Your LinkedIn profile is kind of like a window to your soul… 👀 just kidding! This isn’t a philosophical article. 😜 Nonetheless, adding volunteer experience LinkedIn can say a lot about you.
I’m here to give you all the tips on how to have the best optimized profile and how to make use of it the fullest! 🚀
Continue reading this article to know more. 👇
Why add a Volunteering Experience In Your Resume or LinkedIn Profile?
Let me start by telling you a little story… 👵
A few years ago, I was asking a friend of mine what did she do to get this really nice position at a big international company. I was intrigued, because I was applying for a position there myself at the time. She told me that there were a lot of interviews involved. 😬
You know the drill, right? First, the call with the HR, then the Zoom meeting with the manager & another colleague, and then the final one with the director/CEO!
We’ve all been there, and each one is even more nerve-wracking than the other, haha (*nervous laugh*). 😅 Well, it turns out that the last interview, the one with the director a.k.a. the one that was going to be the final decision, was the one that made her get the job! 💪
Apparently, he was torn between two ideal candidates, my friend and another guy… But, guess what made him choose her? It was the fact that she added a key volunteer experience LinkedIn to her resume. 😁
She participated in a CISV camp and so did he, when he was younger! (if you don’t know what it is, you can look it up here.) Apparently, it was such a great experience for him, and he learned so much from it that it was one of the main topics of their conversation upon meeting. 🤲
He asked her what she enjoyed the most about it, what lessons she learned there, if she kept in contact with the people she met there, etc. So this was a bonding topic for them, and the fact that they had the same volunteering experience in common made him choose her, over the other candidate who had the same hard skills as her. 👏
👉 That’s why soft skills, interests, and hobbies can also be a decisive factor when recruiting new members to any company! 🤗
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How to Add Volunteer Experience LinkedIn?
You can add volunteer experience on your LinkedIn profile this way:
- Go to your profile and click on “Add section” button and then, click on “Volunteer experience”.
- A pop-up window will appear, you need to fill in the “Add volunteer experience” sections and click “Save”.
💡 Here are a few excellent practices to consider:
- Your volunteer experience should, ideally, be tied to your professional experience (though that isn’t required!). For example, if you work in technology, you may state you “volunteered as a software developer at the Red Cross.” 👨⚕️
- Be precise about your roles and duties. Any numbers or statistics should be included. For instance, how much money you raised for them, the results of your charity effort, etc. 💰
- Include everything you’ve learned, and pay special attention to soft skills (like I said before! 👀). Empathy, personal development, leadership, and interpersonal skills are important in any workplace.
Even if you don’t follow this approach, it’s worth mentioning that listing volunteer experience LinkedIn is a good idea. That’s as long as the information is correct and factual. 🤔
As you know by now, LinkedIn is the biggest B2B network there is, that’s why you should use it and make the best of if! ⚡
Where To Put Volunteering Experience on LinkedIn?
Good job! 👏 Now that the new “Volunteer experience” section is published, it will appear between “Education” and “Skills & endorsements” in your LinkedIn profile.
Bonus tip: you can also add “Causes” at the bottom of your LinkedIn profile, to dig even deeper into your volunteering work. You will find it under your “Interests” section. 😉
👉 According to this LinkedIn announcement, “Volunteer Experience and Causes” are as important as work experiences for your profile:
“In fact, 41 percent of the professionals that LinkedIn surveyed stated that when they are evaluating candidates, they consider volunteer work equally valuable as paid work experience. Twenty percent of the hiring managers surveyed agree they have made a hiring decision based on a candidate’s volunteer work experience.”
