Episode 447 | Author: Emilie Aries

The skills listed on your LinkedIn profile have a huge impact on your visibility to recruiters.

Whether or not you’re currently seeking new employment opportunities, this is your friendly reminder to get your LinkedIn Skills section in order.

Of course, our favorite professional social networking platform could change their processes any day, but right now, the capabilities you list in your Skills section have an outsized impact on your LinkedIn job search success, especially if you’re hoping to be earmarked by a recruiter.

When recruiters are looking to fill a position, it’s what potential candidates have in their Skills section that causes them to turn up in those search results in the first place. The more skills related to the position you share, the higher on their list you’re likely to land.

Let’s walk through how to fine-tune the Skills section of your profile to give you the best chance of getting on the hiring team’s radar for your dream job.

Audit your existing skills

First off, take an inventory of the current Skills section in your LinkedIn profile.

To find your Skills, navigate to your profile and scroll down.
Scroll past Activity, Experience, Education…all the way to Skills.
Click on the pencil in the top right corner of this section.

Now you’re looking at the list of Skills that tell LinkedIn (and recruiters) the abilities you want to be known for. The key here is “want to be known for.” You have tons of skills picked up during your many career and life experiences, but that doesn’t mean they’re all important to your future aspirations.

Go through your list and remove any skills that don’t relate to your goals. Do this by clicking the pencil beside the skill, then clicking Delete on the popup. If removing skills feels like selling yourself short, keep in mind that your Skills section is a strategic part of your job search, not an exhaustive list of everything experience you’ve had.

By the way, LinkedIn endorsements don’t mean much anymore, so don’t sweat about not having them for your relevant skills, and don’t keep irrelevant skills just because they’re endorsed by others.

You might notice that LinkedIn automatically adds skills from LinkedIn courses you’ve taken. Just like old job skills, remove any of these that are no longer relevant, but leave the ones that are related to where you aim to take your career in the future.

You have a maximum of 50 skills to add to your profile, so don’t feel like you have to clear everything out. Your goal here is to make sure nothing irrelevant is watering down your relevant qualifications or taking one of the coveted spots that would better go to a more a skill more directly related to your future

Add skills to your Experience section

Once you’ve audited your existing Skills list, you can flesh it out even more by adding relevant skills to each work position in your Experience section.

Navigate to the Experience section of your profile and click on the pencil icon.
Click the pencil on the position you want to add skills to.
Scroll down to “Skills” and add any that are relevant to your current career goals. I would recommend adding skills to every position you list on your profile, but just like in your Skills section, limit yourself to abilities that relate to today and skip those you’re no longer interested in advertising.
Order your skills how you’d like by dragging the four lines to the right of each skill.
Click Save.
Repeat steps 2-5 for all your positions.

LinkedIn recommends choosing the top 5 skills you used in each role. These will appear under your job title and description as a concise list that’s easy for any prospective employer to review.

Seek inspiration for your Skills list

If you feel like you’re still missing some important abilities, take this effort one step further and explore job postings similar to your career goals.

Below every job description in the LinkedIn Jobs section, you’ll find a section labeled “Skills associated with the job post, identified by LinkedIn.” Browse this section on related postings, and you’ll get fresh ideas for the skills that will land you on the shortlist for the kinds of jobs you’re looking for.

This process is essential for anyone hoping to get on the radar of recruiters in their industry— so let LinkedIn do some of that hard work for you. But it’s a good practice even if you’re happy in your current position. Keeping your Skills section on your LinkedIn profile up-to-date could turn up some amazing opportunities you weren’t even looking for!

I’d love to hear how you’ve utilized your LinkedIn Skills section to benefit you! Join our Bossed Up group on LinkedIn or the Courage Community on Facebook to share your insights.

Related Links From Today’s Episode:

Hired: my Job Search Accelerator

Bossed Up Courage Community

Bossed Up LinkedIn Group

LEARN TO NAVIGATE THE MODERN JOB SEARCH:

