One Job Offer And Multiple Interviews

Good Morning Data Scientists,

I recently got this message from a client

‘Interestingly, I also got 2 invites on LinkedIn today to talk to 2 more recruiters. Your optimization of my (LinkedIn) profile has clearly paid off.’

And most importantly, it’s worked for him:

He’s been offered one Data Analyst role and got multiple final round DS interviews coming up.

So today I’ll break down the steps we took to optimise his profile and get people reaching out to him

1. Make It like Instagram

A lot of data scientists would do well to treat their LinkedIn profile like Instagram.

It’s easy to focus on your professional experience, so the profile picture is the last thing which gets done.

But it’s not just your experience which matters, your whole profile is a ‘sales page’.

When I started working with Sam, I knew his picture could be better.

And thanks to smartphones, it didn’t even take long to take something which looked like it was done by a professional.

He even got a compliment from someone he networked with on how Sam had ‘one of the best profile pictures he’d seen’.

2. Mini-Sentences

Most data scientists just chuck in all the skills they can think of into their headline, something like

‘ML, Python, SQL, Analytics, data-driven, Excel’…

Which has no structure, makes it hard to read and doesn’t actually tell us anything about the person.

I’ve found breaking the headline into lots of ‘mini-sentences’ works best.

For example, for my own headline I’d write something like

‘Data Scientist | 3 Years Experience | ML & LLMs | Implemented Savings of ~£xk/year via fraud model’

3. A Personal Touch

Once again, data scientists focus too much on their experience in their about section.

What you should be doing instead is turning this more into a story and offering a bit of a ‘personal touch’ so employers / recruiters can connect with you on a personal level.

He also got offered a data analyst role at an education start-up and is in the final round of different Data Science interviews.

For example, Sam starts his section with this:

‘We are all connected.

During my PhD, I fell in love with relations and connections through graph theory.

Using my new knowledge of graph theory, I was able to design a dot product graph to model similarities in various birds. This led to an amazing discovery of ecological similarities between the Adelie penguin and the sooty albatross.’

You can see how this grabs attention, touches on his interests and journey but also shows off his skills.

That’s how we optimised Sam’s profile so recruiters reached out to him.

Happy Thursday and God Bless!

Albert