Guru said, “Your title/headline is the first thing recruiters will see about your profile.”
It is true indeed. The first thing that recruiters see when they see your profile on the recruiters’ panel of a job-site is the title or headline of your profile.
Most jobsites put the maximum word limit of 250 words when you write the title of the profile. So you have 250 words to write the most effective headline possible. If you are able to write the most effective headline then it will break the clutter and catch the attention of a recruiter. It is just like when you see an advertisement on television, your attention is caught by that advertisement if its tagline is good. For instance, one of the most famous advertisements in the history of advertisements is the ad of Apple’s Macintosh computers when they were launched in 1984. The tagline of this ad was: Why 1984 won’t be like 1984. This ad, even after so many years, is still remembered because of its unique tagline.
But writing a profile headline is much more technical than writing the tagline of an advertisement. The first thing to remember is to use all the 250 words that are allotted by the jobsite for creating the profile. Most candidates do not use all the words and have headlines as short as of 50 words. This indicates that most candidates do not realize the importance of profile headlines.
The second thing to remember is that headline should have as many keywords as possible. Keywords are common words that recruiters use when searching for candidates for a particular job profile. For instance, if the job profile is for a software engineer, common keywords can be software, JAVA etc.