LinkedIn is rapidly emerging as the topmost online resource for recruiters to hire all kinds of employees-especially professionals in various fields. If you’re a job seeker, it’s important to have a superb LinkedIn profile.
At the same time, it’s also important to know the top skills employers are seeking on LinkedIn. Because that would help you find your dream job faster while advancing your career.
If you’re a job seeker, follow these guidelines to get a superb job through LinkedIn by pitching skills that employers are actually looking for.
Skills Employers Seek on LinkedIn
Before I proceed to tell you about skills that recruiters are actually looking for in 2021, check these details on why you should have a superb LinkedIn profile. That might convince you why you require a killer LinkedIn profile.
Don't forget to check out the top skills assessment tools here.
Now let’s see what skills employers look for.
Skills You Should Highlight on LinkedIn
Basically, there’re two types of skills in technical screening that every employer looks for from your LinkedIn profile.
- Soft Skills: These are most important nowadays. Unless you have certain soft skills that all employers desire, chances are an employer might not even consider you for the position. Soft skills are very important because they help promote overall efficiency at the workplace and benefit an organization in many ways.
- Work Skills: Here it’s worth remembering that work skills are much different than work experience. Work skills signify your capabilities to do certain kinds of work with complete efficiency. Work experience is merely the number of years you’re in a specific career or profession. You could have long experience but not adequate work skills for a specific job.
Therefore, highlight both these skills in a manner that catches an employer’s eye at the first glance. That’s most important because recruiters have to go through several LinkedIn profiles and have different technical skills assessments before shortlisting the right candidates.
Here we’ll see what’re the soft skills and work skills or hard skills that employers look for on LinkedIn.
Skills Employers Look for on LinkedIn
Soft Skills
Most job seekers forget to highlight or even mention their soft skills on LinkedIn. Hence, I’ll start by writing about these soft skills that employers focus on primarily during IT assessment tests on LinkedIn.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the very first soft skill that every employer is looking for from your LinkedIn profile. And it’s not easy to mention or claim you have superb EI, that’s because they're no proven tests or yardsticks to prove it.
EI are skills that help you respond to situations depending upon the emotional state of mind of people around you. It could be a team or an individual, at the workplace, or in social circles.
People with superb EI generally emerge as team leaders and managers. They’re able to complete projects better and their career graphs often rise upwards. Showcase your EI by highlighting such achievements on your LinkedIn profile.
Troubleshooting Skills
Problems are an unavoidable part of any job, regardless of your position, work experience, and hard skills. However, what matters is how you deal with those problems at work to achieve the necessary results for the employer. Hence, they look for candidates that have a proven track record in troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
There’s one major misconception about troubleshooting skills: most candidates believe they’re necessary only for customer service jobs. On the contrary, troubleshooting and problem-solving skills are necessary at every level in an organization. And almost every employee is engaged in customer care either directly or indirectly.
If you’re an excellent problem solver and can provide real-life and verifiable examples on your LinkedIn profile and interview, don’t forget to include them. Troubleshooting skills immediately attract the attention of employers since its’s something they look for in every prospective employee.
Interpersonal Skills
Interpersonal skills, as the term implies, are those which help you maintain excellent and cordial relations at workplace and the society at large. People with superb interpersonal skills are always good communicators. They know how to get a message through. Excellency in different communications skills leads to the overall efficiency of a person, team, and organization. Therefore, don’t neglect your interpersonal skills on your LinkedIn profile.
If you’re a member of any social, religious, charitable, or professional network or organization, it’s clear that you possess superb interpersonal skills. If you’re holding supervisory positions or are a good trainer, you can communicate clearly and efficiently to get tasks done. Emphasize interpersonal skills too while creating or updating your LinkedIn profile to catch the attention of recruiters.
Work Skills
Work skills relate directly to the position you’re applying for and the role you’ll be playing at the workplace. Therefore, employers look for these vital work skills on your LinkedIn profile.
Digital & Computer Skills
The Covid-19 pandemic that’s rattling the world has changed the way we work. Companies, therefore, are using different pre-employment technical skill test to look for employees that can work from home with equal efficiency as working from the office.
In fact, a lot of offline work has now moved online because of the need for social distancing, closure of public transport, and the need to protect oneself and others against the Covid-19 contagion.
Digital & computer skills are the single most important work skill that employers look for on a LinkedIn profile, for reasons I explain above. Therefore, showcase your digital and computer skills and how you could successfully migrate some of the offline processes to online work during the Covid-19 pandemic. No employer wants further work disruptions and there’re no guarantees about when the pandemic would end. Hence, digital and computer skills matter a lot.
Telephone Etiquette
With work from home gaining ground, telephone etiquette also becomes an important part of work skills. Earlier, they could be broadly classified as soft skills but that’s no longer the case because teleworking also means making and receiving numerous phone calls. Again, there’re no foolproof ways to mention these on a LinkedIn profile.
However, you can mention your telephone etiquette indirectly by stating the number of important calls you handle throughout a day and their nature. Even top executives have to handle telephone calls from other senior officials.
When you speak of successes you’ve been achieving only through telephonic conversations such as bagging orders, solving issues, or managing staff, you’ll be letting an employer know your telephone etiquette through the LinkedIn profile.
Training Skills
One of the top reasons for staff attrition worldwide is the failure of companies to provide training to their employees. As a result, businesses small and large would provide some sort of training to their employees, with two main objectives: upgrading skills and reducing attrition.
However, with economic downturns and most companies facing financial problems due to the Covid-19 pandemic, they’re cutting down on these expenses.
Given this scenario, if you can train juniors at an organization and have the necessary skills, you’ll definitely attract employers. The ability to train people is one of the key skills employers look for on LinkedIn.
And this skill can definitely bag you a superb job. That’s because not everyone that’s got skills can train others. Knowing and doing something is a different ballgame and training others to do the same is another.
More Skills on LinkedIn
There’re some more skills that employers look for on LinkedIn. These include effective email correspondence, ability to relocate, negotiation skills, and thrift or the ability to save own and company resources.
There’re superb ways to mention all these on your LinkedIn profile to impress employers. Your references on LinkedIn can also mention these skills in their comments, where necessary. Therefore, provide a lot of excellent references too.
Conclusion
Include these soft skills and work skills on your LinkedIn profile because that’s what employers look for. And highlight them in a realistic, verifiable manner. That can help you win that dream job.
