Take it from the Stats! Proven Ways to Optimize your LinkedIn Profile

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29
Jun 2017

If you have ever been hesitant about using LinkedIn, allow the statistics to erase your apprehension. It’s no myth that LinkedIn has revolutionized the contemporary workforce, and has provided proof of the powerful interconnectedness of professional networks. It’s estimated that 106 million unique users visit LinkedIn each month, and that every second two new users join the network. It’s not just the number of users that’s increasing, either. From 2016 to 2017, the use of LinkedIn company pages grew from 24% to 57%. If those facts aren’t enough to make you consider creating a LinkedIn profile or using yours more, consider that as of now, 71% of professionals feel that LinkedIn is a credible source for professional content. That means that if you aren’t using LinkedIn, you should be.

Using statistics as a guide, we’ll discuss the ways that you can optimize your LinkedIn use and profile, or create one if you have not done so yet.

Pro Tip: Get Visual

FACT: LinkedIn profiles with professional photos get 21 times more profile views, and 36 times more messages.

If that’s not reason enough to amp up the visuals on your LinkedIn account, I don’t know what is! The simple act of adding a professional headshot increases your visibility by 21 times. On top of that, you’ll be much more likely to receive messages from contacts. 

Pro Tip: Flaunt your Skills, literally 

FACT: Listing your skills on your LinkedIn profile results in 13 times more profile views than if skills are left unlisted.

Recently, we blogged about the importance of having a Key Skills section on your resume, and how listing your skills can help you rank higher in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Turns out it’s also proven that including key skills on your LinkedIn profile can increase your profile’s viewer traffic by up to 13 times. Remember, the more people see your profile, the more of a chance you’ll have of making productive connections.

Pro Tip: Talk the talk, so walk the walk

FACT: There are 19.7 million Slideshares uploaded to LinkedIn.

Slideshares are LinkedIn’s way of showcasing work portfolios and your past presentations (in the form of PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote, and OpenDocument). We’ve already mentioned how simply adding a profile picture to give your name a face can increase your visibility and interconnectedness on LinkedIn. Apply that same logic to adding visible examples of all the great things you write in your profile. Adding samples of your work makes your project descriptions that much more credible.

Pro Tip: Get Someone to back you up 

Fact: There have been over 10 billion LinkedIn endorsements

Endorsements are LinkedIn’s way of adding third party verification of your professional successes, talents and work ethic. People you’ve worked with can testify to how great you are. What better way to make other professionals want to connect with you and share opportunities with you than to have others give testament to your successes? 

Pro Tip: Get Creative

FACT: The most overused LinkedIn profile word continues to be “Motivated” – which also topped 2014 and 2015. 

We’ve blogged about phrases that will kill your resume. Among them are clichéd phrases that, when you think about them, seem very vague and don’t really describe anything about you. The same philosophy goes with LinkedIn language. If you use the word “motivated” in your profile, take it out and replace it with something else. Same thing goes for any other cliché words and catchphrases.

In closing, we hope you’ve now decided that you need to create a LinkedIn profile. If you’re looking for a job, know that LinkedIn now has 3 million active job listings on the platform. Out of LinkedIn’s 467 million users, you are bound to make some incredible connections that pave the golden way forward in your career.

All statistics sourced from “LinkedIn By The Numbers: 2017 Statistics.”

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Include Key Skills on your Resume to Beat Applicant Tracking Systems

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27
Jun 2017

The Key Skills/Core Competencies section is generally the second major section of the resume, placed right after your header – containing your name, email, phone number, and relevant social media links – and your professional profile. In Resume Yeti’s Anatomy of a Perfect Resume, we liken the Professional Profile and Key Skills sections to an “elevator pitch.” In other words, it’s a lightning fast way to create a portrait of your strengths. In a more technical sense, this section is also a way to clearly include keywords that will rank you higher in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).

