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[ETR #122] You're Wasting Prime LinkedIn Real Estate

Zach Quinn

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Hi fellow data professional!

Even if LinkedIn tells you your profile is complete, I guarantee you’re missing one critical element.

Generally, when it comes to developing a LinkedIn profile, job seekers and professional users over-index on text. Your bio, experience and skills are all strings that you’ve likely written, reviewed and rewritten.

If you’re an active content creator, or at least content sharer, then maybe you also have some links, like a GitHub portfolio. All text-based content can be scraped, analyzed and surfaced in searches by recruiters or hiring managers.

But the thing about a text-heavy profile is that it often buries the lead. Your headline might be crammed with keywords or your bio might be 800 words of perfectly optimized text, but what does that really say about what you’ve accomplished? How do you present a skillset and a candidate profile that is uniquely “you”?

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Enter your personal billboard. Aka your cover photo. When I was employed in my last role my photo had nothing to do with my market value. It was a winter landscape taken from a hotel room in Zermatt, Switzerland. It made for a nice background but it was actively wasting space.

After revamping my LinkedIn, I thought about how best to utilize the cover photo and came up with a visual resume format that instantly sells my skills in a human-readable (or at least scannable) way.

I synthesized the components of a resume.

  • Title (my last professional title)
  • Skills (optimized key words)
  • Results (KPIs I met or surpassed on the job)

The finished product contained these elements.

  • Title: Senior Data Engineer
  • Skills: Python, SQL, Airflow, LLM development (Gemini)
  • Results: 100+ pipelines built, 99.9% uptime SLA, 1MM+ content views

I like being able to present my skills visually because it immediately distinguishes my profile from others that just keyword stuff or bury “the good stuff.” As a bonus, I’m creating additional metadata for any web scrapers or LLMs crawling my profile.

While vacation pictures can make nice wallpapers, you want to show potential employers a different destination: Where your skills can take their teams.

Thanks for ingesting,

-Zach Quinn

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