Smart Money Podcast: Boost Your Career and Income Prospects with Expert LinkedIn Tips

Learn how to optimize your LinkedIn profile to enhance your job and income prospects with tips from LinkedIn’s Andrew McCaskill.

What are recruiters looking for on LinkedIn? What’s the best way to optimize your LinkedIn profile? Hosts Sean Pyles and Alana Benson discuss LinkedIn optimization and professional growth to help you understand how to leverage the platform for career success. They begin with a discussion of LinkedIn optimization, with tips and tricks on highlighting essential skills, sharing engaging content, and maintaining regular engagement on the platform. Then, Andrew McCaskill, a senior director and career expert at LinkedIn, joins the show to discuss maximizing job opportunities on LinkedIn. He discusses the surprising benefits of setting up job alerts, nurturing professional connections, and using relevant keywords to enhance visibility in recruiters’ searches. In their conversation, they also delve into crucial aspects of career growth and safety on LinkedIn, including how to identify red flags for job scams, understand companies’ commitments to diversity and inclusion, and have open conversations about salary transparency.

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Spending a few hours on LinkedIn isn’t many people’s idea of a good time. But if you use the networking site effectively, it can pay off. Optimizing your profile is one of the ways to work toward boosting your income by making you an attractive candidate for a new job.

I think that the number one thing that I would say to folks if you’re trying to make your profile more visible and more searchable is over 40% of recruiters say that they are searching for talent based on skills. So you really have to put your skills in your summary and use skills and skills language.

Welcome to NerdWallet’s Smart Money Podcast. I’m Sean Pyles.

This is episode two of our Nerdy deep dive into what we’re calling investing in your income. This is a series about the different ways that you can look at boosting your bottom line by bringing in more money instead of trying to do that only by cutting your spending.

So Sean, in our last episode we outlined why this is important. Cutting your expenses can only get you so far. A more efficient way may be to find avenues to increase your income where that’s possible. And that can be internally at the current job you have, either asking for a raise or other compensation, or looking externally at a new job where you can hopefully up your salary and other pay.

Well, Alana, we know that LinkedIn plays a big role in this both for workers and employers, right?

Yes. So today we’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of that particular career site. Now, most people probably already know that you need to have a picture of yourself, a background photo, you have to put in some information about you and your experience. But a lot of people leave it at that. And if you leverage LinkedIn to its full potential, you can do a lot more. For example, if you write something, if you’re featured in an interview or on a podcast, you can go ahead and post it. And if you’re active on the site, it can show employers more about who you are and what you can offer. But we wanted to go straight to the source to find out other tips and tricks. So that’s what we’re doing today.

I’m going to be fully transparent here, Alana, and say that I am absolutely not using LinkedIn to its full potential. I’ve honestly long had a LinkedIn aversion. A lot of the interactions that I see on there feel boring, awkwardly self-promotional, and sometimes just plain creepy. But LinkedIn can be a good resource if you’re considering a significant career change.

So yeah, if you’re considering changing your career path or if you’re evaluating what career path you want to take in the future, obviously it should be something you mostly enjoy. So for instance, I loved reading and writing and didn’t really like math. So from a young age it seemed pretty clear that I was not going to become an astrophysicist.

Oh, could have been you and Neil deGrasse Tyson, Alana.

Yeah. If only I could do basic math. But if you’re taking your interests into consideration, that’s really important. But especially when we’re young, we don’t really talk about earning potential in our careers. No one sat me down and said, “Hey, English majors often have a hard time finding a job. You don’t make a ton of money in that field.”

Yeah. So really when you’re thinking about careers, just include the finances as a part of your calculation. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps a large list of occupations and wage estimates that is updated annually. According to that list, in 2023, personal financial advisors earned a mean annual wage of $150,670, which is good to know as I worked toward my CFP certification. Political scientists earned just over $130,000. Social workers earned about $69,000 and registered nurses earned just over $94,000. Again, money isn’t everything, but it is an important factor when we’re considering work and how we get paid for it.