You can read more about ATS here, but in short, the ATS is the first step of the hiring manager’s resume screening process. If the company uses an ATS in the hiring process, then before a person ever looks at your resume, it will be fed through the system in order to select only the applicants that are a “match” for the job description. The ATS only selects resumes that contain specific keywords that are relevant to the position. So, it is crucial to make sure that your resume contains the correct keywords to be selected out of the first screening pool and move on to the next step in the application process, during which a person would evaluate your resume.

You inevitably include many keywords throughout your resume, in your job titles and the descriptions of your responsibilities. However, the Key Skills section is a place where you can take the opportunity to showcase your relevant skills all in one place. Some people recommend not including this section, but there is no reason why you shouldn’t. The benefits of listing your skills far outweigh any disadvantages to including them. Here are some of Resume Yeti’s Pro Tips on the advantages of including a Key Skills/Core Competencies section on your resume, and how to do it right.

Pro Tip:  Including a Key Skills section will help you rank higher in an applicant tracking system (ATS)

As previously mentioned, an ATS is often the first step in screening applications for an open position. If your resume does not include enough content that matches the filters the hiring manager has set in the ATS, your resume will not be selected to move on to the next step in the process.

The use of Applicant Tracking Systems is on the rise. An article on Recruiting Daily states that an estimated 75% of big companies use an ATS. And with developments in the technology, it’s becoming much easier and more affordable for small companies to use the programs, too.  Advertisements for Applicant Tracking Systems boast that for employers, the use of an ATS is cost effective and saves extensive amounts of time in the hiring process. Since most companies are using these programs, it is likely your resume will need to be ATS friendly. Therefore, it’s best to prepare your resume so that if it is screened electronically, you’ll have enough matching keywords to move on.

Pro Tip: Your Key Skills should mirror the job descriptions that interest you

So now you know why you need to include a Key Skills/Core Competencies section on your resume, the next logical question is how to do it. The best possible way that you can prepare your resume for an Applicant Tracking System is to be sure that it includes many of the same keywords as the jobs you’re applying for. Hiring managers will often pull keywords from the job description itself to plug into the ATS filters. It’s a good idea for your Key Skills section to mirror the job description.

Apart from those listed in the job description, you can include additional Key Skills that are relevant to the industry of the job you’re applying for. Browse similar job postings, and take note of the desired skill requirements that are being solicited.

We at Resume Yeti make this task even easier for you by providing a Resume Keyword index. In this Index, you’ll find categorized lists of the most common keywords for over 150 different professions. In addition to your own research, including some keywords from this index may help your resume to rank higher in the ATS, and hopefully get your resume in front of human eyes!

Pro Tip: Include a maximum of 20 Key Skills in this section

Once you realize the importance of trying to match your resume to the ATS filters, it’s easy to get carried away and want to include everything you find, to be sure that your resume passes the first screening. But you also have to remember that once your resume does make it past the electronic portion of the process, the same document has to pass a human screening, too. Listing 3 pages of Key Skills might make you appealing to a computer program, but it’s likely to deter human interest in your resume. Thus, you’ll need to strike a balance between optimizing your resume’s keywords for the ATS and optimizing your resume’s other content (like Professional Experience, Education, Noteworthy, Accomplishments, etc.) and aesthetic. We recommend making an extensive initial list of keywords and selecting your top 20 for inclusion in your Key Skills section. Most Key Skills sections will consist of 2 or 3 columns instead of one long list to save space, so you’ll want to make sure these columns are balanced out as well.

 

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How to get Recruited for a Job

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22
Jun 2017

Recruitment for a job can come in many different forms. Traditionally, job recruitment has been limited to job boards, classified ads, and recruitment firms. Nowadays, job recruitment, like many other industries, has sprawled out across the Internet and takes place in a myriad of unique and unconventional ways. Digital job boards like Monster.com, Indeed.com, Idealist.org, and CareerBuilder.com have replaced traditionally published classified ads, and have become the “go-to” platforms where job seekers search for open positions. However, recruitment (in which hiring managers and recruiting agents seek out potential job candidates, not the other way around) is now happening at several other levels. There are many strategies job seekers can utilize in order to get noticed by recruiters and be ready to jump on exciting opportunities that arise in the ever-constant job hunt. While recruitment is certainly not something that job seekers can consistently count on, it is certainly an exciting way to open yourself up to opportunities that you might not have otherwise encountered on your own. What follows are Resume Yeti’s Pro Tips on how to ready yourself to be recruited.

