LinkedIn Masterclass for 2025

I'm already apologizing if this video comes across as rude or offensive because I know for a fact that a lot of people who don't have great skills still have great jobs now skills are important for anyone but once you have skills you need to be visible to the right kind of people the entire social media and online world is running on perception and perception is all about First Impressions the perception that you have of yourself on the online social media aspect of things is directly tied to very superficial things like your College's name city that you live in your online profiles the way you describe your experiences at your internships and the kind of people that you might be connected with even though those people would have never seen your face in the real life and by the way stop believing people who tell you that degrees do not matter they do what I'm saying is don't drop out just because somebody has told you so and if you're in your fourth here or if you're looking for a very good opportunity and if you're someone young with no corporate connections or aan degree then you need to fix your perception online and you need to be visible to the right kind of people so whether you're a freelancer or somebody looking for a job all of these tips will work for you but before that let me introduce you to the sponsors of today's video ODU ODU is an all-in-one management software that provides entrepreneurs young professionals and students a range of applications to simplify their day-to-day work and efficiency now this could be for your new job this could be for your freelancing business this could be for your own own startup and the tool we are covering today is their email marketing app so it allows you to create a very very good-look gorgeous emails you can quickly create extremely extremely professional Outreach emails by using simple drag and drop tools and readymade templates and I would recommend you to check out their pre-designed templates because they have a big big variety to make your emails look great with no design skills required and if you want to go to the next level they also allow you to do audience segmentation which basically helps you to Target specific groups in your contact list with factors like location their behavior the type which can be further segregated into like a lead or a customer and all of their emails have responsive design which means that if you make something good-looking on the desktop it would work on the iPad and on the phone as well so it basically sets a very strong impression so if you're trying to reach out to recruiters or even your clients via email you can get their emails either from LinkedIn or from their profiles online or from their be hands or from a platform like rocket reach and and use a tool like Odo to run your email marketing at scale now let's start with all the important tips that you need to know the first one is having a basic good-look profile picture a good headline and a banner picture the first thing people notice is your face so your profile picture needs to make a great first impression now some important tips please use a professional looking head shot where you're dressed in a professional attire and you need to smile naturally to appear more approachable don't put like a serious front face thing or like a very serious are you looking like this young attitude Rowdy boy make sure the photo is taken in a villet environment with a neutral background now I'll explain you what a neutral background is but before that let me tell you what not to do don't use selfies don't have messy hair don't have noisy cluttered backgrounds avoid group photos don't become a fashionista and wear like a very fancy outfit and have more space given in your DP to your outfit than to your face there are tools in the market there is photo room there is remove. bg all of these pictures can remove your your background and there are tools like magnific and pixel cut to upscale your image in case you don't even have like a good image then we come to heading which is a very short introduction in a very few words but basically this needs to Showcase Your Role your key skills and your career aspirations within 100 to 120 characters also you can utilize the banner photo that most people ignore they usually put an image from unsplash and have like a motivational quote and sometimes they even repeat their own name on the banner cover and I'll show some examples on the screen right now so you'll get a quick idea of how these things work you can always take chat GPT and CLA and perplexity to you know write these things you don't need me to do that now before moving ahead to tip number two let me show you some practical examples of what people are doing right and what they're doing wrong all right so this is what you do not have to do on your LinkedIn DP right so you have a cover image of a ux designer profile which is a monument and then in the DP she's looking somewhere else and you have like this very vibrant tree sort of a background happening not at all appropriate it would have been way better if this picture was like a clean front face picture right even this guy laka Agarwal so I get what he's trying to do he's trying to be more creative and very playful he's made like a very good color like a stroke and he has a flour on his ear but the point is that this is LinkedIn right and you have to show your front face you should not put flowers you should not come across as like a student right like if you really want some kind of like a serious person to actually consider your profile of course your profile picture is not the main criteria here but I can say for a fact that LXI had like a front face picture it would have been so much better right then you have Hassen so this is a good example right neutral background he's wearing an ID card formal clothes neutral smiling even this picture like pretty good right like high contrast this is also edited from a graphic design tool you have good background you have stroke black and white creative looks pretty decent right now in even in terms of the cover image right this says playboard please don't add motivational quotes right even this like motivational books as your cover does not say anything about you it's way better to have something like this so you have Prine Kai social media executive this is still decent I don't recommend repeating the name again maybe you can talk about your skills the tools that you work on or you can just have something very simple with your picture and you can just repeat your name your company's logo but overall this is how you need to have it in terms of the headings I feel like UI and ux designer it could have just been ux designer specializing in iOS mobile apps graphic designer previously had yum cheese and the company's name this is pretty good BBA driven to succeed and he has put double quotes so I can 100% bet that he has blindly copied this from Chad GPT please stop doing this this is so so bad this heading I think has been the winner so just wanted to give you some examples on this tip number two have a customized URL and a contact info section a personalized LinkedIn URL makes your profile look very very clean it tells the recruiter that you're actually smart enough to focus on the little details for example instead of a complicated URL that looks like this you should should probably have something that looks like this and please ensure that your contact information is updated so that people can reach out to you your resume has to be linked on your LinkedIn profile so they can reach out to your email IDs please try to have a professional email address if you're an agency owner or a freelancer which basically means that instead of having ANM gmail. com I would have admin atm.

