How to use Linkedin so the jobs come to you (Part One)

By HiroProtagonist

Are you:

• Actively job hunting?
• Looking for a career change, or simply trying to make a change of scenery job-wise?
• Frustrated with the lack of leads from Monster, Dice, CareerBuilder, USAJobs or other sites?
• Already on Linkedin but hopelessly bewildered by the site and have no idea how to leverage it to get you (not just help you, but actually get you) a job?

Then, this post is for you.

Linkedin is arguably the best professional development tool at your disposal when it comes to job-hunting today. Leveraging it correctly, you can have recruiters and employers cold-calling you to secure your candidacy for open positions. 

Although there's a not-insignificant amount of initial effort required to get to the point where you have people recruiting you instead of the other way around, once you put in that time, you'll find that the reach of your resume almost takes on a life of its own, doing the majority of the work to market you, your skills, and your experience through sheer momentum.

So Who's This Guy?

I'm in my late twenties and have been exclusively using Linkedin for job hunting since shortly after I graduated from college. Before that, I had about a half dozen different profiles on as many job websites, and despite having a polished up resume posted on every single one, the only emails I ever got were from the websites themselves, telling me about new jobs being posted. Very early on in my career, I was lucky enough to work with a guy twenty years older who told me about Linkedin and what I could do there that would guarantee a ton of interest in having me as a candidate, and probably more than a few job offers.

Prior to that point in my life, while I had a Linkedin profile already, it was almost bare-bones; Linkedin was sort of a professional tchotchke to me, with little real practical use. At first I was a little skeptical--how could what amounted to a myspace for professionals actually help me? Did that many people really have a Linkedin profile anyway?

Well, as it happened, I was ready to move on from that job anyway, so I took my coworker's advice and spent about a week's worth of work laying the necessary groundwork on Linkedin. By the end of that week, I had over fifteen email exchanges going with recruiters, most of whom had contacted me first. A week after that, I had three interviews for my top choices of the available opportunities. In another two weeks, I had a conditional offer on the table for the position that I liked the most out of the bunch.

Although it took another three weeks for me to be hired there due to internal pressures not related to me, my experience using Linkedin to find a job thoroughly sold me on it as a much more successful avenue for job-hunting among the available alternatives.

Since then, I've had a lot of time to figure out what works on Linkedin, what doesn't, and why. I've successfully applied the techniques in this OP to help a number of close friends and relatives boost their success in finding a job through Linkedin. And now, I sincerely hope that I can help to launch hundreds of goons into shiny new jobs while empowering them to make their own career choices, rather than having the choice of hunting for a new job largely influenced by their employer whims or workplace pressures.


Finding a job on Linkedin WILL require you to put in effort.

You must be willing to put in the time required to establish connections, join and participate in groups, and fill out your profile/professional experience, at least in the beginning, or you will not have the desired success. There are no shortcuts here. The good news is that I believe wholeheartedly that putting in this effort on Linkedin will have a far greater return on that investment than any other jobs website.

• Fill out your profile to the maximum extent possible to get that 100% completion mark.
  
  This might be one that many people would ignore, because it seems trivial and meaningless. Linkedin actually has your profile completion %-age factor into your visibility in search results. At one point, it would tell you that up front--I'm not sure if it does any more. Regardless, fill it all out completely and to a professional degree of quality. It's your online face--make sure you don't do the equivalent of wearing jorts to an interview. This includes having a good and professional picture: don't upload a picture of you doing a keg stand at that party last Saturday or hanging out on a beach somewhere.
  
  Recruiters and employers will judge you, sometimes harshly, on how they perceive your profile picture. I have heard anecdotal accounts of conditional job offers being withdrawn when the prospective employee's picture communicated an unprofessional tone. It may not be fair, but it can definitely happen, and we all pre-judge people to a certain extent anyway.
  
  The other usual tips for general picture-taking also apply: higher quality cameras take higher quality (i.e. all around better) pictures, etc. One partial exception to taking "casual" pictures that I've found on Linkedin is that candid-looking pictures get a more positive reception than posed pictures. To get a sense of what I mean, instead of simply posing for a picture in an office for example, it'd be better to get a more candid-looking picture that looks like you just happened to have a picture taken while standing in an office. Smile, be friendly and engaging in your picture and look professional.
  
