Your LinkedIn is your resume's public cousin. Every recruiter will check it. Most will check it before they even reply to you.
**Here's what it needs, at minimum:**
- **A headshot** (see the previous chapter).
- **A banner image.** Anything is better than the default blue gradient. A clean texture, a photo of your city, something simple from Canva. Five minutes, huge difference.
- **A headline that isn't just your current job title.** This is prime real estate. "Marketing graduate, looking for my first role in brand strategy" beats "Student at [University]."
- **An About section that sounds like you.** Not like a press release. Two or three short paragraphs. What you've done, what you're looking for, what you're actually good at.
- **Every job, internship, and leadership role filled out with real descriptions.** Yes, including the cafe job.
- **Skills endorsed by at least a few people.** Ask friends, ask former classmates. Not cheating, everyone does it.
- **Education filled out properly.**
Here's the part most people skip. Start posting. Not every day. Not constantly. But once every week or two, share something. Something you learned, an article you found interesting, a short reflection on something you did. It doesn't have to go viral. It just has to exist.
The posts don't need to be original takes on the state of the industry. The easiest and most useful thing you can write about is your own experience. A project you worked on. A specific thing you did at an internship. Something that went wrong and what you learned from it. A skill you picked up and how you picked it up.
There's a second benefit to this that nobody mentions. When you've written something out once, you're going to remember it much better when it comes up in an interview. You've already fleshed out your thoughts on it. You've already found the words. Posting becomes interview prep, accidentally.
When a recruiter lands on your profile and sees you've been actively thinking out loud about your field, that reads as someone who cares. When they land on a dormant profile with a 2021 photo and no activity since graduation, that reads as someone who's drifting.
You want to look like someone who's moving, even if you haven't found the door yet.
