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Linkedin for Engineers and CS students

Three things that you absolutely need in a linkedin profile

  • Profile photo
    • The photo should ideally be from your shoulders up till your head. Leave very little room above your head
    • Have a natural smile
    • Business casual attire is fine for most industries but if you are looking to get into consulting or finance a suit would be better
    • Rotunda and the East school are some great location to take your photo
  • Tailored Headline
    • Add a little bit more that “XYZ Student at UVA”.
    • Add some of your core interest and things that you have done.
    • People usually use the | symbol to separate the above things.
    • An example would be MS CS at UVA | Machine learning | Computer Vision | foobar member| baz Scholar
  • Experience
    • Copy paste everything that you would have in your resume.
    • Instead of a small summary, provide as much detail as you can in the experience section
    • Add media like a photo or video or a graph under the experience whenever you can

Cover photos

  • People at UVA usually have the Rotunda or some photo of the grounds as their cover photo
  • If you have some photos of you in action - giving a talk, a group photo - use those.
  • The cover photo can also reflect your interests.
    • For example a person interest in clean energy and has worked at wind turbine company has windmills as their cover photo

Banners

  • Mostly the open to work banners aren’t necessary as recruiters assume all students are naturally looking for a job
  • But there was one recruited who said that they filter using “Open to work”. So if you want to keep the banner you can set it to “Recruiters only”.

Linkedin Algorithm

  • Linkedin algorithm favors active participants
  • Respond to as much messages as possible. Even if you are not interested and the message was kind of spammy, just reply with a polite “Thank you for this. But I’m not interested”
  • This makes your profile “quick to respond”. These profiles are the ones that are promoted to recruiters.
  • Follow pages of companies that you like
  • Comment on their post. Not just like or give the applause emoji. Comment something.

Connections

  • Never send a connection request without a message. Even if you had met the person, always include something before sending the request.

Cold DMs

  • When cold-dming always be as specific as possible.
  • Help them help you by asking really specific questions
  • Only message people that you have something in common with or has similar experieces as you

Groups to follow