How To Use LinkedIn To Find A Job

How can you use LinkedIn to find a job? As recruiters, one of the questions we get asked a lot by people when searching for their next job is how they can ensure they are found by hiring managers.

Social Media plays a massive part in this, and it is essential to be building your network and your brand even when not actively looking for work. LinkedIn is no doubt the best social media channel for this.

• You can use LinkedIn to build and leverage your professional network
• You have the ability to contact directly with the Hiring Manager at your ideal company for free means
• LinkedIn is the perfect tool to help you find a job.

Be Seen

Using LinkedIn is all about being seen! You won’t be found by employers if they cannot find your profile.

Your Headline

The way people search while using LinkedIn is different from how they use Google. People using LinkedIn are looking for professionals so they will search for a job title such as ‘Software Development Manager’ or ‘Head of Engineering’.

To ensure you don’t end up ranking lower in the search results, include your job title in your headline and throughout your profile, but don’t cram it in so it doesn’t read well.

Your Summary

This is a great opportunity to grab a potential employer’s attention by selling yourself. You need to highlight your skills and your accomplishments. Use employers’ key terms and write in the first person to let your personality shine but stay professional.

Your Profile Picture

Change your profile picture to a more professional one that is also good quality. Research shows that adding a photo will increase your traffic by a factor of 11.

Rank Higher

Make as many genuine connections as possible. If you have a mutual connection with a potential hiring manager who is searching, then your results will feature higher up in the results.

Ensure that you engage with the people you already have in your network by liking, commenting and sharing their content to stay in their timeline.

Share relevant industry news along with your opinions.

Regularly edit your profile by doing this, it ensures LinkedIn’s algorithm knows that you are an active member.

Get recommendations and endorsements for your keywords and skills.

Staying Active

You need to find the right balance between being active and being too active. Try to visit the LinkedIn home page once a day to see what others are doing and interact with their updates.

When you have an idea of the tone of voice on LinkedIn you can start posting yourself. Try to find articles or stories related to your industry and share them with intelligent comments.

However, try not to spam your LinkedIn feed with irrelevant posts.

Tell People What You Can Do

• It is not enough to just state our job title. You need to ensure that you talk about both your technical ability
• You can do this by sharing recent projects and successes along with your soft skills, whether that be people management or business partnering.
• Share the business benefits of what you do, such as writing a new application that improves customer experience, or cloud migration which has offered a better experience for business users.
• Use your endorsed skills to attract rather than detract.
• Delete any skills that aren’t helping you stand out.
• Only include skills that you are qualified in and that are key for someone in your industry and role, with the most important skills at the top.
• Research the keywords used for these skills and include them to make you more searchable.

Contact Information

Make sure people know how to get in contact with you. Don’t just include your contact information at the top of your LinkedIn profile. Try and include it in areas where the next natural stage would be to contact you.

P.S Make sure you only include social media platforms that are professional, and you wouldn’t mind a potential employer looking at them.

So, that is how to use LinkedIn to find a job. Get in touch to chat more about what we have spoken about here.