Have you ever done volunteer jobs in your life? Do you want to know how to add volunteer experience to LinkedIn? Are you curious about why you should add this kind of experience to your profile?
Volunteer experience can get you hired! Yes, experiences, skills, and education are still very important, but as New York Times claims in its LinkedIn survey, 41% of the employers said that they prefer to hire applicants with volunteering experiences in their resume and/or LinkedIn profile.
Since volunteer experiences are the perfect highlights of your characteristics and personal values, if not, consider leadership skills.
In fact, you are demonstrating your leadership skills, teamwork capabilities, passion, responsible, self-motivation, etc., and all of these qualities are very interesting and attractive in one person.
So if you are doubtful about adding any volunteer experience to your profile, let me say, just add it!
How to add volunteer experience to LinkedIn?
Now let’s talk about how to add volunteer experience to LinkedIn, shall we?
- log into your LinkedIn account
- open your profile
- click on the “Add Profile Section”
- click on the “Additional” bar
- select “Add Volunteering Experiences”
- enter the required information in the pop-out window
- hit Save
Why should you add volunteering experiences to your LinkedIn?
To add volunteer experience to LinkedIn, first click on the "Me" icon at the top of the LinkedIn homepage and select "View profile." Then, scroll down to the "Experience" section and click the "+" icon to add a new experience. Select "Volunteer Experience" from the dropdown menu and enter the relevant information, such as the name of the organization, your role, the dates of your experience, and a description of your work. Click "Save" to add your volunteer experience to your LinkedIn profile.
There are many benefits to doing so. As we said, many employers prefer job seekers with volunteer experiences more than the ones who never had them.
Since it shows you as a responsible person who minds the welfare of his/her society, it can directly mention your leadership skills.
Now, leadership is one of the most attractive skills for recruiters.
Volunteer experiences are not necessarily considered job experiences.
Yet they are the nearest thing to a job after internships. Besides, it can be very helpful if the volunteering is related to the job you are applying for.
Also, it can help you a lot if you have very little experience or even none or if there is a long gap in your work experience history for any reason.
- It’s best to have volunteer experiences that are totally related to your experiences section (don’t have that? who cares, unrelated ones are still so good!).
- For instance, if you work in the agriculture industry, you can add that one experience you had as a volunteer agriculture engineer at an NGO that wants to save the human species from starvation.
- Tell people about your responsibilities in these experiences and be precise. Try to bring data and provide reliable stats. For example, how much money you could collect for that NGO, what were your accomplishments, etc.
- Tell people what skills you’ve developed during those experiences.
The relevant or the irrelevant is the question.
As mentioned, the most ideal volunteer experiences are the ones that are relevant to the industry you are working in. Many people ask where to find these volunteer positions, and the answer is LinkedIn and so many other NGOs and organizations.
There are many volunteer positions available all around the world, everywhere. There is no shortage of volunteer opportunities; the truth is that there is always a shortage of volunteers! Just take a look around your house to find them.
There are Soup kitchens, Red Cross, NGOs, etc. no matter where you live, charities and non-profitable organizations are always around.
All you needed to know was that volunteering can get you hired and how to add volunteer experience to LinkedIn by adding it to its relevant section. So if you’ve ever done some volunteer jobs, it’s time to add them to your profile.
Attract recruiters to your direction by a complete profile. And that’s a wrap-up!