Yeah. And you can then compare the numbers of a potential career to your expenses. If you make $70,000 a year, how will that impact your ability to pay your bills, save up an emergency fund and put money toward investing for retirement? What about if you made $40,000 a year or $140,000? Those are the questions to be asking yourself as you start to think about a potential new career path.

All right. Well, we want to hear what you think too, listeners. To share your thoughts about ways to boost your income, leave us a voicemail or text the Nerd hotline at 901-730-6373. That’s 901-730 N-E-R-D, or email a voice memo to [email protected]. So Alana, who are we hearing from today?

I am so excited about this conversation. So we’re talking with Andrew McCaskill. He is a senior director and career expert at LinkedIn. So we are going straight to the source and I ask him all the questions.

That’s coming up in a moment. Stay with us.

Andrew McCaskill, thank you for joining us on Smart Money.

Listen, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. I mean, it’s the place where recruiters from millions, literally millions of companies from all over the world come to source talent. And I would say that even if I didn’t get a check from LinkedIn on the first and 15th. So I think that the best ways for people to take advantage of finding job opportunities is there’s one tool that I swear by for folks, and that is job alerts. It allows you to set up a prompt for a job alert. You set criteria of what you’re looking for, location, salary, geography, industry. And every time a job comes onto our platform that meets your criteria, you get an email in your inbox saying, “Hey, go apply for this job.” And I always say to people applying in the first 10 minutes of receiving that relevant job notification, it literally increases your chances of hearing back by four times.

Job alerts allows you to look for a job while you’re at a job, while you’re sleeping, while you’re eating and all those other things, because it’s like having a career companion there to help you sift through those opportunities. I think the other thing that people can do is you’ve got to nurture the connections that you make on the platform. LinkedIn is not a social media platform. It’s a professional network. It’s one of the only places online where people are all connecting about economic opportunity. So cultivating relationships over time, effective networking, you’ve really got to reach out to people, build your network on the platform. And don’t think of it as just like the old school business cards connecting and networking. Your professional network is really just people who are rooting for you to win. Literally, it’s people who are rooting for you to win.

And that doesn’t always have to be your best friend. It could be someone that you went to college with, it could be a professor. It could be if you went to university, maybe someone in a fraternity or a sorority that’s in your same industry. Or it could be someone that you worked with briefly. Make sure you still keep those connections. And we’re going to give you a bunch of prompts and things like that and say, “Hey, oh by the way, it’s Lizzie’s birthday,” or “Alana just got a promotion.” This would be a great time to reach out and say hi and congratulations.” So we give you a bunch of prompts for all of those things too.

I’ve really found too that a lot of the people that I am connected to on LinkedIn will post jobs, and because they are in my industry and they know me, they’re more likely to be relevant. So in addition to those job alerts that you’re saying, you might have an old coworker who’s like, “Hey, we have this job opening on my team, and because they know you, they’re more likely to root for you to get that job, too.”

Oh, 100%. You’re eight times more likely to get a job at a company if you know someone who already works there. And it does not have to be your work bestie. It could just be someone that you have a connection with and you let them know, “Hey, by the way, I’m really interested in this role at your current company. We used to work together at company X. Any information or guidance that you could give me would be really helpful.”

But I do have to ask. I heard a rumor, so is it true that the more you interact with LinkedIn, whether that’s posting things or messaging people, are you more likely to show up in search the more you interact with the site?

Listen, posting regularly is a great way to foster those relationships and get noticed by hirers on LinkedIn. And anytime you share or give your takeaways or ask the network for tips or kickstart a conversation in the comments, it really does increase your visibility. So there’s a modicum of truth to that, that the more you engage, the more the site actually recognizes you and puts you in front of other people. The site is learning like, Drew’s really interested in tech. So when these things pop up that are tech related, we’re going to send them to Drew. But also his comments and his posts are probably going to show up more in the feeds of people who are also in tech.