Pro Tip: Keep your resume up to date, up to the minute.

Keeping your resume current is the most important element of job hunting. It’s an easy thing to let go of when you’ve been employed for a while or when you haven’t had to send your resume out in a long time. But it is absolutely crucial that you tend to your resume each and every time there is something new that you could add to it. If a recruiting opportunity arises and your resume is not ready, you will become overwhelmed by the process of updating and perfecting your resume, and in the time it takes to do that, you may miss the deadline to apply, or the recruiter might think you lost interest because of the lag in your response time. So, right now, before you do anything, get your resume up to date!

Pro Tip: Develop your skills to stay relevant

Almost as crucial as keeping your resume up to date, is keeping yourself up to date. Your skills, that is. As we mentioned above, today’s job market is seamlessly intertwined with the digital realm. Digital technology upheaves, updates, and revitalizes itself seemingly in the blink of an eye. This means that, at any given moment, your digital skill set may become outdated or obsolete.

To keep your skills relevant, it’s important that you’re constantly searching through job listings and job descriptions to ensure that the skill set that you posses is in line with what hiring managers expect of job candidates in your industry. If you come across something in your skill set that you need to brush up on or learn for the first time, you can keep yourself relevant by signing up for a seminar, class, or workshop to develop that skill. Attending skill development classes in your industry will also put you in contact with others in that industry whom you may not have met otherwise. Who knows, recruitment opportunities could arise for you simply by keeping your skill set up to date.

Pro Tip: Go to networking events and keep your own network current

Another way to be recruited, outside of digital job boards and attending skills development workshops, is to network your heart out. This includes regularly attending networking events within your industry. A quick Google search of “[your industry]” + “networking events” + “[your location]” will yield tons of networking opportunities for you, ranging from formal meet and greet events to more informal networking cocktail hours. Don’t forget to bring your business cards!

Staying on top of your networking game doesn’t only apply to expanding your professional network. It also applies to keeping in touch with your current network. Your contacts will be much more likely to reach out to you with an opportunity or help you out if you maintain your relationship with them past the time that you actually worked together. Keep in touch with them. Invite them to coffee or happy hour to catch up, see what projects they’re working on, what their next career plans are. That way, your relationship with your contacts is not purely transactional. It’s pretty transparent when an old work contact emails or calls out of the blue and asks for a favor. People in your network are much more likely to reach out or respond to you if you show them that you genuinely care about them outside of asking them for a random employment favor.

Pro Tip: Make yourself visible

Make yourself easy to find. One of the easiest methods of screening applicants or recommended job candidates is to Google them, and hiring managers do it. If you’re hoping to be recruited, you need to find ways to make yourself come up in a list of search results. There are so many ways to improve your visibility. The easiest and most practical way is to open your own professional social media accounts. Number one on this list should be LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a pool of about 250 million people in the modern workforce. Participating in this community increases your odds of being noticed by some of them. Making a LinkedIn profile in your name will also make your name appear in the results when someone Googles you. For tips on how to increase your visibility on LinkedIn, check out their article, “It’s Your Career: How to Get Recruiters to Notice You on LinkedIn.” Another way to increase your visibility in search engines is to make a website, if it makes sense for your work and your industry. Even if the “site” is just a landing page with some information about you, the most important thing is that your name and site would be another item that surfaces in a Google search of your name.

