you found this first tip helpful,
let me know by dropping a like and commenting down below
with a link to your LinkedIn profile so I can check it out.
Tip number two,
your about section should complement your resume.
So I read something recently that I definitely agree with,
and that's the biggest difference between your resume
and LinkedIn profile is that your resume should be tailored
towards the role that you're applying for,
whereas your LinkedIn profile should be
a more general overview of who you are as a professional.
So contrary to some of the advice out there,
I think it's totally okay to have an about section
that paints a more holistic picture of who you are,
rather having extremely targeted and niche keywords,
which I think is more relevant
in the experiences section anyways.
A good way to go about this is imagine
if someone were to read your resume,
they will probably start to visualize the type
of person you are by going through your experiences,
your education, and your skills and interests.
Now, if they go on your LinkedIn profile immediately after,
which a lot of recruiters obviously do,
would what they see on your profile complement
or conflict with their initial image of you?
And since your about section is the second thing they see,
following your profile picture and banner background,
This section should really complement
instead of repeat what is found on your resume.
For me, I'm not actively looking for a job right now,
so my summary is extremely simple.
But if I were looking for a next role in marketing,
for example, I'd say something like,
"Product marketer with six plus years
in the B2B market in Greater China.
I explain complex products
in ways business owners understand."
Notice I keep the number of adjectives
and buzzwords to the minimum.
And that one-liner is very consistent
with the story I'm trying to tell with my resume.
Tip number three,
showcase real work you've done in the featured section.
This section is pretty much LinkedIn bringing the saying,
"A picture is worth a thousand words," to life
by giving you a place to show instead of just tell.
If you're a student, upload classwork
that have received a high score,
maybe a market research project.
Or if you've participated in a case competition,
upload the final presentation on here.
If you're a working professional,
this is where you can link your website, design portfolio,
any externally shareable projects.
For example, a colleague of mine
who does amazing market research work.
Her name is Rohini. She's based in Singapore.
And she's responsible for a series
of market research reports on global gaming trends.
These reports have been published on Think with Google
and shared widely on external platforms.
Being the project lead,
she features these reports on her LinkedIn,
giving her a lot of credibility and exposure
to anyone who might come across her profile.
For me, I don't have anything that comes close
to being as impressive,
so I just link my most popular LinkedIn posts
and YouTube videos.
By the way, I have a Facebook group
where I share weekly tips.
Consider joining if you haven't already.
I'll link it down below.
Tip number four, highlight key achievements
in your LinkedIn experiences section.
Many people make the mistake
of copying and pasting their entire resume
onto their LinkedIn.
While I wouldn't say this necessarily causes an issue,
I think there's a better way to go about it.
You usually have to keep each achievement
within three to four lines on your resume,
so you have to be very succinct, right?
You should see the LinkedIn experiences section
as a way to expand on your key achievements
by providing more background and context.
This is also in line with what I mentioned
at the beginning of the video,
how your LinkedIn profile should tell a consistent story
about your professional life.
And expanding on your achievements found
in your resume is a natural way to do just that.
And just in case I haven't stressed this enough
in my resume video,
make sure to include quantifiable business impact.
I recently spoke with a young professional
who works at a big four advertising agency.
She mentioned how sometimes
she doesn't know the business impact
because for some of the projects she works on,
she doesn't get to stay until the end,
and therefore she doesn't see the end result.
In that case, I would say how about the average number
of pitches you've helped out on
in a given quarter compared to that of your peers?
Or better yet, the dollar value
of the successful pitches you've contributed to.
There are always meaningful data points
that you can highlight.
Finally, a small hack for those of you
who are actively job searching.
Use a free word cloud generator,
and throw in the job description you're applying for
in there to find some of the keywords you wanna sprinkle
throughout the experiences section.
Ending with a very practical tip number five,
get a custom URL.
Some of you might already have this,
but if you don't, go to your profile,
click the little pencil icon
that lets you edit your profile, scroll to the very bottom
where you can see the custom URL option,
and change it to whatever you like.
I already have this enabled. Mine is jsu05.
Other than your resume, cover letter,
and some other social media accounts,
I have found the most useful place
to include your LinkedIn URL is within your email signature.
This is very handy
I hope this video helped.
Subscribe If you haven't already,
and comment down below if you have any questions.
See you on the next video.
And in the meantime, (clicks tongue) have a great one.
(air whooshing) (bright music)