Yeah, I agree. You have to play the algorithmic game. And to that end, I’ve learned a lot recently about optimizing your LinkedIn profile. So I work in search engine optimization, which is just getting pages to show up on the first page of Google, and the way you do that is using keywords and trying to make the pages relevant to what someone who’s Googling wants. And the same principles, do they apply on LinkedIn? Can you talk a little bit about how to optimize your profile using keywords to make sure that you’re showing up in those searches?

Keywords are really important. And I think that the number one thing that I would say to folks if you’re trying to make your profile more visible and more searchable is over 40% of recruiters say that they are searching for talent based on skills. So you really have to put your skills in your summary and use skills and skills language when you’re talking about your work experience. People are less likely to be searching for, I want to work with someone who used to work at Google or Meta. They’re not searching for that. They’re searching for, I want someone who is a great writer, a great project manager, someone who has great teamwork skills, who’s a great communicator. And you should put those skills as your keywords so that you show up in the most relevant profile searches and things like that. And I would say it’s really important too that it’s not just your hard skills that people are searching for. The most in demand skill three years in a row has been communication.

One of the biggest skills that we saw that senior leaders are looking for is adaptability. Senior leaders want someone who can see rapid fire changes happening in an industry and be adaptive. So they want people who will see change and they will pivot and not panic. So those skills, those are your keywords.

Wow, okay. So communication, adaptability. And where exactly should you be putting these keywords? I know you mentioned the summary. Where exactly in your profile should you be adding those things?

I would say add your skills and use skills language in your about section, which is the summary right under your picture and your name, about you and who you are as a professional. You should really use that as a way to give an all up story of who you are as a professional. Include your superpowers. One of mine is I’m a storyteller. I enjoy data and numbers. So I have great analytical skills. So I have in that I’m an analyst and that I’m a marketing executive. That I’ve led public affairs. So I have a lot of things about my skills in that summary. The other places is under your experience it’s really important to use skills language. As a writer, I did these things. As a project manager, I did these things. As someone who is proficient in these specific coding languages. I think all of those places really matter and I think it’s really important to put in any certifications or accreditations that you have, too, because they also give people a good idea about what those skills are.

I would say in the skills section, list as many skills as are relevant, and you can list up to 50 on your LinkedIn profile. There’s only probably one thing that will get you noticed faster by recruiters than having a great skills story, and that is turning on our #OpenToWork feature. You can quietly signal to recruiters that you’re open to new opportunities. And you can even signal whether you’re interested in remote or hybrid or onsite roles. You can let the broader LinkedIn community know you’re looking by adding #OpenToWork on the photo frame on your profile picture, but that’s not for everybody. Some people want to be open for work in stealth mode, but the LinkedIn data shows that turning on #OpenToWork on your profile increases your likelihood of getting a recruiter message by 2X, and you’re 20% more likely to receive messages from other people in the LinkedIn community. Literally #OpenToWork takes you to the top of the job seeker algorithm.

And I’m sure our listeners want to know, can your current employer see that you said that you’re #OpenToWork?

Okay. I love that you mentioned your profile picture because I want to ask about that. Your profile picture and then your banner photo in the background. How can you best optimize that?

I think your profile picture should be a picture of how you would look on your first day of work. LinkedIn is a professional network, so no beach selfies unless you’re wanting to be a beach instructor or a swim instructor. But you don’t have to spend a million dollars on professional headshots. You can take a great photo of yourself on how you would look on your first day of work. But I will say that having a photo really does increase your chances of people actually going to your profile and seeing your profile. We have learned a lot of lessons about making sure that we give people as many opportunities to verify their identities as members, but also giving recruiters the opportunity to verify themselves as being real recruiters working for these companies. The picture being on there and then having a really strong story about who you are as a professional, talking about your superpowers, those are some of the best things I think you can really optimize to.

