How to improve your chances to get a job through LinkedIn
LinkedIn is now the pre-eminent platform for business and professional people, with over 810 million people in 200 countries using the platform
by Russell White
It’s mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful, and to achieve this goal it has developed a range of products to help potential employers find people for their jobs. Equally its platform allows people to flag that they are seeking a new role, giving them the option to show they are ‘Open To Work’, to people who have bought their recruitment products or to a wider audience.
Many recruiters, like Future Work, as well as in-house recruiters and talent acquisition specialists use the recruitment tools, known as LinkedIn Recruiter or Recruiter Lite. It allows us to carry out pinpoint searches of potential job seekers, who match the requirements of the role and allow us to communicate directly through the platform.
If you are actively seeking a new role there are a number of things you can do to improve your chances of being contacted and considered for a new opportunity.
1. Build Out Your Profile
The more information you have in your profile the more likely you are going to be contacted.
· Have an up to date profile picture
· In the ‘About’ section write a summary of your career to date. LinkedIn allows you to use 2,600 characters for this but don’t feel obliged to use all of them. Short and succinct works just as well!
· Add your job roles and a summary of your skills and experience (using key words). It is not a ‘Cut and Paste’ of your CV but an outline of your experience.
· Add your Skills and get Endorsements. Add your skills, e.g. SEO, and then seek endorsements from your network. The easiest way to get endorsed is to endorse other people in your network and ask them to reciprocate. The importance of this is when recruiters are searching for candidates the platform matches these with the recruiter’s search string. The more endorsements, the higher you will appear in search results.
· Follow Companies and Individuals. Their posts will appear in your timeline and allow you to interact with them by commenting on posts, thereby increasing your engagement with on LinkedIn.
· Finally customise your LinkedIn Profile URL
2. Engage With The Platform
There are a number of ways to engage.
· Firstly build your network and connect with more people. My general rule is to connect with people you know or have had ‘real life’ interaction with.
· Like, or comment on posts your network is posting. This shows LinkedIn that you are engaged with the platform and it will increase the visibility of your profile to potential recruiters.
· Use the messaging service to contact people within your network. To contact people outside your network using the messaging service you will have to invest in a Premium account, however many recruiters do have an ‘Open LinkedIn Profile’ that allows anyone to contact them for free.
· Write or share content with your network. The more ‘likes’ you get the more visible your profile becomes and this does impact on the search results in LinkedIn Recruiter.
3. Connect With Recruiters
Very few recruiters will not accept a LinkedIn Connection request from you. Start a conversation as to why you are connecting and build your relationship from there.
There are other things you can consider – subscribing for a Premium Linked profile brings certain advantages, namely being able to contact people via messaging outside your network and seeing whose viewed your profile. This can be useful as if a recruiter has looked at your profile, then you can see who they are – assuming they are not anonymising their view of your profile – and you can see where they work. Equally, if you have a free account you can see how many times you appeared in searches, where they work and their job function. A bit of detective work can enable you to identify whose viewed your profile, and whether they are looking to fill a particular job that may be advertised on LinkedIn!
LinkedIn’s functionality has improved considerably over the 20 odd years I have been a member and further improvements are being lined up that will make it the pre-eminent job search and finding platform globally. A full LinkedIn profile, plus engagement with the platform will improve your chances of securing new employment.