Again, being recruited is not a given. But if you test out these Pro Tips, you may find opportunities rolling in that were not made available to you previously. At the very least, by constantly readying yourself for job opportunities, you open yourself to be capable of applying immediately and confidently for outstanding positions you come across in your job hunt.

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How to Talk about your Weaknesses in Job Interviews

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19
Jun 2017

“What’s your biggest weakness?” is one of the most difficult questions to answer truthfully and genuinely in a job interview. It’s one of the most anticipated interview questions; there’s a strong chance you’ll be asked about your weaknesses. Yet many people feel that it’s uncomfortable and near impossible to answer this question. Why is it so hard to talk about our weaknesses?

No one wants to readily highlight their flaws to a hiring manager. But there is another motive behind inquiring about weaknesses. What the hiring manager really wants is to gauge is whether you’re aware of your own work habits and tendencies that could use some improvement. They also want to see if you know how to take the initiative to address your weaknesses.

Instead of viewing this question as the one where you throw yourself under the bus in front of your potential employer, think of it as an opportunity to show both your maturity and desire to grow as an employee. The key is to state what you believe your “weakness” to be, and then immediately acknowledge that you know how to improve upon it, and that when given any opportunity, you take the necessary steps to correct it.

Below are some examples of common workplace “weaknesses,” and Resume Yeti’s Pro Tips on how to improve these answers if the question comes up in your interview.

Your Weakness: “Sometimes I have been late on assignments because I take on too many projects at once.”

Pro Tip: I’ve always been a great multi-tasker, but sometimes I bite off more than I can chew. There are occasions when I misjudge the amount of time I need to complete a project, and that can throw off my whole workflow. I am working on my time management, though. Once I realized that I could juggle multiple projects, I started building in buffer time to my schedule so that if anything should come up during the course of a project, I have ample time to address the issue and still complete the project in time for the deadline.

Your weakness: “I can be disorganized”

Pro Tip: As a creative person, it’s always been hard for me to stay organized. I’ve been working on my organizational skills by implementing color coding in my calendars and files as well as exhaustive To-Do lists. These strategies are successful because they play into my creativity, and I’ve found that the secret to staying organized is staying consistent.

Your weakness: “I’m bad at public speaking”

Pro Tip: I think to a certain extent, everyone struggles with speaking or giving a presentation in front of a room full of people. Public speaking has always been a skill I’d like to improve, and I know one of the best ways to do that is to engage in it more often. Another way to improve is to make sure that I know the material inside and out. Each time I’m assigned with a presentation or a task that involves public speaking, instead of worrying about the speaking aspect, I pour all my energy into making sure I have everything practiced and memorized. I feel with each presentation my public speaking skills improve.

Your weakness: “I’m a procrastinator”

Pro Tip: When I was a student, I used to procrastinate on assignments. After college, this habit carried over into my work life too. However, I realized very quickly that procrastination hindered my workflow and I figured out a system to budget my time accordingly so that each project could be finished not just on time, but before the deadline.

Your weakness: “I prefer to work on my own because when I work with a team, there are always problems with the project’s final outcome.”

Pro Tip: Delegating tasks on a collaborative project has always been difficult. Yet teamwork is such a crucial part of any workplace and any workflow. To make delegating various aspects of the project easier, I started making spreadsheets to visually divide up the workflow. This visual aid helps to envision the breakdown of responsibilities on the project and also helps avoid confusion if collaborators have questions about what their specific tasks are. It also leaves room to include extra tasks so that if anyone finishes their section earlier than the other collaborators, they will know the next item on the agenda to push the project workflow forward.

Your weakness: “I’m a perfectionist”

Pro Tip: I strive to ensure that every detail on a given project is as close to perfect as I can make it. I know that perfectionism often comes at a price; to agonize over each small detail of a project can also put the project behind schedule because of the extra time it takes to go over everything multiple times. As I’ve grown as an employee, I’ve worked out a system so that I’m nearly satisfied with details the first time around, so I only must check once more before submitting the project to be sure that it’s perfect.

