Your online “personal branding” maximizes your chances to attract recruiters’ attention and to find a job that matches your aspirations. Thanks to LinkedIn – the most popular professional social network – personal branding has repositioned the candidate-HR relationship at the heart of the recruitment.

Be attentive to your personal communication

Develop a strong visual identity

Pick quality and sobriety for your profile picture, which highlights your professional mindset. It should inspire confidence and bring credibility to your personal branding. You can add a professional touch with a relevant cover photo. The LinkedIn background banner photo reinforces your communication, your skills, and your professional identity. You can create one with Canva; this design tool allows you to insert highlights from your experience, adding text to a few related photos you can retouch. It is a real opportunity to create a strong impression with a double message, first visual, then textual with the summary, and increase your chances to attract recruiters.

Display an eye-catching and SEO-optimized headline

95% of recruiters use keywords in their searches on LinkedIn. You should think of your title in terms of search engines, but also in terms of recruiters’ requests. Select keywords in relation to the position you are looking for. Use the 120 characters available in the title to introduce your personal branding, which should differentiate you from other thousands of profiles with similar titles. Provide details by using hierarchical terms such as manager, junior, senior, etc.

Produce an accurate and attractive summary

Only the first three lines of the summary are visible on the profiles, so start strong with a catchy opening statement. Write your summary as if it were your professional biography, emphasize your skills, highlight your strengths, add value by mentioning your soft skills. Insert links to the blog posts you have written and if you have short videos related to these points, share them too. Finally, close your abstract by starting to build a relationship with your visitors, so invite them to contact you in a private message.

Customize your public profile URL

The URL is the link you may use to share your profile with others. Your default public LinkedIn profile shows a reduced version for privacy matters. So first, you have to set your profile into public mode, instead of private, to allow people see your whole profile. LinkedIn assigns you a generic URL when you sign up, but you can easily modify it to your own specifications.

How to find and customize your public profile URL?

• Click View profile
• Then click Edit public profile & URL: you are redirected to Public profile settings page
• Under Edit your custom URL, click the Edit icon and you find an address which looks like www.linkedin.com/in/yourname
• You just have to change the last part of your new custom URL and write your name (or something else)
• Just copy this link and share it with others

Why should you customize your LinkedIn public profile URL?

Specifying your name in the URL brings two advantages:

• It makes you easier to find
• It is an efficient way to make a difference with all the LinkedIn users.
• It boosts your credibility, and online presence on the web’s search engines.
• Moreover, to share your profile in an email, on your business card, or with your other digital media, it’s more engaging and more human to get a serious URL that represents you and identifies you clearly, instead a serial number stuck to the generic URL.

Choose the most suitable language for your profile or present it in two different languages

LinkedIn does not make the distinction between CFO and DAF. Adding your profile in another language will increase your personal branding and give you an international profile, therefore more visibility. Be careful not to accidentally create a second profile. To create your profile in another language:

• Click on Edit profile button.
• Click Create profile in another language

The first profile created when you register on LinkedIn is the default profile. If you have a profile in several languages, LinkedIn works for you and presents to your visitors the version that best suits them according to their language of use on the platform. However, it is up to you to translate and write if you use the option Create profile in another language.

Explain your career background

Your work experiences

Describe, using relevant keywords, previous positions you have held. Illustrate your career prowess with examples, integrate your soft skills. For example, among the soft skills a CFO needs, we find:

• Leadership
• Adaptability: for instance, the CFO can move from a traditional management system to a digital one, especially in the context of e-accounting
• Ability to work under pressure: the management of cash flow and its risks can sometimes generate extra work and stress
• Teamwork: The company’s financial affairs involve other departments or activities and require close collaboration

Customize this section and add value to your profile by inserting links towards documents or digital media channels that talk about your accomplishments.

Request recommendations

74% of recruiters appreciate finding recommendations on a candidate’s profile. Moreover, recommendations improve your ranking and enhance your personal branding on LinkedIn. Social networks are a mean of discussion, exchange and sharing. So, take part as often as possible in dedicated groups, welcome your new contacts or visitors, and ask for recommendations.

Boost your profile

Refine your LinkedIn profile

Recruiters appreciate experiences in a non-professional setting such as volunteering in an association, joining a humanitarian or ecological project.

Drive your network, keep it alive and give credibility to your online presence

An effective communication strategy on LinkedIn involves both presence and time

• Interact with other accounts
• Exchange with your contacts, share their publications, comment on them and show that you are active on LinkedIn.
• Surprise your audience with relevant content
• Promote your personal branding and increase your visibility by regularly publishing high quality content. LinkedIn offers the possibility to write directly on the network, thanks to the “LinkedIn Publisher” feature. Add value to your brand image by positioning yourself as an expert in your field.
• Use data from your SSI Social Selling Index dashboard
• LinkedIn is packed with features, some of which are particularly effective for personal branding. ISS rates how effective you are in building your professional brand, by evaluating your online presence, your ability to network, generate interactions through your publications, and more.