- Let's put aside the fact there are currently 575
million users on LinkedIn, of which 260 million are
monthly active users. Let's also forget a recent
poll showing how 73% of people would choose to
keep their LinkedIn profiles over their resumes. Let's focus instead on just how your LinkedIn profile looks today to a recruiter, a
potential hiring manager, a colleague checking to see if you kept your experiences honest. How does it look? In this video, I share my top five tips that'll help your profile
go from this to this. to create an awesome profile
picture and background banner. Almost every single
article or video talking about LinkedIn profiles will recommend you to have a professional
looking profile picture or LinkedIn banner, but none of them tell
you exactly how to do it. My current LinkedIn profile
picture has several issues. You can barely see my face. I'm not looking at the camera, and it's hard to distinguish
me from the background. Here's what I'm gonna do to fix it. First I'm gonna take a recent
full-on photo of myself with my upper half of my body showing, looking directly at the camera, and uploading it to a
website called remove.bg, removebackground.com. After I upload my photo, the
website automatically detects and removes the background, and I get to download this
image for the next step. Pro tip: in order to download
the high-res option here, you just need to sign
up for a free account. You only get one shot at this
free high-resolution download, so make sure you pick
the right photo first. Then I'm actually gonna go to
something called canva.com. If you don't an account,
just create a free one. And I'm gonna upload my photo with a transparent background to a 1,600 by 1,600 design page, as you can just literally type
the custom dimensions here and create a new design. The LinkedIn profile picture dimension is actually usually 400 times 400, but I'm using 1,600 by 1,600 just so I make sure I won't
lose any pixels or resolutions if I want to zoom in other
profile picture later. So as you can see, I already
prepared ahead of time, uploaded my transparent
picture here to save some time. And here is where you can
get a little creative. If you search for a background
in the Elements tab here. I'm just gonna show you guys. There are tons of free
backgrounds that you can use. There are some that's
pro. Don't use those. But there are a lot of free backgrounds that you can use as well. Let me just check. Yeah, see, there's a
lot of free backgrounds. And you can just go nuts with this. I actually personally like
the gradient paintbrush look right over here, so I'm
actually gonna select this and change the colors up a little bit. Instead of pink and orange, I'm gonna select, let's
say, green and light blue, something like that. So instead of this covering my face here, I'm just going to enlarge. Actually, no, hang on. I'm gonna move this and sort of design it a
little bit better here. Yup, you'll see where
I'm going with this soon. Basically get a little creative. Okay, something like that. Actually, the white
background's a little too white, so I'm just gonna select the background and make it a gray color. Put it right over here. Okay, oh, see? What I did there is literally
I just clicked Position and moved it backward. Then I'm gonna put my
picture right up front. Make it look nice and big. Yeah, look at that smile. All right, cool, and there you go. And now I can just download this. Download this picture
directly as a PNG file, and I have my new
upgraded profile picture. So hopefully that was
pretty painless and simple. I actually also don't
like the banner picture I have right now. I think I uploaded it when I first started
management consulting, and I thought graphs and statistics made me
look really smart. (laughs) So I'm gonna change it up as well. So all I'm gonna do is
create a new design here. Click to create a new design. Type in LinkedIn banner, and select the first option that pops up. To save some time, I already
prepared this ahead of time. And you will see this blank slot here, and I actually went ahead, already selected some
pre-populated free templates that Canva provides. And you can see these on
the left-hand side here. So just for example, let's say I wanna use
this banner right here. I'll just put it on here, and
I can actually play around with some of the elements here. So instead of using this one, I actually like this white
tabletop one with the plants, the alarm clock with a lot of pencils without a notepad or anything. And again, this is where
you can play around with your own creative,
with creativity, rather. So if I wanna add some text here to the laptop background, I can. I don't know what to put without making me look narcissistic. Maybe I just add my initials. That's totally not gonna
make me look narcissistic. Enlarge it a little
bit. Change the font up. Let's see, Permanent
Marker. I like that font. I think that size is fine.
