New Profile tools to spotlight your Top Skills, Projects and Credentials

Job seeking has become increasingly dynamic as hirers go beyond traditional criteria like professional experience or education when looking for candidates to join their teams. In fact, more than 50% of companies hiring on LinkedIn explicitly use skills data to fill their roles. To help you match with the right opportunities and increase your chances of landing them, we’ve added new features to make your skills shine on your LinkedIn Profile.

Engage hirers by summarizing your Top Skills in the About section

Your Profile is one of the first places employers go to learn more about you and a great way to capture their attention is through the About section. Think of your About section as your elevator pitch. If you only have 30 seconds to tell a potential employer about your career journey and goals, what are the key skills that set you apart from other candidates? We’ve introduced a dedicated space here where you can tag up to five of your Top Skills in a more visual way, which will give hirers the context they need right off the bat. 

Connect the skills you have with the work you’ve done

We want to make it easy for you to tell your professional story and experience in your own way by adding context into how you’ve used your skills across multiple parts of your Profile. In addition to associating skills with jobs or education, take it a step further by adding media-rich content in the Projects section and tagging those projects with the unique skills you used in the process. For example, if you’re a photographer, you might link out to a website featuring your online portfolio and tag hard skills such as Adobe Photoshop and soft skills like Communication or Collaboration. 

75% of hirers globally* believe context into how a skill was used is important. The more a recruiter can understand where you developed or used a skill, the better. 

Demonstrate your skill proficiency by earning credentials

Over the past two years, professionals adding credentials to their Profiles increased globally by more than a third and you can now tag a skill against a particular credential. We’re continuing to invest in new credential offerings like Professional Certificates and Certification Prep in partnership with trusted, industry-leading providers, including Microsoft, Google Cloud, Zendesk and more. 

How this shows up for recruiters

Hirers using LinkedIn’s Recruiter tool have access to advanced keyword search filters and can discover you based on the skills you list on your Profile. When associating your skills with a particular job, project, education or credential, those examples will also automatically surface when recruiters search for those skills. For example, when you tag skills on content you feature in the Projects section, recruiters will be able to see those projects as they view your skills.  

Finally, you can choose to share details on your resume with recruiters to make you even more discoverable as they search for candidates. For example, if a particular skill you list on your resume matches a skill keyword a recruiter is using in their search, we’ll surface that skill as a match. Simply go to your Job Application Settings and toggle on “Share your resume data with all recruiters.” Note: Recruiters will not have access to your full resume with this setting. Learn more. 

Highlighting your unique set of skills, how you’ve applied them and how they transfer into a future role is more important than ever to differentiate yourself in today’s job market. Do send us feedback on these features and anything else we can do to make your experience better on jobseeker-feedback@linkedin.com. We’re rooting for you. 

*Based on January 2022 global research among 1,049 recruiters and hiring managers conducted by LinkedIn