30 LinkedIn Tips: #19/30 – All-Star is not enough
30 short, useful, actionable LinkedIn tips in 30 days from Doctor David Petherick. #30by30 #TheDoctorisIn
#19/30: All-Star's not enough. Why you need your profile to be at least an All-Star experience.
- Originally written: October 19, 2017
Text & Images Updated: May 25, 2023
Nobody likes being nagged.
But LinkedIn does keep nagging you to add more to your profile. A bit of education there. A past job there. Publications. Volunteer Experience.
And the bad news is I'm going to nag you too. The reason being — there's a benefit in it for you.
The main indication of how well your profile is doing is the little Profile Strength progress note you will see at top while editing your profile.
How complete is your profile? Aim for All-Star.
There were 5 different Profile strengths used in LinkedIn, now reduced to 4:
- Beginner
- Intermediate
- Advanced
- Expert (now deprecated)
- All-Star
The reason LinkedIn keeps nagging and suggesting your profile is incomplete is simple — the more information that LinkedIn has about you, the better its quality as a database. And the more it can sell its services
Complete your profile and be found in search
But there's also a very important upside for you when you take your profile to all-star status: You'll be found in more searches, and be found earlier in the order of those searches.
Very simply put, if you're profile's not fully complete, you'll not be fully visible.
LinkedIn's search algorithm seeks and displays results in this order:
- Profile Completeness (100% only)
- Connections in Common (shared)
- Connections by Degree (1st Degree, then 2nd, then 3rd)
- Groups in Common (shared)
To quote from Andy Foote's excellent article Why you should complete your LinkedIn profile“It’s important to understand that Profile Completeness is a trump card in the search game. If you don’t have a 100% complete Profile, your Connections or Groups don’t matter, you will be INVISIBLE when searched, game over.”
What do I need to do to reach All-Star status for my profile?
You gain All-Star status by ticking these seven boxes:
- Including a profile photo
- Listing two or more positions you’ve held, including a sentence or two of text describing the position
- Listing 5 or more skills on your profile
- Writing an 'about' section
- Completing your industry
- Completing your location and postal/zip code
- Adding education - where you went to school, college or university
The same rules apply for search visibility for your name when using Google or any other search engine. Only the complete 'all-star' profiles get the top positions in a LinkedIn search.
As with any search engine results, nobody really bothers to check out page two, let alone go any further.
So put in the extra effort to add more to your profile until you reach the All-Star level. If you believe it's worth investing in yourself, that is.
- More Tips: 30 Top Tips for a better LinkedIn Profile – Rounded up and summarised…
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