Just put it right here. And all I gotta do now is click Download and select the first
page, and then I am done. All right, so first step done. Updated my LinkedIn profile picture and background banner in real time for the first time in four years. if you found this first tip helpful, let me know by dropping a
like and commenting down below with a link to your LinkedIn
profile so I can check it out. Tip number two, your about section should
complement your resume. So I read something recently
that I definitely agree with, and that's the biggest
difference between your resume and LinkedIn profile is that
your resume should be tailored towards the role that you're applying for, whereas your LinkedIn profile should be a more general overview of
who you are as a professional. So contrary to some of
the advice out there, I think it's totally okay
to have an about section that paints a more holistic
picture of who you are, rather having extremely
targeted and niche keywords, which I think is more relevant in the experiences section anyways. A good way to go about this is imagine if someone were to read your resume, they will probably start
to visualize the type of person you are by going
through your experiences, your education, and your
skills and interests. Now, if they go on your LinkedIn
profile immediately after, which a lot of recruiters obviously do, would what they see on
your profile complement or conflict with their
initial image of you? And since your about section
is the second thing they see, following your profile
picture and banner background, This section should really complement instead of repeat what
is found on your resume. For me, I'm not actively
looking for a job right now, so my summary is extremely simple. But if I were looking for
a next role in marketing, for example, I'd say something like, "Product marketer with six plus years in the B2B market in Greater China. I explain complex products in ways business owners understand." Notice I keep the number of adjectives and buzzwords to the minimum. And that one-liner is very consistent with the story I'm trying
to tell with my resume. Tip number three, showcase real work you've
done in the featured section. This section is pretty much
LinkedIn bringing the saying, "A picture is worth a
thousand words," to life by giving you a place to
show instead of just tell. If you're a student, upload classwork that have received a high score, maybe a market research project. Or if you've participated
in a case competition, upload the final presentation on here. If you're a working professional, this is where you can link
your website, design portfolio, any externally shareable projects. For example, a colleague of mine who does amazing market research work. Her name is Rohini.
She's based in Singapore. And she's responsible for a series of market research reports
on global gaming trends. These reports have been
published on Think with Google and shared widely on external platforms. Being the project lead, she features these
reports on her LinkedIn, giving her a lot of
credibility and exposure to anyone who might
come across her profile. For me, I don't have
anything that comes close to being as impressive, so I just link my most
popular LinkedIn posts and YouTube videos. By the way, I have a Facebook group where I share weekly tips. Consider joining if you haven't already. I'll link it down below. Tip number four,
highlight key achievements in your LinkedIn experiences section. Many people make the mistake of copying and pasting their entire resume onto their LinkedIn. While I wouldn't say this
necessarily causes an issue, I think there's a better
way to go about it. You usually have to keep each achievement within three to four lines on your resume, so you have to be very succinct, right? You should see the LinkedIn
experiences section as a way to expand on
your key achievements by providing more background and context. This is also in line with what I mentioned at the beginning of the video, how your LinkedIn profile
should tell a consistent story about your professional life. And expanding on your achievements found in your resume is a natural
way to do just that. And just in case I haven't
stressed this enough in my resume video, make sure to include
quantifiable business impact. I recently spoke with a young professional who works at a big four
advertising agency. She mentioned how sometimes she doesn't know the business impact because for some of the
projects she works on, she doesn't get to stay until the end, and therefore she doesn't
see the end result. In that case, I would say
how about the average number of pitches you've helped out on in a given quarter compared
to that of your peers? Or better yet, the dollar value of the successful pitches
you've contributed to. There are always meaningful data points that you can highlight. Finally, a small hack for those of you who are actively job searching. Use a free word cloud generator, and throw in the job
description you're applying for in there to find some of the
keywords you wanna sprinkle throughout the experiences section. Ending with a very
practical tip number five, get a custom URL. Some of you might already have this, but if you don't, go to your profile, click the little pencil icon that lets you edit your profile,
scroll to the very bottom where you can see the custom URL option, and change it to whatever you like. I already have this
enabled. Mine is jsu05. Other than your resume, cover letter, and some other social media accounts, I have found the most useful place to include your LinkedIn URL
is within your email signature. This is very handy I hope this video helped. Subscribe If you haven't already, and comment down below if
you have any questions. See you on the next video. And in the meantime, (clicks
tongue) have a great one. (air whooshing)
(bright music)
