HEY!!! Over here! I have no skills and I’m lazy too!… or why you need to update your LinkedIn profile TODAY

© lintmachine CC

If I’m honest I struggle to understand why people have LinkedIn profiles that they don’t update regularly. Maybe this is because I’m a flagrant trumpet-blower, always flagging up my skills and achievements – partly my personality, partly the fact that librarians are woefully underestimated so I feel I have no choice but sing out. To me, having a LinkedIn profile and not updating it is a bit like putting an advert in an international newspaper every day to tell people you haven’t got any skills.

Unless you’re called Mary Brown or John Smith (or something equally common) your LinkedIn profile will come up as the second or third result if someone searches for you on Google, so you really need to stay on top of it. This is even more important in the new recruitment landscape. The new what?

The new recruitment landscape. The job market has changed. Many successful candidates now never apply for a job and instead are headhunted directly on LinkedIn. Some companies *only* recruit through LinkedIn and you can now apply for many jobs directly via LinkedIn. All three are hugely compelling reasons why you should ensure you’re profile is up-to-date and accurately details your skills, achievements and ambitions.

When I started proclaiming along these lines on Twitter there were a few tweets saying surely it’s better to have a brief profile without much information that is up-to-date rather than a long profile that is out of date, and I’d agree. However, I think this approach fails to capitalise on the fact that the window of self-promotion that is LinkedIn is free and just sat there, ready and waiting for you to promote the heck out of yourself.

Several members of the Information & Library Service team have a lot of experience with LinkedIn. If you’d like to book a 1:1 consultation about how to improve your profile or how to use the platform’s other functions then drop an email to [email protected].

I’ve also written some FAQs with Georgina Cronin, our User Experience Librarian, to answer some of the questions that come up regularly in our sessions on LinkedIn. Download a handy PDF version.