Are you using LinkedIn to its fullest to get a job? Are You using LinkedIn Job Alert?

I turned on the TV recently and saw a “CBS This Morning” interview with Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. Needless to say, it inspired me to sit down and write. After all, I was receiving information on how to boost your LinkedIn profile during a job search straight from the CEO’s mouth, so I had to share.

Why should you use LinkedIn for your job search?
It’s no secret that LinkedIn is the top professional social networking site with 133 million users in the U.S. alone and reaching 200 countries and territories around the world. Per the Jobvite Recruiter Nation Survey, 87 percent of recruiters use LinkedIn as part of their candidate search. As a professional or student, it’s the popular place to network and look for job opportunities; even former U.S. President Barack Obama once joked during a TV press conference that he would join LinkedIn to help him land a job after his term was up!

The issue is that if you’re only updating your profile now and then, you’re not fully utilizing all LinkedIn can do for you, which includes taking hours off of your LinkedIn job alert. Know how to find saved jobs on LinkedIn. Below are some tactical tips on how you can leverage LinkedIn to its fullest to expand your professional network and land your next job.

On CBS This Morning, LinkedIn’s CEO noted the following three tips to maximize the potential of your LinkedIn profile:
– Keep your profile up to date.
– Be comprehensive about current skills and objectives.
– Highlight your recent experience.

When asked what was most important about a candidate’s profile and how to make the best use of the platform, Weiner responded that first and foremost “authenticity” was important.

“Be yourself, represent who you are. It’s not just your experiences; this is not a resume … This is a more dynamic approach to representing your experiences, your skills, your objectives, what you know, what you’re interested in within a professional context,” Weiner explained. “It’s not just about the comprehensiveness; it’s also about freshness of the information, and the more complete and the more fresh, the more recent that that information has been updated, the more opportunities that are going to accrue to our members.”

14 ways to use LinkedIn to get a job
In addition to Weiner’s advice, I’ve added 11 more actions you can take to leverage LinkedIn for maximum efficiency in securing your next position. For the sake of this article, let’s say your favorite company that you just can’t wait to work for is called Gone Bananas. Follow these tips on how to leverage LinkedIn, and you’ll be an employee of Gone Bananas soon:

1. Keep your profile up to date. LinkedIn members with a profile picture are 14 times more likely to receive page views, while those who post skills are 13 times more likely to have profile views compared to those who don’t, per LinkedIn’s blog. There are more than 45,000 skills to choose from on LinkedIn to beef up your profile, so if you want Gone Bananas to notice you, make sure to regularly update your profile, add a profile photo, and include your notable skills.

2. Be comprehensive about current skills and objectives. To ensure you’re using LinkedIn to find a job correctly, don’t leave anything out about your current skills and objectives. Use your headline to share your main objective if it makes sense and add all of your skills to your page. You don’t want it to look like you haven’t updated your page in a while, as recruiters and companies might pass you by if it does.

3. Highlight recent experience. You want your recent experience evident to anyone who views your page, especially when you’re actively engaging with connections and companies to land a job — which is the reason you’re likely reading this post, after all.

4. Update your headline. Your photo, name, and headline (which is listed below your photo) are the only items people see when they do a search. Your headline should stand out and highlight what you do or what type of position you’re looking for. “HR professional connecting employees with management” are examples of headlines that are clear and might grab attention when compared to plain-Jane headlines like “Chemical engineer in the public sector.”

5. Let people know you’re available. If you can announce the fact that you’re looking for a job, do so. Use your headline to make the announcement. For example, “Writer seeking businesses in need of a friendly ghost (or ghostwriter)” and “Petroleum engineer ready to strike oil and make you rich” might catch a recruiter or hiring manager’s attention.

6. Build your network to the 1st degree. Your connections can exponentially increase your exposure and access to other connections. LinkedIn makes it easy to connect with people you know by importing your contact lists from sites such as Gmail.

7. Research the companies you’re interested in and follow them. Know how to follow companies on LinkedIn. LinkedIn makes it easy to find and follow companies. If you haven’t already done so, make a list of the companies you’d like to work for and follow them on LinkedIn. This will help you stay in the know about company news and new positions as they become available.

