JT & Dale Talk Jobs: Why did recruiters stop contacting me?

J.T.: With over 900 million users, LinkedIn is now the No. 1 platform for recruiters to search for candidates. However, that also means you have a lot more competition. It’s likely that your profile is no longer showing up in the top 50 search results. LinkedIn has an algorithm much like the internet search engines. You need to know how to utilize the algorithm for recruiters to find you. Recruiters search on keywords. Specifically, they search on words associated with the skills that they were told to look for in a candidate. So, you want to make sure that you have keywords optimized as much as possible. And that leads to one important tip: Your headline is the most important real estate on your LinkedIn profile because the algorithm looks at those words to match to keyword searches. A lot of people make the mistake of putting in headlines that don’t have any keywords tied to their type of work. My advice is to pick five to six of the key skill sets you most want to use in your next job and put those in your headline with little line dividers between each one. This will improve the chances.

DALE: If you’re having doubts about what keywords you might use, you can study postings at the kind of companies you want to work for to see what they’re emphasizing that might fit your skills. But, bigger picture, you might want to shift from a passive to an active job search. Even if your skills are in high demand, being passive is a mistake because, by doing so, you are excluding many of the most desirable jobs. Great bosses rarely post jobs or hire recruiters — they spot and court talent. Plus, the best openings may not be posted because those jobs go to people actively seeking jobs at great companies. The upshot is that if you wait for a recruiter to call, you might be missing out on the best jobs.