Making your LinkedIn profile work for you

I find candidates by searching job titles, keywords and locations. If your profile does not contain the words a recruiter would type, you are invisible regardless of how good you are.

The five things that matter

• Headline: use the recognised job title, not an internal one. 'Land & Planning Manager | Strategic and immediate land | South West'.
• Location: set the nearest major city, not a village nobody searches for.
• About: five or six lines in the first person covering sector, scale and specialism.
• Experience: two or three bullet points of outcomes per role. Empty roles rank poorly.
• Open to work (recruiters only): private, and genuinely effective.

Visibility beats volume

A short, sensible comment on an industry post is worth more than ten applications. It puts your name in front of the exact people who hire in this sector, repeatedly and for free.