Stand out from the crowd on LinkedIn: Tell Your Professional Story

For four years at LinkedIn, I led the LinkedIn Profile engineering team with one primary goal in mind - helping you highlight your experience so that you could be found for a variety of opportunities, from dream job offers to potential business ventures and invitations to network.

Along the way, I realized that the biggest challenge we faced in achieving that goal was enabling you to tell your professional story in a way that helped you stand out when someone looked at your LinkedIn Profile.

Converting a profile page view into an opportunity extended

Late last year, the answer to this challenge came to me when I heard the story of Vitaly Gordon, a LinkedIn Data Scientist in our Mountain View office.

Vitaly had updated his profile with a presentation he had given about building Data Products at LinkedIn. Meanwhile, a conference organizer in Korea was searching LinkedIn to find an expert to speak at an upcoming technology conference. When the conference organizer found Vitaly's presentation, he immediately invited Vitaly to deliver the keynote at the conference.

The thing that differentiated Vitaly from the other well qualified candidates was the way that Vitaly's presentation added credibility and depth to the professional story he was trying to tell.

Give depth to your profile with LinkedIn's Professional Publishing Platform

While you may have never given a presentation at an industry leading conference, you can still add depth and credibility to your profile by publishing on LinkedIn on our new Professional Publishing Platform. Your posts can tell the story of your unique experience and expertise.

For me, this story is about how craftsmanship and quality are foundational to building world-class software, about lessons learned in developing engineering leaders, and about how team culture and identity are critical ingredients of a productive team.

That is a story that couldn't possibly come through from skimming the bullets on my profile.

So, stand out from the crowd. Tell your professional story.

Take a few minutes and think about the three things that you are truly expert at, the three things that differentiate you from your peers. Then, take a look at your profile -

Does it do a good job of expressing the depth of that expertise?

Does it make you stand out from the crowd?

If not, maybe it's time to start writing. Apply for early access to the platform here.