[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 447. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And yes, I am in the thick of daycare cold and flu season, so please bear with me through today's episode.
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Today's quick episode is going to be breaking down how to optimize your LinkedIn profile using your Skills feature LinkedIn is constantly changing, so for the record, I'm recording this in early February 2024. This may or may not be relevant a year from now, but recognizing that the features and different tools available to us on LinkedIn are constantly changing, one that was recently updated in the last year or so that can have an outsized impact on your success in using LinkedIn, particularly if you are looking to be recruited or uh, are generally looking for a new employment situation, is making sure you're using everything that the Skills section has to offer.
Now, first, let me explain why your LinkedIn skills matter. This is not your skills generally, but these are the actual skills listed on your profile on your LinkedIn profile right on your LinkedIn page. When recruiters use LinkedIn to source candidates for an open position, the skills that are formally tagged and attached to your profile determine what search results you will turn up in. So, if you have a ton of project management related skills on your profile, like project management, project management certification, team management, agile management, project and program management, whatever, they might be, right? If you have a lot of skills in that vein tagged to your profile, you are more likely to show up for project management positions when they're recruiting for those specific skills, particularly if they're also searching on LinkedIn for candidates within your geographic area, let's say. So, it's not the only way you might end up in someone's search results, but LinkedIn skills can make a big difference.
Now consider for a moment if you are a former high school teacher who's looking to transition into an entry level project management role. If your entire LinkedIn profile is tagged with teaching related skills and you don't have anything on there related to project management, you're not going to show up in the search results that you want to show up in, particularly when recruiters are looking for entry level workers to fill a lot of the open positions in our economy right now at the entry level. So, it's really important that you strategically use your skills section in LinkedIn to essentially kind of put out a bat signal in the sky of what skills you want to be known for, not necessarily just accurately depicting what skills you have in your arsenal from the past. It's more important that the skills attached to your profile give a sense of what you want to be known for and what you want to be employed for than being really meticulous about all of your past experiences. In fact, I would delete past skills that are no longer relevant to the future of your career. So how do we do this? Let me just break it down for you in the most nitty gritty way. I'm going to click along as I describe this and you should feel free to do the same to edit your skills section. You used to only be able to edit this at the very bottom of your profile. There's a section under your experience, under your education, under licenses and certifications, if you have any under volunteering, if you have any called skills. And in that skills section, you can see all the skills that you have added to your profile over the years.
Now, a long time ago, people were enabled to sort of suggest or endorse your skills. Those endorsements don't mean much anymore, so don't over freak out about having endorsed skills. Doesn't really matter. That's sort of an antiquated feature that has since gone away. But if you had people endorsing you for a whole bunch of random skills that you do not want to be known for, that has nothing to do with your actual skill set or expertise, delete those skills. So, the first step is to go down to that skills section. Open it up by clicking view all skills and then make sure you start by auditing all of the current skills that are attached to your profile. Are these all skills that you want to be known for? Are these all skills that are going to get you where you want to go next? If you've taken any LinkedIn learning courses, what's interesting is that they automatically add skills to your profile based off of the courses you have taken as well. So, just make sure that that list is accurate because you can only have a maximum of 50.
So it's not that you should cull it back completely, you know, to just ten essential skills, but you've got 50 to work with as a maximum. Make sure there's nothing there that's getting in the way of other more relevant skills. Then go back to your main profile section and scroll under your work experience section, just called Experience. Now, under each and every work position you've held, you can edit by clicking the little arrow there and then clicking the arrow next to your specific title and position. You can actually edit the skills that you used in each past position. They recommend adding your top five skills used in this role, and you can do that via this editing of your experience section, and it will automatically populate your profile's skill section.
Now, the thing to know about this is that when you add a skill, there's a drop down menu of sorts. There's a limited number of skills. You can't make up your own skills. But what's really frustrating, and I wish LinkedIn would make this more transparent, is that we don't know what's on that drop down menu. You simply start typing a skill like learning and development, let's say. And as I write the word learning, it starts to show me my options. They have e-learning, machine learning, distance learning, deep learning, blended learning disabilities, learning management systems learning, management learning. So, there is no learning and development because I already have a skill on my profile here called Employee Learning and Development. So, you kind of need to mess around as though you're kind of using this as like a search bar, searching for what skills that you have that you want to list alongside this experience in your work history that actually exist in the limited options that LinkedIn is offering us. But there is no way to scroll through and see everything available. So it takes a little bit of typing to see what's available.
