Why aren’t recruiters looking for you?

Wednesday 1st April – Why aren’t recruiters looking for you?

Most of us do our LinkedIn profile once and then forget about it until we move jobs.


However, more & more these days, a lot of job opportunities never see the light of day – as in, they’re never publicly advertised, so how on earth can you get to know about them?

Short of befriending every HR department and Recruitment Consultant in the country – not much!

These days, rather than resorting to advertising, which often attracts the wrong candidates (or none at all), recruiters choose to manage their own candidates, by actively targeting them through mediums such as LinkedIn & other forms of social media.

When recruiters run a search through LinkedIn, they effectively get a list of candidates to work through, which will state:

  • Your name
  • Your headline – i.e. what your about/currently doing/actively looking for
  • And one liners on the companies you have worked in, if the recruiter is viewing the Professional version of LinkedIn. If they are just viewing from the regular basic LinkedIn account, they will see even less.

In order for a recruiter who is actively looking for candidates, to fill a specific role, it is important that your headline is compelling and informative enough to give them cause to click into your profile, to find out more and/or connect with you.

Therefore I cannot understand the importance of making it as accurate and as telling, as you possibly can.

Example: “unemployed” as headline is not really going to generate any reason for a recruiter to want to click in to find out more detail.

Whereas “actively looking for account manager roles in event services, available at short notice” – will certainly be more of an invitation for a recruiter to want to have a closer look, if they are looking for that type of person or similar for a role.

Be as comprehensive as you can be with the rest of the information you provide on your profile in terms of key achievements in your previous roles as well, but if you just do one thing today – make sure that headline is crystal clear!