How To Create A Personalized LinkedIn Cover Photo
LinkedIn serves as a crucial platform for job seekers, allowing them to showcase their skills, experiences, and personality in a way that traditional resumes cannot. One of the simplest yet most impactful ways to enhance your LinkedIn presence is by personalizing your cover photo. This often-overlooked aspect of your profile can serve as a powerful visual representation of your brand, setting the tone for your entire LinkedIn experience.
Why Personalize Your LinkedIn Cover Photo?
In recent years, a major part of job searching has been about building a personal brand for yourself. With the amount of job applications employers receive each day, being memorable is a vital part of making it through the hiring process. Building a personal brand has become a key tool to communicating as much about yourself as possible while also standing out in a crowd of generic resumes. The same applies to LinkedIn profiles. In today’s digital age, recruitment has become a mainly digital process, with LinkedIn playing a major role in how employers research their candidates.
The good news is that LinkedIn is the perfect place to truly express your personal brand. Without the need to follow the standards set for resumes and cover letters, job seekers have even more flexibility with how they present themselves. In the hiring process, you should take every opportunity you have to show who you are, what you do, and what makes you qualified.
Your LinkedIn cover photo is one of the first things people see when they visit your profile. A well-designed, personalized cover photo can create a strong first impression, reflecting your professional image and personality. It can showcase your skills, interests, or industry, making your profile more memorable and aligning it with the professional image you want to project.
Tools To Create A Personalized LinkedIn Cover Photo
Creating a personalized LinkedIn cover photo will be more daunting for some job seekers than others. For those in the design field, designing a cover photo is like being asked to recite the alphabet. For those of us who aren’t so design-inclined, there are several simple design tools available on the web to help you create a good-looking, professional LinkedIn cover photo.
Canva: Canva offers everything you need to fully customize your LinkedIn cover photo. It will allow you to create designs entirely from scratch, or select from a large library of templates, depending on how hands-on you’re willing to be. Not only that, but Canva has you choose from a wide range of pre-set dimensions, including the exact dimensions recommended for LinkedIn, simplifying the process even more.
VistaCreate: VistaCreate, a design platform with VistaPrint, offers a wide range of LinkedIn cover photo templates for you to quickly and easily customize.
FreePik: FreePik has a beta design platform with some premade cover photos and cover photo templates. Some designs and templates require a premium license, but there are free options available.
With these free easy design tools, you can’t go wrong with designing your own LinkedIn cover image. Give all of them a shot and figure out what works best for you.
Advice For Creating A Personalized LinkedIn Cover Photo
Use The Right Dimensions
Imagine you spend all this time perfecting your LinkedIn cover photo, but once you go to put it on your profile, the design is cut off! LinkedIn has specific dimensions for their cover photos that are fairly unique from other social media platforms. Before you get to designing, ensure your design or the template you’re using is LinkedIn’s recommended dimensions: 1128 (width) x 191 pixels (height).
Make Your Visuals Industry-Specific
If you’re applying to sales management positions, then you won’t want to be using a cover photo that includes a galaxy backdrop. Your cover image shouldn’t make you think of other industries. A galaxy backdrop would make you think of astronomy or aerospace, not sales. If it’s hard to think of industry-specific visuals, there’s nothing wrong with going for a sleek, professional look that doesn’t include a lot of complex imagery. In fact, many industries will likely call for a more basic style.
Ensure Style, Colours, and Fonts Work With Your Chosen Career
The same goes for the overall design, colours, and fonts. Some industries will call for a more serious style, with a standard font and either black, white, beige, or gray as the main colour. But others may call for something more flashy, in which case you’d use brighter colours and decorative fonts that can stand out.
Use A Template
The quickest way to create a visually-appealing personalized design, especially if you aren’t skilled in graphic design, is to use a template. There are simple ways you can customize the template to suit your style and industry.
List Down Your Skills
If there is free real estate on the cover photo to add some additional text (outside of your name, desired job title, and contact information), try listing a few of your top skills. This gives recruiters an immediate idea of what your specializations are, and what they can expect from you on the job. Ensure that these skills are attractive and relevant to the type of jobs you’re applying for. For a sales management job, you can list important skills for a sales management position, such as: coaching, leadership, and adaptability. You can choose only to put hard skills, but throwing a useful soft skill in, such as adaptability, won’t hurt.
Match Your Resume & Cover Letter
If you want to tie your personal brand together, you can match or redesign your resume and cover letter to match your cover photo. This can benefit your job search in a number of ways. You’ll be able to make your personal brand, and therefore yourself, more memorable to recruiters, while also impressing them with your ability to go above and beyond with your attention-to-detail. It’s not a necessity, but it’s always a nice touch to have your personal brand be consistent, just like a corporate brand.
Meet With Our Recruitment Experts
Are you struggling with your job search? We understand how frustrating it can be to look for a job for months on end with little progress to show for it. We specialize in finding jobs for candidates in manufacturing, insolvency, allied healthcare, sales, and finance. We’re passionate about matching talented candidates with rewarding career opportunities. Work with us today and get connected to the jobs you truly want.
Conclusion
Personalizing your LinkedIn cover photo is a strategic move that can significantly enhance your online presence and improve your chances of being noticed by employers. By carefully considering design elements such as dimensions, industry relevance, and visual aesthetics, you can create a cover photo that effectively conveys your personal brand. Utilizing accessible design tools and following best practices will help you craft a professional and engaging image that complements your resume and cover letter. As you embark on your job search, remember that every detail counts—making your LinkedIn profile not just a representation of your professional background, but a vivid expression of who you are and what you bring to the table. Embrace this opportunity to stand out from the crowd!