Maybe some people feel shy or there’s obviously things in our world that make people maybe not want to put their photo on the internet, but I think you’re right. It can definitely be helpful to help you tell that story that you’ve been talking about throughout this. So we talked about the profile photo, but what about the other large banner photo? What should people do with that space and is there any way that they can showcase skills or is that a space to put a photo of them and their dog? What do you put there?

I’ve always ventured on the side of something that is indicative of me at work. For some people that is a quote. For some people it’s a picture of them working or doing something at work. A lot of times people, particularly senior leaders, will actually use that banner as an opportunity for them to show them speaking on a panel or doing volunteer work or a picture of them with their team. I think you should always go back to how does this real estate do just a little bit more to tell the professional story of who I am.

Every piece of real estate on your profile should be working for you. And that I think is a great way to say if there’s a quote that you live by as a professional or picture of you doing community service or something like that or speaking on a panel, I think those are really great places to lean into first. Aside from the dog pictures. I mean, everybody loves a cute dog, but I’ve got the world’s cutest miniature schnauzer sitting on the floor next to me right now, but I’m not going to put him on my LinkedIn profile just yet.

So you’ve given us so much great information. I quickly want to ask about scams. We know that there are fake jobs out there and people have gotten lost in that. So what would you say to people who are trying to navigate those opportunities that may or may not be real and how people can keep themselves safe?

I think that the first thing is, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is untrue. So I think that there are a couple of things that people should watch out for. One, if someone reaches out to you via email and there are typos or misspellings in the email from a recruiter, that’s probably a red flag. I would say double check the email address that the email came from versus what the email is in the email signature. If that email is coming from a recruiter and they’re talking to you about a job at LinkedIn but it’s coming from their Gmail account, that’s a big red flag. When a recruiter reaches out to you, you should see if they’re verified on LinkedIn in particular. There’s a great way to do that.

Usually one of the things that is a big red flag for people who are doing job scams is that they will say, “You got this amazing job and you got this great salary. All you have to do is give us your bank information for this or for that.” A recruiter will never ask you for your social security number. A recruiter will never ask you for your bank information. And the other thing I will say about that is they’ll never ask you to send them money in exchange for sending you a laptop or something like that. The final one too is if somebody offers you a job and you’ve really only spoken to one person, that’s usually a big, big red flag. And if you see something, particularly on a platform like LinkedIn, report it. If something doesn’t feel right, report it. Let us do the due diligence on it.

Andrew, you have given me so many things. I’m going to get off this call and go work on my LinkedIn profile right now. Do you have any other tips or tricks for people to optimize their profiles and just get the absolute most out of LinkedIn?

I think one of the best ways that you can get the most out of LinkedIn is using LinkedIn as a way for you to really do research on where you want to work. If you’re someone who wants to work at a company that is committed to diversity and inclusion, particularly, I think this is really important oftentimes for women and people of color and people from the LGBTQ+ community, you can search for companies that have had real commitments to inclusion as well. I say this to African Americans all the time. You know, 56% of African Americans live in the South. And remote work has been a really interesting and viable way for many of them, like you said, to actively have a job in media without living in Manhattan. Or have a job in technology without living in the Bay Area.

So I think that being able to look at these tools and look at these platforms as a way to strategize your career and to have more options so you can have more control over the path of your career, I think that’s the best thing that you can do, is to look at these tools and say, if LinkedIn is telling me that these are the most in-demand skills, maybe I should highlight some of these skills on my profile.

Everything that you just said leads me to another question is, some people have a harder time getting hired. And like you said, minority groups, women, people from the LGBTQ+ community. How can people leverage LinkedIn to even the playing field if that’s possible, or just have a safer job experience? I know a lot of women frankly get approached by people on LinkedIn as if it was a dating site. What safeguards are there to make sure that you’re having a safe experience and hopefully a more equitable experience using LinkedIn?

