How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Inbound Jobs

Inbound is still the most important channel for PMs. Here's how to get more of it via your LinkedIn, with advanced strategies not published anywhere else.

Hardly anyone focuses on optimizing their LinkedIn and online presence to optimize for inbound job opportunities.

But it works. You get to bypass the 1% reply rates from online job applications. Instead, jobs come to you.

How do I know this works?

1. I got my jobs as Head of Product Growth at Affirm and VP of Product at Apollo.io from inbound on LinkedIn.

2. When Favikon ranked creators on LinkedIn, I was #11 worldwide. And I have over 213K followers as of writing.

3. I’ve coached several PMs in the last few weeks who have gotten interviews from LinkedIn. And several PMs over the last year who have gotten offers.

In today’s post, we’re going to talk about exactly how you can do so, too.

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Today’s Post

Words: 5,337 | Est. Reading Time: 24 mins

1. Optimizing the 7 most important profile elements

2. How to get searched more

3. Open to work or no?

4. To write content, or not?

5. The art of LI commenting

6. Growing your connections

7. The hierarchy of what matters

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Preamble 1: LinkedIn works

Some of you may not even have filled in the details to your experience section and not seen much inbound to your profile.

If this is the case, you are missing out on a huge potential channel. I polled 20 currently employed PMs on how many LinkedIn inbound PM messages you receive per month (all US).

The average was 3.3, but that doesn’t tell the whole story:

There are some people who get a lot more inbound than others.

Some of this is explainable factors:

• These numbers go up if you are in the Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle. The numbers go down in areas where fewer people work in tech.

• People with more years of PM experience get more.

• People with better brands get more.

But there’s also another factor at play: how well they play the LinkedIn game.

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Preamble 2: Your LinkedIn is not your CV

Many of you might have at least copy pasted your resume into your LinkedIn.

This is actually missing out on a whole host of LinkedIn-specific optimizations you need to make. Just three to consider:

1. You need to have a strong profile picture on LinkedIn. No one cares on your CV.

2. LinkedIn has settings like ‘Open to Work’ you should have a strategy around.

3. With LinkedIn, you can increase your visibility with connection requests.

So, let’s get into the details of everything you need to do to optimize your LinkedIn.