So you just landed a big promotion - congrats!
Not only do you get the new title and compensation, but you now have a chance to pave the way to your next promotion - just by sharing your news on LinkedIn.
And as someone who used to lead LinkedIn’s Education Team, I’m thrilled to show you the two ways you should add your promotion to LinkedIn:
Add your promotion to your LinkedIn profile
Share your promotion with your network
Add Your Promotion to Your LinkedIn Profile
The first thing to do is to incorporate your new role into your profile. That’s because, unlike a post that will be seen once and quickly fade away, your profile is scanned millions of times a day by recruiters. And so by investing in an up-to-date profile, you can make sure that you maximize your visibility in those searches.
Here’s how:
Go to your profile (just click the Me tab in the upper-right hand corner of the menu)
Scroll down to the Experience section and click the + icon
Enter your new title and be sure that the Company matches your existing company perfectly - that way, LinkedIn will visually show your progress within the organization (which recruiters love) as opposed to two separate entries
Even though you were just promoted, add a few bullet points under your title and be sure to incorporate the keywords recruiters will be searching for
This last point is a critical one so let me explain: Recruiters don’t just search LinkedIn for job titles and locations - e.g., “Show me all the Project Managers in Chicago.” Because they need to match their job descriptions, they also search for specific keywords related to the job - e.g., “Show me all the Project Managers in Chicago with a PMP and experience with MS Project.”
This means, even if you’re starting in a new role, it’s important to include some of these essential keywords that define that role. And if you’re not sure, just check out your own new job description or ones like it on LinkedIn. Plus pro tip: If you run those job descriptions through www.jobscan.co, you’ll get a sense of which keywords you need to nail.
Share Your Promotion with Your Network on LinkedIn
Although it may be more ephemeral than adding your promotion to your profile, sharing it with your network on LinkedIn also has value.
Specifically, there are three things to incorporate into your post:
Show some love for the folks who helped you get here. Your colleagues, your bosses, your mentors all likely played some role in this new role - indeed, no professional is an island. And the further you go in your career, the truer that becomes. So be sure to take a moment to tag all these amazing folks (e.g., “Huge thanks to @Jane Perez for helping me navigate the tenure process!”) and keep your boosters boosting you!
Activate your weak ties. As much as we tend to focus on our closest confidantes, research suggests that it’s actually the people at the peripheries of our networks who are most likely to help us land a new job. That’s because while our friends and family want to help us, they tend to know all the same opportunities we do - whereas your professors, your old colleagues, and your former bosses are the ones who are plugged-into new opportunities. And so make sure you’re connected with these weaker ties in the first place (another pro tip: Import all your address books if you haven’t done so already) - and then you can be sure they’ll see your update when you share it on LinkedIn.
Build your brand with the right people. A celebratory post on LinkedIn is also a great chance to add more people to your network - but you want them to be the right people. Specifically, being seen by recruiters, hiring managers, and thought leaders as a mover-and-shaker can do wonders for your career. So to ensure that these key influencers get served your update in their feeds, you can do two things. First, you can leverage hashtags relevant to your new role (e.g., #projectmanagement). And second, you can tag some of the most influential people you already know, since that will trigger a domino rally: They’ll see your post, they’ll react or comment, and then that reaction - along with your original post - will get served to their networks, chock full of more insiders.
Adding Your Promotion to LinkedIn: The Bottom Line
Congrats again on earning your new role!
And given that you were savvy enough to earn the role in the first place, don’t stop there. Recognize that the best careers leverage the momentum from one piece of good news to pave the way for the next.
So add your promotion to your profile to permanently increase your visibility and attractiveness with recruiters. And then share it with your network to get a temporary bump - but also just to share the love.
Because if I learned anything during my time inside LinkedIn, it’s that we’re all only as strong as our networks and communities. So be sure to use this opportunity to continue to build your own!