One of the things we watched happen last year was a change in the recruitment market.

Whereas once, the core competency was things like being able to use email, word use, powerpoint use etc, we saw this switch to companies wanting sales and marketing people to have a "personal brand".

They may not have asked for it, but they were filtering applicants on this requirement and using LinkedIn as a way of getting a handle on what the applicant it like.

I'm not saying here that your Linkedin profile needs to be a CV, in fact I'm saying the opposite.  Your CV needs to look like a CV.  Your Linkedin profile needs to cover your why, who you are, it needs to reflect your humanity, what you stand for.  Your job history should not be a list of tasks or objectives but want to learnt.  There is nothing wrong with admitting failures as long as you learnt.

Take a look at my profile I admit that my first startup went into administration. https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothyhughessocialselling/ but I came out of it stronger.

So many companies say that "culture" is important and this certainly will be reflected in your Linkedin profile.

In addition to this, we a scarcity of good candidates the head hunters are using Linkedin as a way of sourcing these candidates.  No different there, it's been like that for 15 year.  The difference is that headhunters, the good ones anyway are using "personal brands" to source good candidates.

We all know that a good personal brand is "best practice" the assumption therefore is that people with good personal brands (and good LinkedIn profiles) are the best people.

I've written before about how I got my "dream job" by changing my Linkedin profile and this is now becoming more the norm.