  Pictures are the first and potentially the most significant impression, but I'll try and give more profile tips that I've found to be useful and informative later in the OP. For now, it's enough to say that your profile should be complete, accurate, of professional quality, and include a good, professional-looking picture. 
• Linkedin is not Facebook, and the people who use it are not your friends--when in doubt, send connection requests.
  
  Linkedin is all about professional networking and human interaction, not making friends and socializing. Like real life, getting a job is all about who you know. Linkedin facilitates that to an incredible degree by making it easy and quick to both find and accept useful professional connections. The key individuals who are sponsoring and recruiting for those job openings are often so busy that they would never in a million years have the time to do that networking if it were done face-to-face. With Linkedin though, all you have to do is click, click, click.
  
  When in doubt, send a connection request (if it's possible). You never know who just might someday happen to be working at the company you want to apply to, or heading up the division that's expanding its team and needs a new member. At an absolute minimum, you will expand your reach and visibility with every new contact you make.
  
  Since this comes up occasionally, I should mention that nobody will think it's weird to receive an unsolicited connection request. In fact, that's the way Linkedin usually works. In the vast majority of cases, it's not required nor necessary to explain to someone why you'd like to connect. Send requests, send them often.
• Groups are your friend, join them.
  
  Linkedin has thousands and thousands of professional groups, in a huge variety of fields and disciplines. Join the ones that are relevant to the type of job you want to get, starting with the largest groups. You can find these groups by searching every key word you can think of in the search bar that is associated with your desired job title (Google around if you need ideas, or are less familiar with the field).
  
  When searching for groups, don't use jargon unless you only want to find jobs in a highly specialized area of expertise. Also be aware of differences in regional and national dialects. A very basic example: in the field of government contracting, a "bid" in the UK is a formal submission to a government contracting officer in response to a "tender." In the US, the same thing would be referred to as a "proposal" in response to a government-issued "solicitation," while bid is a term used more informally. A British expat looking to find a job in the US doing similar work might run into a few stumbling blocks unless they're aware of the differences in dialect.
  
  Note about groups: most Linkedin groups' discussion areas are full of poo poo posting and/or resemble an echo chamber for industry marketing types. Don't worry about it, and join those groups anyway. There will certainly be interesting or informative postings in the more active and better moderated groups, but unless you care about socializing more than finding a job (and that's legitimate, too), don't feel the need to participate. It can help you to make intelligent, thoughtful posts in the more visible groups, but it's by no means required and joining the group is all that's necessary to get access to the Jobs board, which is what you really care about.
  
  The reason that groups are Very Important is because they are the initial avenue to reaching your target audience while job-hunting. Recruiters will be members of the more active groups because those groups tend to have many more postings on their Jobs board, ensuring steady demand and constant eyes on any listing they post. Besides the obvious benefits for you as a prospective candidate, the other huge advantage of being in the same group as recruiters is somewhat less obvious. Without getting too much into how or why, Linkedin facilitates making new connections if you share the same group. More profile information is generally available to group peers, and on top of that, any keyword searches (a recruiter searching for potential candidates by required skills or experience, for example) will return the most "relevant" Linkedin profiles closer to the top of the results. "Most relevant" in this case meaning the results with the most complete set of information available, which due to most peoples' visibility settings will either be their 1st (direct) or 2nd (shared group or connection) degree connections. This is a prime reason that having connections is a prerequisite for effective job searching. 
• Connections are required if you want the jobs to come to you.
  
  Although ideally you will (eventually) be a 1st degree connection of a good number of recruiters, there will always be others circulating about out there and the number one way they will happen across your profile is through being listed in their search results because you have a group in common.
  
  The Jobs board of a group is what gets most of the attention, and will also most likely require the most maintenance on your part while you're actively searching for a job. The simplest method is posting a short and to the point message on the board with a one sentence description of your experience with a note mentioning that you're looking for new opportunities and encouraging readers to check out your profile. Don't post an email yet, that will just invite spam.
  
  If you're concerned about potentially alerting a present employer that you're looking elsewhere, you may only be comfortable with perusing the currently available job postings. This is a perfectly productive method as well, but you'll want to take the additional step of sending Linkedin connection requests to all of the people posting job listings, even if you aren't interested in the particular job they've posted. That way, you'll accomplish getting into their pool of potential candidates, in the hopes of receiving future opportunities that are potentially much more interesting as they pop up without having to monitor every single Jobs board necessarily.
  
