There’s no tool more powerful than LinkedIn when searching for a job.
With over thirty five million members and a network that includes everyone from ground level employees to Fortune 100 CEOs, you’re really missing out if you’re not taking full advantage of the power of LinkedIn.
If you’re looking for a job, here are the most important things you need to know about LinkedIn.
How Recommendations Work
Recommendations are professional “testimonials” for you written by other people who have a professional relationship with you.
These recommendations can be from past employers, past managers or even from people you’ve managed in the past. You can also get recommendations from big clients you worked with.
The goal of recommendations is to give prospective employers more of a sense of who you are and to build credibility.
Both the quality of your recommendations and the quantity matter. Someone with 10 recommendations looks a lot more solid than someone with just one or two.
A good recommendation should be one that’s very specific about the qualities that they liked about you when they worked with you, these qualities also support your brand.
LinkedIn’s “Company Profiles”
LinkedIn has many company finding capabilities that can lead you to job opportunities you may never have thought of yourself.
For example, let’s say you’re a programmer in the San Francisco area.
By going to the “Company Profiles” area of LinkedIn, you can find out the job history of everyone who works at a certain company.
Using this feature, you can compile a giant list of all the companies in your area that hire people like you.
You can also use the “Company Profiles” feature to see where people go after they leave that company. This can be very useful for finding companies that are hiring right now.
In other words, if you notice that a lot of people are leaving firms in your area to join a certain firm and it all happened in the last 3 months, that might be a very good company to contact and see if they have openings.
Getting the Foot In the Door
LinkedIn will tell you exactly how “close” you are to other people on LinkedIn. It does these through degrees of separations.
You can find out if anyone in your network works in companies that you might want to work for. It can also tell you if you know anyone who knows anyone in companies you’d like to work for.
Using the degrees of separation feature, you can easily find people who can help get you through the job hiring process.
These are some of the most important things every job seeker needs to know about using LinkedIn for job search. LinkedIn is one of the most powerful and essential tools for finding a job in today’s job market.
If you’re on Linkedin, let’s connect.
If you’re not and would like a little help setting up your profile contact, send me (Theresa) an email – I’ll help set you up.
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