LinkedIn allows you to share your experience, skills, and qualifications with future employers, while also allowing you to build and interact with your network and grow your brand as a professional. Here are some strategies, tools and tips that can put you one step closer to a new job – or new career.
Make yourself memorable with great stories
Recruiters and Hiring Managers are like anyone else – they respond to story-telling rather than just lists of facts. Plus, research shows that stories can aid memory. So telling a good story or two in your LinkedIn profile could make you more memorable to recruiters. For each job you post on your profile, don’t simply state your responsibilities. Weave an interesting tale about your successes in the job. Most important, explain the problems and how you solved them, especially if you came up with creative solutions to important challenges. Keep your narrative concise; a lengthy story could be a turnoff to busy recruiters.
Know your audience – and what keywords will get their attention
As you craft your LinkedIn profile, think about who will be reading it – likely other professionals and recruiters in your industry. What will those people specifically want to see in a job candidate? Are certain technical skills the most important? Or certain experiences or qualities? To help figure out the answers to these questions, follow a similar process to the one you would when writing or tailoring your CV. Pull up a few job descriptions for the type of job you have or would like to have. Take a look at what they keep talking about, common themes, what seems to matter to these employers. Think about which ones apply to you and your experience and which specific words and phrases are being used to describe them: These are your keywords. They’re likely what recruiters are searching for when they’re looking for people like you.
Follow the companies you’re interested in
Stay up to date on the industry news, participate in conversations, and learn about new job opportunities. Among the people who found jobs in three months or less, 91% used LinkedIn company pages for research. It could also help to follow key people from these companies – they might post updates or blogs pertaining to the company.
Complete your profile
LinkedIn’s algorithm rewards users with complete profiles. You’re far more likely to show up in search results with a complete profile. LinkedIn assigns different strengths to profiles based on their completeness, and there’s a massive advantage to being at the highest strength, “All-Star”. Recruiters and Hiring Managers are going to look at your profile whether you apply for their jobs on LinkedIn or anywhere else. A barebones profile doesn’t make a great impression. Plus, each section is an opportunity to add more keywords and tell a compelling story. Why pass that kind of opportunity up when you’re job searching?.
Message LinkedIn recruiters
Reach out to a few relevant recruiters to give yourself more chances of hearing about relevant job openings. Don’t randomly write to 100 recruiters; find a couple of recruiters who specialise in your industry, type of role, and city/area. You can also turn on LinkedIn Open to Work to let recruiters know that you’re open to job offers or connection requests in general (without your current employer seeing). Recruiters won’t conduct your whole job search for you, and it’s a big mistake to talk to a few recruiters and then sit back, relax, and wait for them to do everything for you. But it’s still a great idea to have a few recruiter conversations so they’re working behind the scenes to find a few relevant job opportunities while you also conduct your own job search.
More than 30 million companies are represented by LinkedIn business profiles, with more than 20 million job-listings posted per year. You don’t need to spend hours on the network each day to make your profile work for you; by simply maintaining current, specific data on your professional acumen, you’ll help recruiters and potential clients search you out.
If you’re looking for some exciting new career opportunities, make sure you click through to our job section.