 

Out of these examples, the most important common element is that none of these explanations of a “weakness” are negative. The trick is to express a skill that you’ve been working on or you need to work on in the future, and explain how you plan to go about doing that.

Remember, the best way to have a successful job interview is to practice and prepare for any questions you anticipate. Make a list of questions you think you’ll be asked, and practice answering them in front of the mirror or with a friend. Another great resource is to check www.glassdoor.com/ and see if anyone has listed the interview questions they were asked at the company you’ll be interviewing for.

 

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Optimize your Resume to Avoid Age Discrimination while Job Hunting

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14
Jun 2017

If you are over the age of 40 and have been searching for a job, there is a strong chance that you have experienced age discrimination in the hiring process. As you age and continue to apply for jobs, you may notice that call-backs and interview requests are becoming increasingly rare for you. While hiring managers may not realize that they are discriminating against applicants based on their age, there are several age-related factors that could negatively affect how your resume is viewed, and those factors subsequently affect whether or not you are invited for an interview.

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 states that employers shall not discriminate against job applicants or workers who are over the age of 40 throughout the hiring process or in the workplace. Employers declare themselves Equal Opportunity Employers, though treating each applicant equally is much more challenging in practice than in theory. Hiring managers may have the impulse to gravitate, subconsciously even, toward applicants who give the impression of being young. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, this practice is illegal. Yet it persists in the modern workforce because of the subtle behaviors we adopt from societal attitudes and stigmas, as well as the difficulty in enforcing equal employment opportunity laws.

Your resume projects who you are to hiring managers. As their first impression of you, your resume has the power to be the one thing that compels them to elevate you to the next step in the hiring process. There are several ways in which you can optimize your resume to ensure that you are not discriminated against based on your age. Below are Resume Yeti’s Pro Tips on how to optimize your resume for the modern job hunt.

Pro Tip: Focus on your most recent positions

In the “Professional Experience” section on your resume, you should emphasize only the most recent positions you have held. While it is crucial to include professional experience that is relevant to the positions you are applying for, any jobs outside of the past 10-15 years should not appear in the main “Professional Experience” section of your resume. Instead, you can simply list these positions in an “Additional Experience” section below your “Professional Experience” Section. The positions you list under additional experience do not need to include dates, though you may be asked about dates during an interview.

Pro Tip: Keep your resume short

No matter how many unique work experiences you have had, or how many years you’ve been working, your resume should ideally be two pages or less (three at the absolute maximum). Having an overly lengthy resume can indicate your age to hiring managers. Long resumes can also be overwhelming to read and process, and they can actually work against you in the hiring process. Keep your Professional Experience descriptions concise and direct, with three short bullet points per position.

Pro Tip: Eliminate your graduation dates

By dating your education, you date yourself. If you alert hiring managers to the year you graduated from college, they can estimate your age within a few years. Your age is supposed to be irrelevant to hiring managers, but if they calculate your age based on your education dates, it opens up the chance that they could discriminate against you, however unknowingly.

Watch out for this question in interviews, too. Even if you remove your graduation dates from your resume, hiring managers could attempt to gauge your age by casually asking what year you graduated from college or high school in an interview. If this question should surface in the hiring process, you may be able to deflect it by responding, “May I ask the reason why you need this information?” or “I could order you a copy of my transcript if necessary.”

Pro Tip: Modernize your resume’s appearance

Again, your resume is hiring managers’ first impression of you. This part of your application is a way of projecting who you are without ever meeting someone from the office in person. Older job applicants have a tendency to use outdated visual techniques and formats in their resumes. In today’s job market, many applicants are utilizing graphic design and self-branding in order to attract the attention of hiring managers. If you can modernize your resume’s appearance, then you will not stick out as an older applicant when hiring managers first screen resumes for the position. If you are worried that you don’t have the graphic design skills to modernize your resume, don’t worry! Resume Yeti uses an online system in which you type in your information, and the program rearranges it into your choice of a beautiful modern template.

