//For job seekers
How to Get LinkedIn All-Star Status and Land More Job Opportunities
4 min read
Achieve LinkedIn All-Star Status: A Guide to Get More Visibility
This is how to get LinkedIn All-Star status to stand out as an underrepresented and high-skilled candidate. Achieving LinkedIn All-Star status is a powerful way to stand out as an underrepresented, high-skilled candidate in today's competitive job market.
This comprehensive guide will walk you through the essential steps to elevate your LinkedIn profile to All-Star status, enhancing your visibility and attracting top-tier opportunities. Each step focuses on key aspects of your profile, from optimizing your headline to showcasing your skills and endorsements.
Follow along with our detailed video tutorial to maximize your results. Implement these steps one at a time, and watch as your LinkedIn profile transforms into a compelling representation of your professional brand, making you more attractive to recruiters and employers.
Whether you're looking to advance in your current career or pivot to a new field, this guide will help you unlock the full potential of your LinkedIn presence.
Benefits of a strong LinkedIn profile
There’s no doubt that having a strong LinkedIn profile and being active on the platform can be very helpful in landing a job or making a career move. LinkedIn allows its users to build meaningful connections and their personal brand and offers a great starting point to build connections that could lead to informational interviews. On top of this, LinkedIn offers the latest in career trends, advice and a job board. This makes LinkedIn extremely useful and important to job seekers.
What does LinkedIn All-Star status mean for diverse job seekers?
LinkedIn All-Star status means having a fully complete profile. Ideally your profile is also active and well put together. This will significantly increase the chances of your discovery by various companies looking to hire people based on your skills and experience.
In fact, LinkedIn users with an All-Star profile are about 40 times more likely to be contacted by Recruiters and Hiring Managers. A strong LinkedIn profile is an important part of meeting the expectations of employers in the Canadian job market.
And when it comes to personal brand, your LinkedIn profile provides an opportunity to showcase your skills and overcome any hiring objections before the interview.
Overcoming possible objections can be particularly powerful for underrepresented professionals, international students and new Canadians who may face additional, unfair barriers in their job search.
How to get LinkedIn All-Star status in 9 steps:
Know what stage your LinkedIn profile is at.
Add a professional profile picture.
Write a compelling headline.
Add your industry and location.
Complete the experience section.
Add at least 5 skills.
Add your education.
Write a compelling about section.
Get 50 + connections.
Reaching All-Star status with your profile may seem daunting at first. But breaking it down into smaller steps makes it more obtainable. Every change you make improves how you present yourself to prospective employers and connections. So you are winning even before you have completed everything!
Step 1: Know what stage your LinkedIn profile is at
LinkedIn profiles have 5 stages of strength: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert, and All Star.
When you’re building out your profile, LinkedIn will tell you how well you’re doing with their Profile Strength Meter. You can find your Profile Strength Meter on your profile’s homepage under the section named ‘Dashboard’.
As an underrepresented professional, international student or new Canadian, All-Star status will be important to enhancing your credibility and overcoming possible objections.
Note: At the time this article was written LinkedIn was implementing changes around the profile completeness scale. Some users were reporting a missing Dashboard. This was replaced with Analytics information. Here is the most recent update directly from LinkedIn.
Therefore, it is possible that your profile looks a little different. The stats and data around the importance of profile completeness stay the same.
Step 2: Add a profile picture
Having a high-quality profile picture is important to getting All-Star status on your LinkedIn profile. Your picture is an important first impression for anyone who visits your LinkedIn profile.
This impression can include evaluating your status and trustworthiness. After all, a picture says a thousand words. As a result, it is important to show a professional image of yourself.
When taking a profile picture for LinkedIn, it is important to have bright lighting, clearly shows your face and make sure the photo has a general positive energy to it.
LinkedIn users who include a photo receive 21X more profile views than users without one. Profile views are important to enhance your credibility and visibility on the platform.
While it is a best practice to omit a photo from a resume, it is necessary to include a photo on your LinkedIn profile.
Underrepresented job seekers, international students and newcomers may raise concerns of potential bias that is caused by showing their physical appearance. This concern is valid and should not be ignored. The practice of showing a photo at any point in the job search process is problematic in Canada.
However, the profile picture on LinkedIn remains a best practice for a LinkedIn profile and necessary to achieve All-Star status.
Third-party sites like Photofeeler provide an opportunity for impartial feedback on your LinkedIn profile photo. Here, you upload your profile photo and receive anonymous feedback from users on the site.