8. Use the Advanced Search. Use LinkedIn’s Advanced Search option and do a search on your favorite companies. Find out who of your connections is associated with Gone Bananas, for example, and make a list. You can reach out to these people depending on their connection with the company. If they work there, you can ask questions about the company culture. If they are a client or service provider, you can ask what it’s like to do business with them. Get creative and have fun doing your research so you can navigate how to best approach the company for a job when you’re ready.

9. Ask for an introduction. Once you’re ready to reach out to Gone Bananas, you can ask your connection(s) to make an introduction to someone they’re connected to within the organization.

10. Look for alumni associated with your college or university.
Doing a search for your college or university is a great way to connect with alumni who went to the same school as you. You can reach out to them and share this common interest to help you land your next job.
Entrepreneur, trainer, speaker, consultant, and author, Shelley Roth, has been “helping individuals, organizations, and teams improve their effectiveness and results by changing the way they think about social media and business.” When I asked her what advice she gives to help others leverage LinkedIn, utilizing your alumni network was key.

“I would suggest that one of the best, easiest ways to leverage the power of LinkedIn is through using the Alumni tool. You can first join [or follow] your alumni college and then search for past alumni at companies or places of employment you are interested in,” she elaborated, “You also can input any college and search to see how many degrees of separation you may be from alumni at any school.”

Shelley is President & Chief Navigator of the Houston-based organization, Springboard, and author of several books, including Give to Grow: 9 Principles for Conscious Business, Social Media and Life.

11. Be more than a wallflower. Be active on LinkedIn, and as Weiner suggests, be authentic and current. Post any articles you write, videos you post, and so on, as updates. Get involved with groups and interact with others on LinkedIn. The more you interact and post as a professional, the more you’ll be noticed and build recognition.

12. Get involved in LinkedIn Professional Groups. Do an Advanced Search to identify professional groups in your area and get involved. This will help expand your network, show your expertise (when you engage in online conversations and answer questions that come up), and possibly connect you to the organizations you want to work for in the future. When researching groups, you want to participate in groups that have recent activity. Otherwise, you might be wasting your time if a group doesn’t have daily or regular interaction online.

13. Research your future boss and executive team. Before going in for an interview, you can use LinkedIn to research hiring managers and interviewers to find out about their likes, interests, and more. You can leverage this information during your interview to create relatability and show that you’ve done your homework.

14. Network after business hours. According to Mashable, statistics show that only 8.33 percent of Americans use LinkedIn during working hours compared to other social media sites, such as Facebook (with almost 30 percent of people using it during work hours), indicating that you might get more interaction and exposure if you update your status, network, and connect with people and companies after business hours on LinkedIn. Test this out at different times of the day to see what works best in getting responses and other interactions.

The post Are you using LinkedIn to its fullest to get a job? Are You using LinkedIn Job Alert? appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.

Ten Ways To Use LinkedIn In Your Job Search and how to find saved jobs on LinkedIn.-

LinkedIn is an insanely useful tool for every working person, not to mention every job-seeker and student. The only unfortunate thing about LinkedIn as a job search tool is that most of what’s powerful about LinkedIn as a job-search tool is not obvious to the casual LinkedIn user.

If the only thing you’re doing on LinkedIn is updating your profile every now and then and waiting for the headhunters and recruiting managers to reach out, you’re missing the boat.

LinkedIn is a massive database, and within its gazillions of records are critical elements in your job-search plan and strategy. Let’s say that you heard about a growing company in your city and wondered whether they might need someone like you.

Before LinkedIn, you would have had to call or write to the company, search your contacts to see if any of your friends might know someone who works there, or call the front desk and ask for HR. Those are all slow, cumbersome and less-than-highly-effective research methods.

Your LinkedIn membership eliminates the need for that kind of tedious legwork.Let’s call our imaginary company Angry Chocolates. You’re a Marketing guy, Manager level, and you’re curious whether Angry Chocolates might be able to use a guy like you. You hop on LinkedIn and conduct a search on Angry Chocolates to see how folks in your network are connected to the company. Hurrah! Learn how to follow companies on LinkedIn. Learn how to tag companies on LinkedIn.