So if I start typing project management, project management is certainly one option. Software project management, project management office, agile project management, project portfolio management, program management. There's a lot of different options here, but you just need to keep typing, seeing what's there so that you can think to yourself, okay, what skills were essential to this role, but also the kinds of skills that I want to be most known for. And what I like most about this new feature is once you've attached those specific skills to your specific work experiences based on what skills you used in which roles, a nice little paragraph appears under each past role that you've held that lists off all of those skills with a nice neat little bullet point between each one. So it's really easy to skim. It's a nice way to display your skills as they relate to your specific experiences. And if you want to, you can also write a blurb that describes the role above the skills section.
So under, founder and CEO of Bossed Up, I have a little blurb that says, “lead a nationwide team to design and deliver custom leadership development and career services programs with a focus on gender inclusion and DEI for Fortune 500 companies, institutions of higher education, and individuals across sectors”. And then it goes on for another sentence. Then below that blurb, that I wrote that offers a lot more flexibility and like, personalization are, the list of skills associated with this role, leadership development, team building, diversity and inclusion, employee learning and development and more. So it's a really tidy little way for you to beef up your LinkedIn profile in a strategic way where you're essentially tagging your profile with the skills that you want to be known for. And you can do that for every single work experience, every single job that you've held that you want to list on your LinkedIn profile. And then at the end of editing each past work experience and adding the skills in that way, you can scroll down to the skills section on your profile and you'll see them all updated there. So all of your skills that you listed or added to your work experience section are now populated in your skills section. It doesn't really matter where they're displayed. It's not like we care where people are seeing these. What matters is that you are formally attaching those skills as a data point to your LinkedIn profile, which is really, really helpful for recruiters and folks who are looking for talent. If you want to be approached by a recruiter, if you want to be competitive for the kinds of jobs that you're applying for, this is a really key way to do it. And while you're looking at jobs on LinkedIn, you can also gain inspiration for skills that you might want to add to your profile that you didn't even know existed on LinkedIn.
So when you're scrolling through job descriptions on LinkedIn, obviously there's a lot of custom text that talent acquisition teams are putting in about the job itself. But once you scroll to the very bottom, there's a little section below the job description called “skills associated with the job post identified by LinkedIn”, and it alerts you to the skills that might be missing on your profile that are prevalent among other applicants to the job. So that's a really great way to start to identify, oh, wow, I have a lot of skills on my profile, but maybe I'm missing some key skills that would make me a better candidate according to LinkedIn, based on the skills that are associated with the jobs that I'm applying for. So keep in mind that this is constantly iterative. You can constantly update your LinkedIn skills and you want to do so to position you as an obvious fit for the kinds of jobs that you're applying for.
Now, the last thing to keep in mind on this is to be selective. Remember, you don't want recruiters who use LinkedIn to find you in their search, based on all the skills that you used to use but are looking to kind of retire, right, that you don't really want to be known for moving forward. For example, in the earlier parts of my career, I, as a digital strategist working in political campaigns and elections, you kno, I would build websites, write blog posts, run email fundraising strategies, and frankly, I still do a lot of that technical stuff for Bossed Up, right? I'm recording a podcast and I'm writing blog posts and building and managing our website. But I am not looking to be a website builder for anybody, right? I am not looking to run an email fundraising strategy for anybody. So I took those skills off of my LinkedIn profile not because I didn't have them, not because they aren't accurately associated with former roles that I have in my work history, but simply because I don't want to waste my 50 skill maximum with the kinds of skills like blogging, for instance, that I have but don't want to be known for when it comes to opportunities that I'd be looking for.
So keep in mind that you're really determining by choosing what skills you're attaching to your profile, you're determining what search results you're going to turn up in. So be selective, be choosy, and be thoughtful about setting yourself up for success in this way. If you have any questions about how to do this, head to our corresponding blog post at bossedup.org/episode447 there you'll find a fully written out set of instructions with screenshots on how to do this and how you can really keep up to date with your LinkedIn profile to just set you up for success. And the beauty of setting up your LinkedIn profile based on all the bells and whistles that they have to offer is that you can set it and forget it. Let's say you're not actively looking for a job. Go optimize your profile anyway. Let your profile do the work while you sleep, while you stay focused on your current job. Because if you get a message in your inbox with an amazing opportunity from a recruiter, your effort up front will position you to get those kinds of opportunities coming to you, even if you're not actively seeking them out right now.
So, allow LinkedIn to do the work for you by making sure your skills section is optimized for the kinds of opportunities that you'd be interested in entertaining if they were to come your way. I'd love to hear how this works for you. Let's keep the conversation going on LinkedIn in our Bossed Up group there, or, of course, in our Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook.
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And like I said, for lots more, head to bossedup.org/episode447. And if you found this episode helpful, make sure to share it with the folks and the job seekers who you love in your world. Now, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose. And together, let's lift as we climb.
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