com or your name atyour agency. com then if you don't know how that works just go to Google and figure it out if you're a developer or a designer please please include links to your portfolio it can be your notion portfolio otherwise if you're a coder your GitHub profile if you're designer then your behance profile you you sort of get the drill one thing is optional putting your mobile number if you're comfortable with recruiters directly contacting you you can do that uh but one pro tip please make sure that the email you have on your LinkedIn and your resume and your other behance profiles it's all the same so let me show you some real life examples all right so when we talk about customized URLs as you can see mayure has a customized URL then we have Shas also then we have Kumari also and and interestingly all of them are ux designers maybe like designers are very like specific about these things but then we have vene who has done a very good job with the TP and the cover but no customized URL so this is how your url would look like if you don't have it customized it just looks very very complicated in terms of the pictures and the DP Karan Kumar has nothing whatsoever somia deep please don't have such a vibrant DP look at the real estate allocation of this DP right you have this much of space for the person's face and you have more space consumed by the water the trees and the sky then you have some picture about desktop and Coffee Plus Cod don't do this don't do this have something way more personality driven for example vene great job with the cover great job with the DP I would still recommend to have like a clearer DP don't have these phone pictures it's so easy to go to a studio and just get a picture kumari's DP pretty good I think this is a very very solid DP it has a theme also the background color and the cover they sort of match together I would be very very impressed but I still can't figure out if she's looking for work or not so you can always put that otherwise you can just mention the company that you're working with Sha's great job with the cover I feel like the picture could have been taken without the shades but maybe that is your own artistic expression but notice how even now like you can't really see the person the pose that he's standing is very like like very like defensive I would still recommend to have a slightly better picture May's picture I really like it for sure like neutral backgrounds smiling face formal attire it's on point but again May if you could just slightly zoom in so that we can see more of your face tip number three have good summary and experience section written very very carefully because this about section is like your elevator pitch it basically tells people who you are what you do and what are you aiming to teach and there's a very basic structure right you can start with a strong hook where you are introducing yourself with a title so you can say like a junior software developer graphic designer iOS mobile designer then specify your strengths and what you're passionate about and in your experience section you can tell your story about how you joined a specific company what have been your achievements what have been the unique skills that you have added and please show some results add some quantifiable achievements to prove your value right because if you just say that oh I worked on social media it makes no sense but if you say that when I joined the team we were at say 50 followers and when I exited the team we were at 1,000 followers then there's a quantifiable metric please make sure that you add your work experience in the reverse chronological order which basically means that you start with the late experience and then you go back to your school days I see a lot of BIOS where they talk about them taking science in school and then going through their first job and at the end of their paragraph they have their latest achievement which makes no sense focus on achievements and specific outcomes rather than job titles or just responsibilities and the structure that you can follow is that you have job title company name dates that you worked and some description right so this is how LinkedIn works and there's a very specific framework that people use it's action verb and impact approach where you start with a strong action like analyzed XYZ designed ABC optimized XYZ and then you say I analyzed XYZ using XYZ tools or Technologies and then you show the result that I had this quantifiable result to highlight your impact so you you should sort of start with a fancy verb then the tool then how did you take that tool to you know bring some value into your company so let me show you some real life examples okay now let's check the summary section so we have the about section we have the activity then we have experience this is a pretty well defined experience section I can see the tools I can see the location I can see what he's done he's not been able to mention the impact but overall pretty well organized this could have been way better if you could have just specified certain metrics I also keep forgetting about it it's completely okay right like you don't have to be that that serious about it let's check out this one this is also pretty good you've mentioned the product categories this is actually way more nuanced way more specific pretty good you've also added pictures this is a very very good touch always try to have pictures and links to your actual work even the cover images like like it has the phone email book a call now really really good stuff then we have saruk saruk you should change your DP for sure have a front face DP you know sort of comb your hair if it's your own artistic expression then it completely depends on you but I would still recommend you to get a haircut which is slightly clean slightly formal but that depends on like person to person you know some people have their own style it's completely okay the cover image looks like a stock image alog together that is not a good experience section at all user experience in turn I have no Clarity of what you did helped in user research to do what assisted in designing the landing page where is the landing page okay we have aushi goria frontend developer there is no experience section at all there's nothing like please have something that's the only feedback I would have Vidant let's go down education licenses certificate there is no experience section and please don't have these brackets please please forging my intersect of data Realms please don't do this this is not poetry and withan you're open to work this will not work out so please have some some experience section please talk about your projects don't have these many you know emojis also this is not like a creative section you have