You don’t know anybody who actually works there, but one of your first-degree contacts did a consulting project for Angry Chocolates and another two first-degree homies have friends who work there. You’re already way ahead of the networking-into-your-next-job game!

Now you check out the Angry Chocolates leadership team via their own LinkedIn profiles. What do you find? One of them went to your undergraduate alma mater. That means that the Alumni Office can put you in touch with him, if you didn’t feel comfortable reaching out yourself. (And why shouldn’t you? Alumni connections are one of the pillars of networking.) One of the executives at Angry is on the Board of Directors of a not-for-profit where your fiancee’s mom is a staff member.
Do you remember those see-through models of people, about a foot high, made of plastic parts that fit together and come apart to show kids how the human skeleton fits into the nervous system and the organs? LinkedIn makes your network visible the same way those anatomic models make human anatomy visible.

Using LinkedIn, you can see who your friends know, where people have been and what they’re interested in, what people are talking about and who’s gone from Company to Company B. If you’re paying attention, LinkedIn can absorb at least thirty percent of your job-search-related research load. LinkedIn can save you hours that you used to have to spend at the library or on some corporate database, researching who’s who and who’s where. It’s a new day! LinkedIn is a job-seeker’s best friend.

Here are ten ways to use LinkedIn in your job search:

Make Your Headline Count
Your LinkedIn headline (just below your name) is your online brand, because your name and your headline are the only things a LinkedIn user will see when s/he conducts a search on the LinkedIn database and your profile comes up as one of the search returns. Your headline, your name and your profile photo are the only cues that user will get before deciding whether or not to click through your headline to your full profile. Make your headline count!

“Marketer seeking next opportunity” is weak, but “Consumer Products Marketer Looking for Small Brand to Make Big” tells your next boss what you plan to deliver.

Job-Hunting, or Just Eyes-Open?
If your job search is out of the closet, go ahead and say so in your LinkedIn headline. “Office Manager/Business Air-Traffic Controller Looking for Overstressed CEO to Make Sane” was a winning LinkedIn headline for a client of ours for about two weeks. That’s how long her headline (making clear her job-hunting status) was posted on LinkedIn before she got scooped up by one of those CEOs in need of a capable administrator.

What corporate recruiter wouldn’t call an Office Manager like that, seeing as the recruiter’s biggest headache at that moment was an overstressed CEO desperately seeking sanity?

If your job search is under the radar, you can’t use your headline to signal to recruiters “Call me!” but you can still make sure that your headline (and your entire LinkedIn profile) are pithy, full of stories and as human as you are in real life.

Follow Your Target Companies
If you’ve got specific companies on your target list — and I highly recommend that you create a list like that, if you don’t have one now — you can follow them on LinkedIn via their Company pages. That way, you’ll hear about anything new they’ve got cooking, from a new branch office opening to a new product release. Company news is exactly the kind of thing you can mention in a Pain Letter you’re writing to reach your target hiring manager. Why not follow a handful of your favorite companies right now? Learn how to tag companies on LinkedIn and how to follow companies on LinkedIn.

Broaden Your Network
The bigger your first-degree network on LinkedIn, of course, the bigger your entire network will be. One new first-degree contact with 100 connections of her own can expand your first-second-and-third-degree network by tens of thousands of people. That’s good at any point, but especially in a job search where you’re looking for as much visibility into your professional ecosystem as you can get.

If you haven’t been meticulous about inviting new networking contacts and old colleagues to join your LinkedIn network, get caught up now! LinkedIn makes it easy. You can download your address books from Gmail or any webmail application and your Outlook contacts too, and invite any of them you like to join your posse.

You can use the Colleagues feature to reconnect with people you used to work with, even if you don’t have their current email addresses. Don’t misuse this feature though, or LinkedIn might suspend your invitation privileges!

Get That Intro!
If your first-degree connection knows someone you’d like to talk to — say, your prospective next boss at Angry Chocolates — you can ask your first-degree buddy to make an introduction for you. Just browse to your target person’s LinkedIn profile, look for the blue link that says “Send a Message” and click on the arrow on the right of the link to see a pull-down menu that will include the words “Get an Introduction” if you and your target person have someone you know in common.

