What Does Your LinkedIn Profile Say About Your Personality?

According to a recent study, what you enter on your LinkedIn profile reveals multiple traits of your personality. In fact, it can even reveal qualities such as kindness or conscientiousness.

Reviewed and approved by the psychologist Valeria Sabater.

Written by Valeria Sabater

Last update: 15 November, 2021

What does your Linkedin profile say about your personality? Well, there are those who point out that this social network that’s oriented to business use and job searches is like a fruit market. Each person “sets out their stall” and, later, the recruiters choose the one whose “merchandise” best suits their needs.

In this public market square of profiles, titles, skills, and various experiences, each one tries to sell themselves in the best possible way. It’s like creating an online billboard that you hope an entrepreneur will be drawn to. However, what you don’t always know or realize is that, in your attempt to captivate prospective employers or business associates through your cv, you’re also leaving leave multiple clues to your character.

A recent study has provided some interesting data in this respect. In fact, they suggest that you should be somewhat more scrupulous when designing your own personal billboard. Because sometimes, having your name in lights can do you more damage than good.

Your Linkedin profile and your personality

Currently, Linkedin is probably more important than you could possibly imagine. It has great corporate power. Furthermore, those who’ve made effective and strategic use of this service have seen positive changes in their careers. Its creators were Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant who launched it in 2002. From that time, it wasn’t long before it become the main platform in the job market.

LinkedIn isn’t only a “digital public market” oriented to job searches. In fact, it’s a meeting point between communities. It allows you to keep up to date on current issues, connect you with other professionals, and it also has the LinkedIn Learning platform aimed at training.

However, when it comes to recruiting candidates, there are experts who know how to look beyond what the profile of each user on this social network reveals. In fact, just a few months ago the Western Swiss University of Applied Sciences and Arts published an extremely revealing study.

As a matter of fact, what your Linkedin profile says about your personality is actually as striking as it’s interesting. Let’s take a closer look.

Your openness to experience

The research work used the Big Five model of human personality. The first factor within this model is openness to experience. This is a highly positive, interesting, and valued trait in the field of recruiting. It’s expressed through dimensions such as the following:

• Active imagination (fantasy), intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensibility, preference for variety, and emotional management.

However, how are these traits observed in your Linkedin profile? Experts state that it’s via the following elements:

• Your profile picture.
• The way you present yourself and the way you talk about yourself. In addition, how you explain who you are, what you’re looking for, and what your expectations are.
• The languages you speak.
• Your multiple contacts in the Linkedin network itself.

Conscientiousness, your ability to be responsible and task-oriented

What your Linkedin profile says about your personality goes beyond your set of studies, experiences, and skills. It also displays your ability to comply with rules and tasks, your self-control, and your desire for work.

Conscientiousness is another variable highly appreciated by recruiters. To see if you possess it, they’ll look at the following:

• Any accredited certificates you possess and the way you expose them.
• Skills you describe and how you present them.
• Order, detail, and thoroughness in the writing of your resume and presentation.
• Whether or not you add any accreditations to demonstrate any relevant courses you’ve undertaken.

Your degree of extroversion

Extroversion is another variable that appears in the taxonomy or classification of personality traits of the Big Five. It measures sociability and energy and if you’re more lonely or reserved. To see how you score on this scale, employers will look at:

• Whether you practice a team sport.
• If you possess leadership experience or not.
• What the size is of your social network.
• Any added complementary experiences (hobbies, skills, etc.).

Kindness, the cooperative candidate

Can you appreciate, perceive, intuit the kindness of a person on the contents of their cv? It certainly seems that what your Linkedin profile says about your personality includes this factor.

In fact, your ability to collaborate with others, be altruistic, supportive, and considerate can all be observed via the following variables:

• The solidarity or volunteer activities you specify. These are highly valued and always taken into account by employers.
• Whether you reflect competencies such as “teamwork”  in your listed skills.

Can the neurotic or less neurotic person be identified in a Linkedin profile?

This could be the golden question. Can the neurotic personality be identified on Linked In via a cv? Neuroticism, within the model of the big five, defines the person who scores highly on the neuroticism scale as being more emotionally insecure. Also, they tend to suffer higher levels of anxiety, worry more, or experience increased feelings of guilt, etc.

Therefore, is it possible to identify a more stable and less neurotic candidate? The truth is that this is the variable that showed the lowest correlation. For this reason, it seems that it’s really not easy to deduce this psychological trait. In fact, in order to analyze it, the messages that the prospective candidate publicizes would need to be studied, as well as the way in which they interact on the social network itself.

Nevertheless, it’s extremely interesting to think about these facts when you fill in your data on this or similar social networks. Because it seems that when an employer’s looking for someone with talent, they don’t just look at training and experience.

Finally, in this open market of offers and demands, you must design your own billboard. Try to always be sincere, appealing, and reveal precisely what you want to in order to sell yourself.