I think one of the things that I think is really helpful for anyone who’s from a historically or systemically marginalized group in any way is using LinkedIn to build your professional community so that you can have people that you can peer to peer mentor each other or peer to peer share information. It sounds pretty simple, but it really is that. Many people from marginalized groups, there’s not some mentor who’s going to descend from an ivory tower to give us the career path that will get us there. And I think building out that community and connecting with people is really important. Also, following people who have a similar experience as you who have figured out ways to excel in their careers. We have top women voices and top voices from the LGBTQ+ community. People who have huge followings, and they’re actually sharing their wins and their losses and their lived experience.

I think the other thing that is super helpful is that if we flip the way that we research job opportunities to where… There’s no one who will tell you with more clarity about what it’s like to work at a company besides someone who actually works there. So I think that when I’m looking for a job or my friends in my group chat are looking for a job, I always say, “Hey, you should check the leadership. If there are no Black people in leadership, that could be a red flag or-“

Or if the only person of color on the leadership team is the D&I person, they probably have a D&I problem. And oftentimes I know that from the dataset that people who are part of ethnic minority groups are oftentimes very cautious about talking about money. And I’ve noticed that in my own circles is that the only way to get comfortable talking about money is to talk about money. In the past, I’ve had young women say that they didn’t talk to their other women peers about compensation because it was so taboo.

I love that you brought that up because that is frankly the whole point of this podcast, and you’re totally right. People have a really, really hard time talking about money. It’s very emotionally charged for a lot of us. But the only people that it benefits to not talk about your salary with is the people in charge and your employers. And the people who it benefits if you talk about it is you. So it serves employers to say, hey, this is taboo. You can’t do this. It’s so unprofessional. They’re doing that so they can pay you less.

I mean, you’ve just got to be honest about it. And I think that we fall into that mindset of, it’s naughty. No, no, no. Because oftentimes too, there’s a lot of ego and a lot of shame tied up in our actual number of what we’re making. But I think that what is most empowering is when people actually are saying, hey, I’m going to trust you with this information. You’re going to trust me. And once you have better inputs, you can make a better case for your own compensation. And companies are not going to tell you that.

Yeah, I agree. And the way we make them change is by changing them ourselves and saying, “Hey, I’m making X amount. If you’re comfortable sharing, we can compare notes and make sure we’re all getting paid fairly.”

Asking the right people the right questions is what gets us to more information, more options, more agency.

Andrew McCaskill, this has been such a joy and a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today and telling us all of the secrets of LinkedIn.

Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it so much.

Alana, no promises here, but your conversation with Andrew might just help me get over my LinkedIn aversion. I really like how you two framed how to interact with the platform. We should treat it like a tool for making professional connections and have clear boundaries around that. Optimize your profile, build your professional community, and as Andrew said, “Put a lot of technology and a solid strategy behind finding a job.” And if people want to overshare and generally be weird on the platform, that is their business and I’ll just ignore that stuff.

Yeah. I mean, it’s similar to other social media. You just need to do you, and if people are doing things that you don’t like, you don’t have to interact with it.

Yeah. Just laugh and move on. But we should note here that LinkedIn isn’t the only place for this kind of online resume building, but it is the big kahuna, isn’t it?

It really is. And like you said, there are other sites. But to Andrew’s points, this is where all of the recruiters are. And for better or worse, you need to have a presence on LinkedIn because of that. So as we’ve heard, you need to have those keywords. You need to keep your profile updated. And if you’re really looking for a new job, you should probably be active in posting on the site and also checking your job alerts within 10 minutes, which that just blew my mind when he told me that.

I can guarantee that I won’t be doing that, but thank you for the other advice. So Alana, what about the other sites that can be helpful in this process? What should people know about them?

So one thing that can be really difficult is to figure out your “market value” or just how much you are worth in the marketplace. And without actually knowing how much people in your company and in your role make, it can be really tough to glean an appropriate number for that raise request or a new salary negotiation. And we’ve heard showing up to those with numbers is really important. So that’s where Glassdoor comes in. And Glassdoor is probably one of the most well-known pay transparency sites. So it lists tons of companies and real employees can go on there and anonymously post their salaries. So you can see what people are actually making in certain roles.