Find Your Hiring Manager
If you want to avoid the Black Hole of Death recruiting portals, you’ve got to know who your hiring manager is in any organization you’re targeting. It’s easy to find your hiring manager in all but the most enormous and bureaucratic organizations, where half the people walking around are called Program Manager, Project Manager or Director of Special Projects.

To find your hiring manager on LinkedIn, just use the Advanced People Search feature (click on the word Advanced next to the search bar at the top of the page) with your target company name filled in and the most likely title for your hiring manager as a second search term.

If you’re a Marketing person, your hiring manager could be Angry Chocolates’ Marketing Director or Marketing VP, for instance. Once you’ve got your hiring manager’s name, you can send him or her a paper Pain Letter via snail mail with your Human-Voiced Resume and avoid the Black Hole part of the process altogether!

Get the 411 On Your Next Boss
Once you’ve found your target hiring manager, of course, you’re going to do more than just add your future boss’s name to your Pain Letter envelope. You’re going to learn who this person is, what s/he cares about and what he or she may be up against on the job. The more you know about your hiring manager’s situation at work, the better for your pitch! Read his or her profile, check out the Groups your hiring manager belongs to and see which Influencers s/he follows.

Read some of those Influencers’ posts to see which topics and perspectives make your hiring manager’s heart beat faster. When you’re the customer, don’t you appreciate a salesperson who has done his or her research? Your hiring manager is no different!

Your Network Is A Fount of Wisdom
Go back to the Advanced Search page and conduct a search using just your target company’s name (Angry Chocolates, e.g.) as a search term. Who in your network is connected to that company, and how? Those folks can do more than just make introductions. They can tell you what they know about Angry Chocolates, who they know there, and what they’ve heard about the firm.

Remember that a job search is not just about being noticed and making connections. It’s also about learning enough to decide whether a firm — Angry Chocolates, for instance — can use your talents and grow your flame, and whether it’s worth your time to pursue opportunities there.

Burnish Your Flame
If your profile is just a boring chronology of the jobs you’ve held, you’re missing out on the branding power of a well-written LinkedIn profile. Add some elements to give your profile spice and substance, like your best-ever PowerPoint presentation or a video of you speaking to a group. Use the Status Update feature to share anything you write, any event you’re attending that others might be interested in and anything else that will add value for your LinkedIn connections. Hey, that’s what community is for, right? how to find saved jobs on linkedin?

Stay In It!
A white-collar job seeker can swap out hours of time poring over delusional job ads and replace them with pertinent, professional overtures to hiring managers facing Business Pain that only someone with your experience can relieve. LinkedIn will help you do that, but only if you use the site as an active participant, not a passive flower on the wall. Step in and step up to your next opportunity!

The post Ten Ways To Use LinkedIn In Your Job Search and how to find saved jobs on LinkedIn. appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.

If you’re looking for a new job, LinkedIn is a good place to start your search.
At least 500 million people use the network, and there are more than 10 million active job listings, Fortune magazine reported in 2017.

Business Insider reached out to career experts at LinkedIn and independent LinkedIn specialists to find out the best ways to go about finding a job on social network.

If you’re wondering how to use LinkedIn to find a job, these concrete tips give you your best chance at finding employment on LinkedIn. What does actively recruiting on LinkedIn mean.

1. Get a referral from someone you know who works at the company where you’re applying
All three LinkedIn experts who spoke to Business Insider said the most successful way to find a job on LinkedIn is through a referral from one of your connections who already works where you want to work.
“Nearly 50% of recruiters say referrals are the leading source of quality hires, and if you receive a referral you’re four times more likely to hear back from a recruiter,” Blair Decembrele, a career expert at LinkedIn, told Business Insider. “To make this process easier, LinkedIn recently launched an Ask for a Referral tool directly on the platform to help you make these requests.”
If you don’t have a direct connection at the company, look for someone who works there with a shared connection, Sue Ellson, an independent LinkedIn specialist and career development practitioner, told Business Insider.
“You may like to reach out to some of these people with a personal message and ask for information about the recruitment process (not a job just yet),” she said. “Once you have this information, you will hopefully be able to keep finding out more information and start networking until you receive a referral.”