It may not be possible to eliminate age discrimination in the workplace and hiring process, but it is possible to prevent it from happening to you. Test our Pro Tips, and get ready to receive more call-backs and interview requests than before!

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How to Write your Resume if you have little or no Professional Experience

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07
Jun 2017

Summer is heating up. For many of this year’s college graduates, the festivities are dying down, and the need to find a job is becoming more pressing. Yet many recent grads or those who have taken career breaks find themselves in a conundrum when they begin their job search: how to write an outstanding resume if they have little or no professional experience. Embarking on a job hunt is never easy, but it can seem even more daunting if you feel you haven’t had the professional experiences that hiring managers look for when screening job applications. Fear not, however, because there IS a way to frame your unique experiences and skills so that they translate in to valid, valuable bullet points on your resume. With a little research, some personal reflection, and determination, you can write your resume and begin applying to jobs within a few hours of reading this post.

1) Do your research

Decide which industries you would be interested in working in. Once you’ve picked two or three, use sites like monster.com, indeed.com, and idealist.org to peruse some job postings for entry-level positions in your chosen fields. In each posting, there should be a list of qualities and qualifications that hiring managers desire in potential entry level job candidates. Make a list of these traits and skills.

Once you have a good list with quite a few skills and traits, examine any that repeat. If you begin to notice patterns across job postings from various companies, you can get a general sense of what is expected of an entry level worker in that field. For example, if you were researching desired traits for jobs in sales, you might see that customer service, persuasion, negotiation, and diligence are among dozens of skills that are emphasized when working in that field, according to TheBalance.com. Now, analyze your findings. Do you possess any of the qualities that recur across job postings? Circle all that are relevant to you.

2) Do some personal reflection

Once you’ve got a sense of what hiring managers are looking for, you can begin to reflect on your own experiences to discover if any work you’ve done over the years would demonstrate your suitability for a position in your chosen field. The trick here is to stop limiting your interpretation of “professional experience” to solely conventional long-term jobs, which you may not have had yet. Professional experience can be anything you have done that utilized or developed your skills. Perhaps you were a TA in college or you volunteered at the writing center or as a tutor. Maybe you gave tours to prospective students or were assigned to have a visiting student shadow you one day. Maybe you worked at the library.

For recent college grads, work experience doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to your college, either. You may have worked on a catering team at a wedding, or helped take care of your neighbors’ children. A family friend may have asked you to help with a home improvement project or help fix a car one summer. Even hobby activities can be considered experiences that demonstrate your value as a worker.

It may make it easier to reflect on these experiences if you think of times when you collaborated with others to achieve some sort of end. What projects have you completed? What volunteer work have you done? Now reexamine the list of desired qualities in your industry. Focus on the ones you circled, those you possess. Try to think of how you acquired, developed, or utilized these skills throughout your past work, volunteer, or other project experiences. These experiences will be the bullet points in the Professional Experience section on your resume. For help formatting this section and others on your resume, see Resume Yeti’s “Anatomy of a Perfect Resume” Pro Tips.

3) Make your resume look the part

Since you are searching for employment with few “conventional” job experiences, it is of paramount importance that your resume be as close to perfect as possible. In an article about the most important resume characteristics for an applicant with no experience, Business Insider states that the number one way to make a resume stand out is that, “The layout is clean and easy to read.” Your resume should contain no spelling or grammar errors, no formatting inconsistencies, and it should have a clean, polished design. In order for hiring managers to take your resume seriously, it needs to be visually as good as or better in caliber than those of applicants competing for the same positions. First impressions are key!

 

Once you get over the initial anxiety of feeling like you have no work experience, you’ll be able to crank out your resume and start applying to jobs immediately thereafter. And remember, the employee profiles that hiring managers post in job listings are only desired qualities; they are usually not hard line requirements for every applicant. Show hiring managers that despite not having had conventional work experience, you have had valuable learning experiences in the past, and you are ready to put your skill set into action.

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