Unlocking Opportunities with LinkedIn

On July 24, 2025, Jeremy Schifeling returned to the Pivot with Purpose community to demonstrate LinkedIn’s full power as a job-searching and networking hub, as well as how we can best use it to our advantage.

This event was the fourth in our Skilled and Ready to Serve: Marketing Your Development Experience Effectively series theme, and Laura Sheehan, Georgetown SFS, was the moderator for this session.

As a platform, LinkedIn has become synonymous with job searching and our professional lives: it is the central locus that houses our prior experiences, cultivated interests, as well as our skills and academic backgrounds. It also maintains a de facto monopoly over the online, professional networking marketplace. No competitor comes close to LinkedIn’s user or company metrics.

In other words, it is the principal mechanism that we have to highlight our skills and tool that recruiters use around the world to identify, contact, and hire job seekers.

Thus, Schifeling stressed that we should all make sure that our LinkedIn profiles are up-to-date and fully fleshed-out with our work experiences, job skills, and other talents.

Our online presence is especially important in this current job climate. According to Schifeling, recruiters can juggle up to 10,000 resumes at any time, vetting thousands of candidates for numerous positions simultaneously. Obviously, they will not read every single resume they receive. Instead, they harness LinkedIn to evaluate our job seekers.

More specifically, recruiters and hiring managers will review our profiles with an eye toward finding keywords in our headlines.

To illustrate the importance of keywords, Schifeling showed attendees the hiring manager’s view on LinkedIn where job seekers’ profiles are organized. The one metric that brought some users to the top of the list was the presence of these keywords in their headlines.

Given the billions of LinkedIn users across the globe (not to mentioned the thousands of job applicants for any single posting), recruiters will use this short section on our profiles to separate and identify candidates for outreach. Indeed, Schifeling emphasized that our LinkedIn headlines are the most important 220 characters on our online job profiles.

Expanding on this point, Schifeling recommended that our headlines should mention our previous job titles and those we aspire to hold in the future. He also advised us to update our skills in a similar manner.

While we may harbor concerns about not knowing the right keywords or phrases to use, companies usually provide that information for us in the job posting itself. Schifeling implored participants to pull these terms directly from job announcements in order to tailor our LinkedIn profiles for the jobs we want.

Ultimately, weaving these keywords into our headlines, job experiences, and skills sections are how we can best standout and ensure our profile has a positive impact on recruiters.

In addition to focusing on highlighting keywords on our profiles, Schifeling offered guidance on how to tailor the settings of our LinkedIn profiles to attract our ideal jobs, recruiters, and organizations.

For example, many of us may be interested in working abroad, or open to reside in several locations. Good news: in the “Open to Work” tab on LinkedIn, you can add up to five locations where you’d like to work. It is wise to include locations where you know you can work, even if you are not there currently. As Schifeling argued, adding this information to our profiles gives us the opportunity to signal our intentions and aspirations to future employers.

Users can also make their preference known for remote, hybrid, or in-person work, as well as the primary language of work and preferred work schedule (e.g., full-time or part-time) among other options.

Another tool at our disposal is the “Open to Work” banner. Though often maligned, Schifeling noted that most recruiters don’t weigh it heavily and that, on balance, it is a good thing to let recruiters know you are open for work and ready to pursue that opportunity immediately.

Despite having access to all of LinkedIn’s premium features and tools, even recruiters are limited to only thirty InMails per month. As a consequence, hiring managers are forced to be selective in who they contact. Here, letting employers know you are actively looking for new job opportunities is vital, as it may give them the “push” needed to reach out to you rather than someone else.

Furthermore, whether you choose to use the green banner or not, announcing your interest and openness to work publicly activates our weak ties online, thereby increasing the likelihood that we find new employment opportunities.

As part of his presentation, Schifeling cited an MIT-LinkedIn joint study of over 20 million users that confirmed that people who are at the periphery of our networks are most likely to be those who help us find new work.

Although we may believe that leaning on our networks of family and close friends might be more effective (and easier), there is often too much overlap among these connections. We will all know of the same jobs and same organizations in a given area. In contrast, more peripheral or distant connections will see horizons we cannot perceive and are more likely to be better placed to introduce us to new opportunities.

To add another angle to this observation, Schifeling reminded attendees that recruiters lean on referrals heavily in their hiring decisions. Unsurprisingly, LinkedIn is a great tool to cultivate these ties. By using our InMail credits and reaching out to specific individuals and organizations, we can strengthen our weak ties and increase the likelihood of receiving an employee referral.

Therefore, informing potential employers of our interest and openness to work is not the only tool at our disposal. Our engagement on the platform also matters. Though hiring professional look at our projects and posts, most often they see whether we respond to our InMail messages, in addition to our networks to evaluate our potential fit for a specific job posting or organization.

The importance of networks in the job searching experience was a through-line in Schifeling’s remarks about job searching and LinkedIn’s benefits. He suspects many of us are not “connected” with as many people as we could be and encouraged us all to expand our networks. A larger network exposes our profiles to new hiring managers and broadens the aperture of our job search.

Yet, for Schifeling, LinkedIn’s greatest benefit to us is that it allows us to exercise agency. Though we cannot control who views our profiles or for what roles recruiters think we may be qualified, we control the narrative. We should include all of our work experiences, curate our skills and keywords, and customize our profiles to attract the job opportunities and organizations we wish to pursue.

We should always remember that there is both a computer algorithm that finds us and a human element that chooses us. Designing our LinkedIn profiles with that idea in mind and curating our information to tailor our profiles for the jobs we want will allow us to unlock LinkedIn’s full potential for our benefit.

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