  Make sure new connections you make with recruiters know that the lines of communication are open by sending an introductory message. You can include this message in the connection request, but I don't necessarily recommend that, as it can be missed; instead, send a follow up message after your contact accepts.
  
  As far as content is concerned, I recommend just using a copy and paste form letter to save time, it need not be more elaborate than "Hi [NAME], I just wanted to send you a quick note to let you know that I'm current looking for a new position and if you would please contact me at [EMAIL], I would be happy to email you my resume and review any positions you currently need filled. Thanks, [YOURNAME]" or some variation on that. In general, follow the guidelines of keeping it short (no more than 3-4 sentences) and professional.
• Get recommendations from friends, past or present co-workers or supervisors, and especially other recruiters.
  
  The last part of that sentence is the most important, but I'll get to that in a moment. On Linkedin, "Recommendations" are actual written professional references that are displayed on your profile. Unless it's changed since I created my profile, Linkedin initially requests you to get 3 different recommendations in order to reach 100% profile completion. This is the first and most immediate reason to get them, however it could never hurt to get more. You'll probably find that it's easiest and quickest to get a couple friends or close coworkers to do this, initially. In general, the more recently given it is, the better. Eventually however, you'll want to get at least one recommendation from a recruiter, which brings us to the most important point here.
  
  Because it is vitally important to their professional success, recruiters tend to be the best networkers in the class. You can leverage that existing network to increase your own visibility with a little help. After a period of time, you'll likely form some decent working relationships with recruiters, whether or not you receive any offers of employment in the process.
  
  Ask one or two of your favorite recruiters to write you a quick recommendation on Linkedin. Most would be happy to do so, and you should return the favor in kind as well. This helps you tap into their existing network of connections, which is a boon for job-hunters through dramatically increasing the visibility of their profile.
  
  The way this works is, on Linkedin, a connection's recommendations of others are visible on the profile of the recommending user. It doesn't matter if you are connected to the recommended individual. When a recruiter recommends you, every single person who visits that recruiter's Linkedin profile has a chance to see your name and click on your profile. Recruiters are the most popular people on Linkedin in terms of traffic and activity, so getting a recommendation from a recruiter is exponentially more effective than others through simple numbers. Playing that numbers game long enough will pay dividends in the form of job opportunities. Essentially, it's free self-promotion without any further effort required.
  
  In my opinion, getting at least one recommendation from a recruiter is absolutely essential.
  
  As a brief side note, Linkedin recently added another feature called "Endorsements" which is mostly useless and dumb, so don't confuse it with recommendations. I encourage you to bury the Endorsements feature on your profile as much as you can. If someone can explain to me how it's useful beyond simply playing a version of Pokemon on Linkedin ("Liked-in?"), I'd love to hear it.
• Add your contacts from Outlook, Gmail, and any other services that you use.
  
  I can understand some people's reluctance to link their personal email to their professional presence on Linkedin, but there's no reason not to import your corporate email contacts. The reasoning for adding corporate email contacts is fairly straightforward and doesn't require any elaboration.
  
  While concern about importing personal email contacts is understandable, in the absence of an overriding reason not to, I would highly encourage everyone to do it. Personal references and relationships are the smoothest and least difficult path to find and be offered jobs. Merging your personal and professional contacts in order to centralize your professional life in one place, i.e. Linkedin, also makes sense for many reasons.
  
  A centralized online professional presence allows you to maintain a single set of information that is as up to date as you'd like, rather than updating the same information in many different profiles maintained independently around the internet. Any of your friends or relatives who use Linkedin on a regular basis will also see your updates and changes, potentially alerting them to consider you for an upcoming or currently open opportunity.
  
  I can't speak for the iPhone, but the Android app for Linkedin essentially makes it a virtual Rolodex for the new age, with connections accessible through Google's phone search, which I find convenient when needed.
  
  As far as any potential consequences of associating Linkedin with your Google account, I can only give my personal impressions; but, by all appearances, it doesn't seem that Linkedin gets associated with your Google account any more than is absolutely necessary to import your Gmail contacts and nothing further. There are quite a few privacy options available through Linkedin if that kind of thing makes you skittish. You also have the option to revoke Linkedin's access at any time, even immediately after importing your contacts from Gmail.

Editors note: I’ll post the step by step tips tomorrow on how to put YOUR Linkedin job creation plan into action. So stay tuned for more!

This post originally appeared here:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3531540