Now you know why it’s relevant to have volunteer experience in your LinkedIn profile! 😌
Volunteer Experience LinkedIn Profile Examples
As I mentioned previously in this article, if you add your volunteer experience LinkedIn, it may help you polish up your profile and take it to the next level. 💯
To understand how to use your summary part in combination with your volunteer section, in order to improve your whole LinkedIn profile, look at these summary examples below. 👇
Furthermore, let’s have a look at two LinkedIn volunteer work examples from influencers and thought leaders who know how to do it well. 🤩
- First up, we have Oprah Winfrey 💜, which we all know is a famous TV host, actress, writer, and philanthropist:
She has a very extensive “About” her section, which details the volunteer work she has done and the projects she is working on. As the name “Summary” suggests, it summarizes all her skills and experiences in one place. 😏
- Secondly, we have “Bob” he’s a fictional character 😂, but he is a volunteer for the Red Cross and this is his “Volunteer experience” section on LinkedIn:
As you can see, he has a wide variety of experiences in the volunteering field. 😇 Therefore, he really detailed each experience in order to let the visitors of his profile know what his missions were and how he collaborated for each NGO. 🙏
💡 These are just a few examples of how you can optimize your LinkedIn profile using the “About” and the “Volunteer experience” sections. This will make it more appealing for visitors, and it will attract recruiters your way! 🧲
How To Add Volunteering to CV?
On LinkedIn, a volunteer experience section functions in the same manner as it does on your CV. 👌
In other words, it’s absolutely optional, yet it might help you land a job. 🎯
It’s also a terrific approach for a candidate to stand out. It demonstrates that you care about your community and go out of your way to serve others without expecting anything in return. 🙌
Volunteering can help you improve your work prospects in addition to making the world a better place. What’s not to like about that? 😍
We already saw how to add your volunteer experience LinkedIn, so now let’s take a look at how to add volunteer experience to your CV with the example below. ⚡
Usually, volunteering experiences go at the bottom of your resume or CV, under your profile description and your education information. 👩🎓 Remember to add contact details, social media links if necessary, your soft and hard skills, hobbies, languages or any other relevant interests as well! ⭐
Your volunteering experiences should be as detailed as possible, using these elements: 👇
- Position you held, “Receptionist/Day Chair”, in this case.
- Period, you volunteered on “July 2016 – June 2016”.
- Location “Boston” and the name “Columbus State University” of the organization.
- List of the missions you performed and the results of your help.
There you have it! 🙂
Bonus tip: if you want to add your CV page inside your LinkedIn profile, so recruiters can download it easily, then you can do it by following the steps in this article! 🚀
Where To Add Volunteering on a Resume?
💪 Volunteering can, fortunately, quickly translate into leadership abilities, which can be extremely beneficial in the workplace.
💁♀️ Volunteering experience may not always equate to work experience. However, along with internships, it’s the next best thing.
Alternatively, it might be quite beneficial if your volunteer experience:
- Is relevant to your profession or career. 👩🚀
- Balances out your little paid experiences or little work experiences. ⚖
- Fills in a gap in your professional experiences. 🧐
Thus, it’s reasonable to conclude that volunteering experience on your resume or LinkedIn profile is beneficial. 🔥
Furthermore, if you want your CV to stand-out event more when you post it to LinkedIn, then you can add it in carousel format! 👀 If you don’t know what it is, we have prepared this article in order to give you all the information you need to know.
💫 To upload your CV to your LinkedIn profile, you can just follow these simple steps:
- Go to the “Featured” section in your profile page,
- Click on the “+” button to the right,
- Go to “Media” and click “+” button again to add it.
- A pop-up will appear to “Add media”,
- Add a title and a description if required,
- And lastly, click on “Save”.
That’s it, your CV will be featured in your LinkedIn profile! 💥
Afterwards, you can “Edit it” by using the “pencil” button in the “Featured” section, and you can move it around to the first place too, in order to make it the first thing that pops out in your LinkedIn profile page. 😉
Below, we will see where and how to get volunteer experience LinkedIn, so you can apply all of these tips! 👇
How To Find Volunteering Work on LinkedIn?
Using LinkedIn’s search platform, networking, and reaching out to appropriate volunteering positions is a practical way to find volunteering experience. 💪
Here’s how to do it! 🤗
If you want to find volunteer opportunities on LinkedIn, you should:
- Define your role and the field in which you want to volunteer.