And they’ve been around for a while, so they have some credibility in terms of finding those numbers that you’re looking for. I also like that Glassdoor will let people leave reviews of what it’s like to work at a certain company. At a sort of interpersonal level on a day-to-day level like that, too. But there are also plenty of other sites for salary comparison like salary.com or salaryexpert.com.

Another great resource is Elpha, that’s E-L-P-H-A. And it’s a networking community and salary database for women, particularly women in tech. There are lots of forums to ask questions about the tough weird stuff like when to tell your supervisor you’re pregnant or ask me anythings with CEOs. And there’s other job postings as well.

So the main point here is whether you’re looking for a new job or asking for a raise, having well-researched numbers in your back pocket can be really helpful in legitimizing your claims and requests. Alana, what are some other aspects of increasing income that folks might want to consider?

So you might want to look at side gigs, which is what else do you do to ladder up to making more money? One of the best things you can do whether or not you’re actively looking for a job is to keep an updated resume. One thing that you can do is to have lots of different styles of a resume. So for instance, I work as a writer. But I have also done a lot with SEO and social media. So I have my writer resume, but I also have a social media focused resume where I talk more about that type of experience. And then I also have one total resume where I just put absolutely everything on there. So that way when you go to apply for a job, you’re not having to remember everything you did at an old job, certifications you took, awards you won. It’s also helpful to just have those things in one place.

You can also keep a brag sheet, which is just a list of the things of your smaller accomplishments at your current job, and that’s really helpful for annual reviews and things like that. But then also when you go to a new company if you’re interviewing, you can say, I have these concrete examples for when people ask you those questions of, tell me about a time that you did this, and you have a whole bunch of examples ready to go.

And when you’re putting together your accomplishments, keep in mind that almighty algorithm that is looking at all of our resumes.

Absolutely. So if you don’t get past those, your resume might not even be seen by a human being. And this is particularly true of larger companies. So take the time to go through the job description and use similar phrasing so the algorithms pick up on your keywords. So for instance, if a job description asks for someone who has the ability to “drive the development of innovative UX writing,” in your resume you can say “drove development of UX writing.”

Right. And I’ve found that tools like ChatGPT can be really helpful when writing things like a cover letter. You can put in the job description that you are applying for and say, “Hey, help me draft a cover letter that speaks to the needs of this role.” And they can put in those keywords for you. You’ll want to edit it, of course, because ChatGPT isn’t perfect, but it gives you a starting line and something to work off of.

Totally. ChatGPT and AI doesn’t have to take our jobs. It can help us get jobs.

That’s the ideal. Okay. Well, Alana, give us a sneak peek at what’s coming up in episode three of the series.

Well, I don’t know about you, Sean, but the one part of this process that makes me super anxious is the thought of negotiating for that next raise or a new job salary.

Yeah, neither is easy nor fun.

Exactly. So we are going to hear from a negotiation expert who says, part of what we all need to learn is that we can be in the driver’s seat when it comes to negotiating. And that means making the first move in a money negotiation.

The most powerful anchor in any negotiation is the first offer that’s thrown out there. So if you are anchoring the negotiation, they are playing your ball game. So that’s why you want to be making the first offer.

For now, that’s all we have. Do you have a money question of your own? Turn to the Nerds and call or text us your questions at 901-730-6373. That’s 901-730-NERD. You can also email us at [email protected]. And remember, you can follow the show on your favorite podcast app, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and iHeartRadio, to automatically download new episodes.

This episode was produced by Tess Vigeland. I helped with editing. Kevin Berry helped with fact checking. Sara Brink mixed our audio. And a big thank you to NerdWallet’s editors for all their help.

And here’s our brief disclaimer. We are not financial or investment advisors. This nerdy info is provided for general educational and entertainment purposes and may not apply to your specific circumstances.