2. Fill out every part of the ‘Career Interests’ section of your profile to let recruiters know you’re looking
You should always keep your LinkedIn profile up-to-date, of course, but there’s another section you should pay attention to when you’re on the job hunt.
You can update your “Career Interests” while viewing your own profile in “Your Dashboard.”
Toggling on the “Let your recruiters know you’re open” tool will make your profile more searchable for recruiters who use LinkedIn to find professional talent, Decembrele told Business Insider.
“And don’t worry — the platform hides the signal from recruiters at your company or affiliated company recruiters,” she added.

3. When reaching out directly to a potential employer, write a succinct, personalized message — don’t just copy your cover letter
When you go to send a message to someone, LinkedIn sometimes provides automatically-generated greetings. Don’t even think about using these templates, LinkedIn experts say.
“Always, always, always type something personal,” LinkedIn consultant Loribeth Pierson told Business Insider. “Personal will get you so much further that an automatically-filled form that so many other people are doing. You want to stand out from the crowd.”
A short note is better than typing out an entire cover letter, Pierson said.
“Keep it short, sweet, and to the point of what you want,” she said.
Decembrele said you should tell the person why you would like to connect and look through their LinkedIn profile to find a personal detail or shared connection that you can reference.
“Nearly 70% of LinkedIn members have found a job through a mutual connection,” Decembrele said. “Mentioning a personal detail is important, as it may jog someone’s memory for how you met, reinforce a mutual interest, or even solidify a way you might work together.”

4. If you can’t find a mutual connection with your potential employer, reach out to them through a common group
If you can’t find someone to refer you, you can still reach out to a potential employer.
“If you want a job, and that’s the job you want, you have to find a way to get to the person,” Decembrele said. “So if you don’t know them through connections, find them through a group. Find them through writing a really good message to them that’s going to stand out from the crowd.”
You can search for people within the LinkedIn groups you’re a member of or browse groups within your industry to join.

5. Turn on LinkedIn Job Alerts to be notified of new positions as soon as they’re posted
“LinkedIn has recently expanded this feature and there are a lot more choices you can make, even targeting specific companies,” Ellson said. Know how to create job alerts on LinkedIn.
You can choose to be notified of new job postings via email or mobile and desktop notifications, once a day or once a week.

6. If you’re currently unemployed, create a ‘current position’ anyway so that you show up in search results
You don’t want to be deceitful, of course, but you’re more likely to show up in search results if you have a current position listed on LinkedIn, according to Ellson.
She recommends creating a current position and filling it in with information about the type of work you’re seeking.
“In the employer section, mention ‘Various’ for now,” Ellson said. “You can discuss how you are currently doing research, networking, studying, applying for jobs in which areas etc.”
Avoid using the words “seeking opportunities” because they can make you look desperate, Ellson said.

7. Follow the pages of specific companies that interest you to be the first to see hiring announcements
“You can also follow companies of interest to keep up to date on brand news and hiring announcements,” Decembrele said. “In fact, now when you follow companies on LinkedIn, you’ll be notified when your dream company posts new jobs so you can be one of the first to apply.”
You can choose to see the company’s posts in your news feed or get LinkedIn Job Alerts for that company — or both.

8. Emphasize your skills rather than your job titles
Don’t neglect the “Skills” section of your profile, because it just might be more important than your “Experience.”
“LinkedIn research has found that almost 89% of professionals feel that skills are even more important than job titles,” Decembrele told Business Insider.

9. Like, comment, and share items in your LinkedIn feed
As with any other social network, you have to actively participate in order get all the benefits of LinkedIn.
“LinkedIn is a perfect place to find a job,” Pierson said. “[But] you can’t just sit on the fence. You have to be all in.”
Make sure to be on LinkedIn every day, even if it’s for a few minutes on the mobile app while standing in line, she says.
“If you’re standing in line at a store, read an article and put your comments on it,” Pierson said. “It’ll take you five minutes. If you use it, it will work.”

The post 9 expert-backed ways to use LinkedIn to find a job and LinkedIn Job Alerts appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.