What Contact Centre Skills Should You List on LinkedIn?

Darren Deehan discusses how to get your business profile noticed online.

For a successful career as a call centre professional it has become increasingly important to have a LinkedIn profile that is up to date and reflects an accurate picture of you: your education, employment history, experience and your skills.

Maybe you set up your account a while ago, added a picture that you think looks smart, posted some detail and accepted the odd connection request. But you’ve not really looked at it that much, and now you are wondering why you have been stuck in the same analyst post for the last 3 years. You’re all set, right? Nope; think again.

LinkedIn recently rolled out a few interesting new features that you should really know about if you want to take full advantage of the platform and get the new job you feel you deserve.

Recruiters now have the option of searching for candidates based on their LinkedIn skills. It’s been suggested before that this is a useless feature. Its value has been questioned because LinkedIn prompts you to endorse the skills of your connections, and it’s as easy as liking a post on Facebook.

You may get endorsed for skills that you do not particularly want or even remember adding to your profile. For example, someone recently endorsed me for ‘Interiors’. I didn’t think this was particularly accurate nor relevant to me as a professional, so it was promptly removed. The important thing is to identify the right skill categories and skill sets that are relevant to your chosen career.

It’s difficult to quantify just how much specific endorsements will influence recruiters or potential networking connections who review your profile, but it is fair to say that endorsements can’t hurt your profile and the absence of endorsements might leave viewers wondering about the validity of your claimed skill sets.

I looked at a sample of 10 LinkedIn connections who have established careers in the ‘Call Centre’ world in the UK, with some variation on the years of experience and seniority. I also looked at a sample of 5 Job posts looking for similar roles.

I created a simple Word Cloud for the 2 samples, see below.

The skills that people have listed:

The skills that recruiters and employers are looking for:

It’s interesting to see some of the words that immediately jump out from each image. However, it’s clear that there is a difference in the type of skills and language that are identified in each.

Skills and expertise will generally fall into different categories. For instance, general transferable skills like management, project planning and budgeting, or specialised skills which solve a particular problem that might be unique to a niche profession.

A good, consistent approach might be to try and have a balance of both types and incorporate a combination of your skills and expertise. Incidentally, there are almost 1.5 million people on LinkedIn with the skill ‘Call Center / Call Centre’, so that in itself is not exactly unique.

If you are attempting to branch out into a new field you might want to include as many transferable skills as possible. One of the best ways to get endorsements of your skills is to endorse others, particularly those contacts or connections who have had some exposure to your skills.

It has been suggested that the evidence points to these endorsements helping with SEO (search engine optimisation), but now with the addition of this new feature for recruiters, we know for sure that they are important and can help you get found. So, if you haven’t got around to it yet, now would be the time to beef up that section. You never know where you could be next year.

As Albert Einstein famously put it, ‘You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else’.

With thanks to Darren Deehan at injixo