to talk about your work DP is surprisingly pretty good so that is one thing you've Ted even the cover is not that bad but you still have to show work like you have to show work on number four skills and endorsements there's a proper section in LinkedIn for this you have to list at least 10 to 15 relevant skills that match your career and goals these skills are very very important because anybody who searching for somebody like you will put this query into the LinkedIn search bar and then the LinkedIn algorithm will check these relevant skills so please make sure you include both hard and soft skills and one important tip please ask your colleagues or uh your previous manager just to endorse your top three skills so you have to sort of Niche down to top three most important skills and Linkedin would always highlight these endorsements so they are really really important it could be our teachers it could be our College professors also it could be our Dean also but just have somebody let me just show you how other people have done it let me show you the skills and endorsement section so you have top skills that come here and if I go to the very very bottom you have these 55 skills that he has tip number five recommendations most people tend to ignore this section but this is very very very important recommendations always increase your credibility request very short and very genuine recommendations from you know managers and mentors and teammates for example you can just have something saying that ANM played a key role in XYZ like just a single sentence and then you have to specify the exact quantifiable result so I'm I'm again saying this word again and again because you have to specify the tool you have to specify the impact right so let me just show you some examples of what other people have done and if I go back again we have the recommendations also and the recommendations are very very good good so he has recommendations from a CTO from a product design manager he has four of them so this is really really good effort really really interesting if you go to rajat's profile if I scroll to the very bottom we have again really really good recommendations all of those things the skills the licenses everything has been sorted so this is a very very good LinkedIn profile to take inspiration from Karan Kumar what do I say shti Singh so we have oh wow I really like this cover like this is so cool this is the first time I've seen something like this very impressive but again shy I would recommend you to have a picture that shows more of your face and less of the vibrant background it's just too distracting I feel like you're doing this to like some come across as like a creative person but it's still better to have more focus on your face with like a neutral background so people can actually see you we have no experience section at all we have some skills but nothing whatsoever so shuy you have done so good at the cover and there is no work at the bottom please make sure you spend some time adding more work on number six build connections and I don't mean like dming people and just forcing them to connect with you I get those messages a lot it never works prioritize connecting with directors and VPS at new startups VC backed startups VC stands for venture capitalist and managers right if a designer wants to get a design job that person would start messaging other designers whereas in reality you need to get in touch with hiring agencies uh Talent managers recruiters and HR people so please have that distinction also connect with alumini from your college who's in a specific company you can always message them usually when you message an alumini there's a very high chance of getting a response and just keep all of your notes and DMS very short and very professional you know you can always start with a shared interest or some personal connection or some common intersection of you know something that you both like so you have to have some common ground don't just say that hey my name is XYZ I'm doing this give me a job does not work it only works when you're really really good at what you do in fact I'll just flash some message templates that you can use don't blindly copy also folks please stop copying chat GPT comments and chat GPT messages with the double quotes it is such an embarrassing mistake that you folks are doing again and again please stop doing that so I have so many YouTube comments and Linkedin messages and emails where they forget to even delete those square brackets because anytime chat GPD gives you a message it puts those square brackets such a bad mistake in the end I would totally recommend you to invest in LinkedIn premium I would totally recommend you to invest in tools that give you like premium emails rocket reach and all of these other platforms if you're an agency owner if you're a young fresher and you don't have a budget it's completely okay you get some free inmails which are like direct DMS every single month and you should exhaust these inails only to recruiters and hiring managers be concise be professional connect with them show them your work and you can always use this specific template that we have here for your cold Outreach right so you can use Chad GPT for making more templates but I'm just showing you this in case you want on something very very specific on number seven Search keywords to find hidden opportunities use the LinkedIn search bar with very specific phrases or keywords like we are hiring ux designers we are hiring data analysts so when you put this phrase into the search bar you will be redirected to people who have posted this exact thing right so looking for a specific role hash hiring #d designer so to summarize I'll give you a checklist please make sure you have that checklist and if you comment below we actually have these stickers that we're giving away of The Cutting at school here you go I have one more very cool sticker which is be remarkable I don't know if you've been following what we've been saying it's not focusing but yeah I will be sharing these three stickers to all the interesting valuable comments we get on this YouTube video and I really really want you folks to support us in the comment section and do talk about the video on LinkedIn I'm pretty sure if you write a good LinkedIn post and if I comment on it if I engage p on it it will be boosted to more people it eventually helps you to get more more and more eyeballs and visibility on your profile right so here is the checklist if you do all of these things trust me when I say this your LinkedIn profile will automatically become 10 times better than any other candidate trust me it plays a very big role uh let me know if you want us to cover any other specific topics my email ID is admin atate unch.