New LinkedIn tool helps you get to a 100% complete profile

The 100% profile in LinkedIn has proven to be fairly elusive, with many people wondering what on earth they’re meant to do in order to reach this. You can spend a lot of time following the steps required to complete a LinkedIn profile, adding as much content, links and information as you can, yet still not reaching 100%. For some of course, this doesn’t represent a huge problem but I’ve spoken to many people that want to know how they can make their profile 100% complete in order to get the most out of the site. LinkedIn have just made this a little bit easier, through a new addition to user’s profiles, through the ‘Improve Your Profile’ button. This is shown at the top of user’s screens, when you navigate to your profile :

Clicking on this brings you to a set of tailored recommendations for your own profile, letting you know how you can improve it to make it more complete and better optimised. The layout of this is incredibly user friendly, which fits with their recent makeovers to user profiles to make them easier to navigate and update. The ‘Improve Your Profile’ tool takes you through a number of steps presented as a checklist, showing you which parts of your profile are still incomplete :

When you have completed the number of steps to improve your profile, you can save your changes and choose to come back to it later if you have new information to add, or LinkedIn launches new features that you can utilise on your profile.

Good timing for LinkedIn

This new feature comes at a pretty good time for them, as they have clear targets to meet with their recent IPO (which are currently looking a bit shaky). By launching a tool like this they are encouraging people to revisit their profile and along with the profile redesign, it encourages users to spend more time on the site and importantly give LinkedIn even more data. This, as we now know, is pretty important for LinkedIn. They’re currently in a bit of trouble online for allowing advertisers to access user’s profile data to display in third party ads. They’ve needed to catch up with Facebook’s advertising product for a while, and data is clearly the way that they are going to achieve this. The new profile tool, while useful from a profile point of view, of course encourages more data to be shared on the site, which is increasingly valuable to LinkedIn to attract advertisers.

Another clear benefit to LinkedIn here, is to increase the likelihood that recruiters use LinkedIn to source potential employees. The more information available about someone through the site, the more likely it is that this person will get successfully recruited. More and more large organisations are turning to LinkedIn for their recruitment needs, meaning the need for an up to date profile becomes even greater. Your LinkedIn profile is your living CV. LinkedIn know this, they know that recruiters know this, and this most recent change to the site is a recognition of this.