- In the LinkedIn Jobs search, type “volunteer writer” for example.
- Then, use the “Job Type” filter to narrow down your results to “Volunteer”.
Bonus tip: you can also turn on the Alert for any new positions available for this specific search by clicking on the option “Set alert” under the Job filters. 👇
You’ll find plenty of nonprofits and businesses asking for volunteers this way. 👍
However, if you’ve ever tried to discover meaningful volunteer experience employment, you know that the process may be just as difficult as obtaining a paid job. 🥴
So hang in there! 🙏
After you do your research on LinkedIn, you can browse over the employment requirements (some are paid, some are not) and get ready to approach them using LinkedIn outreach best practices, and/or an automation tool like Waalaxy. ⚡
Conclusion
Whether you’re seeking for volunteer work experience to make a difference or just want to know how to add your volunteer experience LinkedIn, you came to the right place. 👌
You should be proud of yourself for making a difference and assisting others. Hopefully, the next hiring manager who looks over your LinkedIn profile will see this as well. 😍
To sum up, these are the questions we answered here:
- Why add a Volunteering Experience In Your Resume or LinkedIn Profile?
- How to Add Volunteer Experience LinkedIn?
- Where To Put Volunteering Experience on LinkedIn?
- Volunteer Experience LinkedIn Profile Examples
- How To Add Volunteering to CV?
- Where To Add Volunteering on a Resume?
- Find Volunteering Work on LinkedIn
- How to Get Relevant Volunteering Experience For LinkedIn?
- Get LinkedIn Endorsements and Recommendations
- Highlight Your Leadership Skills
In addition, you can always improve your LinkedIn profile by following these simple tips on how to heat up your account. 🔥
The end! 👽
PS: We’re hiring! For more info, visit our Welcome to the jungle page! 😙
FAQ of Volunteer Experience LinkedIn
How to Get Relevant Volunteering Experience LinkedIn?
If you want to help your NGO be more developed on the internet, specifically on LinkedIn, then you can use LinkedIn for Nonprofits, which offers a solution to this problem. 😉
Successful NGOs, according to LinkedIn, are built on a foundation of active communities: community members they need to contact, organizations with whom they want to partner, people willing to help, and online networking. 🌍
Therefore, LinkedIn for Nonprofits offers considerable discounts on most of its products, including Talent, Fundraising, Marketing, and Learning solutions, to eligible organizations to assist them achieve their aim of saving money. 💸
How To Get LinkedIn Endorsements and Recommendations?
“Skills & endorsements” is a section you can add to your LinkedIn page, in order for people to vote on the assets that you have. You can add up to 50 skills and people can vote on each one of them. 👍
This gives more credibility to the skills that you say you have! 🙂
“Recommendations” are also a form of endorsement on LinkedIn, but this is more personalized. Normally, you can ask colleagues from work or from school to write a little paragraph about you, what they liked the most from working with you, etc. ✍
You cannot choose who or what is written about you, but you can hide any undesirable recommendation. As well as giving one in return too! 🤝
These elements in your LinkedIn profile, can really help you make a difference and will capture even more the attention of a recruiter that visits your profile page. 🧐
👉 Check out this article on how to endorse on LinkedIn if you want to know more tips about this!
Highlight Your Leadership Skills
As we covered in this article, volunteering can help you stand out on your resume and LinkedIn profile by highlighting your own values, leadership abilities, and initiative. ⭐
They exude qualities that practically every recruiting manager and CEO admires, such as:
- Ability to lead.
- Teamwork.
- Leadership.
- Compassion.
- Empathy.
- Interpersonal abilities.
- Self-motivation.
- Honesty.
- And many more.
So if you were wondering whether you should include volunteer experience on your LinkedIn profile, the short answer is “Yes”. 😍
In conclusion, everyone will appreciate the fact that you showed your volunteer experience LinkedIn and that you went out of your way in helping your community. 🤲
Remember, this could be the deciding factor in getting you hired! 💫
