Everyone dreams of having a top employer contact them about a job opening. The constant rejection that comes with job search is so intense, when you finally get an email or a call from a hiring manager, there’s a feeling of euphoria. This makes knowing how to decrease the rejection and increase the success rate a valuable skill.

2 Things on LinkedIn Will Help You Get More Interviews

Understanding how to optimize your LinkedIn profile is one of the smartest things a job seeker can do today. The following are two immediate steps you can take to systematically get in front of more recruiters.

Step 1: Use Generic Job Titles

LinkedIn is currently the number one tool used by recruiters to identify potential candidates for their jobs. Many recruiters pay fee to have access to a tool on LinkedIn that lets them search for candidates who match specific job titles. That’s why using their standard job titles is so important. For example, let’s say your background is in sales. Sales Representative or Account Manager are two generic titles recruiters will search for. Which means, if you put down Biz Dev Guru or Client Relations Manager, you’re less likely to show up in the top of their search results.

Step 2: Increase the Endorsement of Your Skill Sets

The endorsement section of your LinkedIn profile indicates how many of your professional peers have vouched for your expertise in a certain skill set. The more endorsements you have for a skill, the higher you could rank in the search results of a recruiter. For example, using the salesperson example again, if you have only 5 endorsements for sales skill set, but someone else has 20, who do you think will come up in the results as a better match?

P.S. – There’s one new LinkedIn feature that can help you jump to the top of the list.

Optimizing your LinkedIn profile with generic job titles and getting more endorsements for key skill sets will help you show up in more recruiter searches. But, there’s one new feature on LinkedIn that will literally put you towards the top of the pile. It’s the “I’m Open” privacy setting. When turned on, it indicates you are interested in job opportunities. Why is this so good to do? Well, out of the over 500 million users of LinkedIn, currently only 12 million have turned on this feature. The sooner you flip the switch, the quicker you’ll move up in search results!