New to LinkedIn? Here’s a beginner’s guide

Why joining LinkedIn is good for your career

Being active on LinkedIn can be beneficial to your career in many ways. Using LinkedIn can help you:

• Strengthen professional relationships with people you already know
• Interact with people working in your field
• Search for job postings
• Connect with recruiters
• Learn more about companies and organizations that interest you

Not only can LinkedIn be good for your career, NOT being on means you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities.

How to build your profile on LinkedIn

Getting started on LinkedIn is a little different compared to other social media platforms. The biggest difference is the profile, and it’s an important difference. When someone wants to connect with you or you reach out to them, the first thing they’ll check is your profile.

There are many different elements you can include in your profile. You don’t have to fill in all of them right away. For now, we’ll go over the basics to get you up and running.

Introduction

This includes your name, pronouns, location, and contact information. It also includes your headline, which is where you can put your current role, your aspired role, or skills you want to highlight.

Photos

There’s a place for your photo and a background photo or graphic. For your photo, go with business casual clothing. You don’t need to hire a pro, but be sure your photo is in focus, has headshot-sized proportions (no selfies), and shows your smile! You can set the background photo to the LinkedIn default—plenty of people do. Otherwise, a photo or graphic specific to you is a nice touch.

“Open to”

Here you indicate the types of opportunities you are open to. You can set this to recruiters only or a public setting.

About/summary

This section gives you the chance to tell the LinkedIn community who you are and what you have to offer.

Experience

Include your work experience, including dates and a brief synopsis of your roles and responsibilities. Include paid work experiences, internships, volunteering, and military service. You can pull language directly from your resume, if you have one.

Education

Include schools and any degrees earned.

Other sections include licenses, skills where other people can endorse you, recommendations, and a space to share portfolio examples, interests, and causes.

For further information on building your LinkedIn profile, refer to LinkedIn’s Help article.

Connecting with people you don’t know: the etiquette of LinkedIn

Our best piece of advice here is to send a personal message with your connection request. Something simple and friendly like this is very effective:

“Hi, (First Name)! I saw your post today and really liked what you said about (X). We work in the same field, so I thought I’d reach out and see if you’d like to connect.” You’d be amazed how often this leads to a phone or Zoom call.

What kinds of content should you post on LinkedIn?

People early in their careers often feel intimidated by LinkedIn. There are very accomplished people on the platform—C-Suite executives, founders, and industry leaders—so you might wonder, “Who am I to speak up here?”

Let us reassure you, if you’re a person who works, or wants to work in the future, you belong on LinkedIn. We all have something unique to share with the community—our ideas, our perspectives, our life experiences. That’s enough, even if you’re just starting out.

The content you share is one of the main ways that people who don’t know you can get to know you.

You can find hundreds of prompts to help you come up with content ideas for posting on LinkedIn.

To get the most out of the platform, be strategic in how you use it. In other words, have a game plan for how you want to present yourself.

What do you want people to know about you? Take some time thinking about that. Make a list of 7-10 things you want your LinkedIn persona to represent. Then narrow it down to 2 or 3.

Say you’re starting out in sales and you have a talent for organizing presentations. Your posts can center around sales in general, sales in your particular field, and the successes and challenges of preparing presentations for a professional audience.

In another example, maybe you work at a non-profit that creates community gardens in urban settings. Share content about working in the non-profit sector, gardening, and building strong communities. Then you become known as the non-profit, community-building person who knows about gardening.

Final thoughts

LinkedIn is an amazing place to meet interesting people professionally. Opportunities abound on the platform, so if you haven’t joined yet, get to it! You’ll be glad you did.