How to Make a Somewhat Decent LinkedIn Profile
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Become minimally functional on the world’s most insufferable website.
Despite its glaring faults, LinkedIn remains useful for two key reasons:
(1) It has a database of people to network with and contact individually.
(2) It provides an easily accessible list of available jobs.
These two things remain uber-valuable no matter what the temperamental economy or oscillating job market decides to do this week. But to leverage those two features, you need to zen out and tolerate all the bullshit that overpopulates your newsfeed and email.
I would put at least 90% of LinkedIn newsfeed content and spam-like emails into four categories:
1. Narcissistic self-congratulatory posts for trivial achievements
2. Fictitious employment tales filled with platitudes attempting to be inspirational
3. Corporate marketing or personal marketing that feels vaguely corporate
4. Clickbait news articles that repurpose things people said in other clickbait articles
Sigh.
Despite millions of users, there is a lack of exciting, substantive content on LinkedIn. Instead, they’ve purposefully optimized their algorithms to push low-quality shitposts that generate clicks, just like social media.
But since we don’t have anything better, I’ll put my scathing criticism away. We may not love LinkedIn, but it is a necessary evil.
We may need to be on LinkedIn, but we don’t need to sink our souls into the abyss.
All we need to do is be adequate on there. Keep a barebones presence. Be mindful. A functional profile and prompt responses to opportunities are all that is required.
So here’s a checklist that hits the basic points of setting up a somewhat decent LinkedIn profile Advanced users can likely give some deeper tips, but this should at least get your profile up to snuff.
