Guest post by Jesse Langley - Using LinkedIn is becoming a growing trend in job searching. If you look at very many LinkedIn profiles though, you’ll begin to see that a lot of folks aren’t harnessing its true potential. LinkedIn isn’t a substitute for a stellar resume. Rather it works best when it complements your resume. Think of your resume and your LinkedIn profile as two equally important team members of your job search team. You’re going to rely on them both, but they are performing specific roles which, if done correctly, will be complementary.
Get Them Synched Up
Do you link to your LinkedIn profile on your resume? If you don’t, you should. If you do, you need to make sure they’re working together harmoniously. Your resume is still an absolutely essential part of the job search, but LinkedIn’s networking capabilities are providing huge potential for personal branding. You can easily convey marketable elements of your personality through networking in a way that a paper resume never could.
Get Serious About Networking
You need to get really serious about professional networking as an essential tactic in your job search strategy. Every tool you’re using should point to your LinkedIn profile. Business cards, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and your resume should all work together in pushing traffic to your LinkedIn page. All of these tools should function in such a way that anyone who has some interest in you as a potential employee will feel compelled to know more about you. And LinkedIn is where they’ll go to get the full picture. The ability to see who has been searching you and what kind of searches you’re showing up in can give you valuable insight into what’s working best in your networking efforts.
Get Recommendations
You should obviously highlight your relevant business experiences. But LinkedIn’s most important features aren’t used nearly as much as they should be. If you did a great job in a previous position, get a recommendation. LinkedIn can work so well in conveying your whole personality in a way that your resume can’t, so work to get great candid recommendations from many different areas of your life.
Why Recommendations Matter
A resume tends to highlight a single dimension of your personality. Essentially it’s you in a few sentences describing job duties. But when influential people from all aspects of your life write good candid recommendations on your LinkedIn profile, all of the dimensions of your life are rounded out. Having a professor write a recommendation about your academic performance and talk about how proficient and poised you were as a student is great. Former bosses glowing about your job performance looks good. LinkedIn allows other people to highlight your strong track record of hard work and personal attributes. Four people who agree that you’ve been a task-oriented, goal-driven and poised performer can’t be written off as a fluke. Having other people brag about you always looks better too.
Demonstrate Competence with Social Media
It’s not enough to dabble in social media anymore. Potential employers want to see that you’ve got a handle on the social media scenario in general. Even if they don’t personally get the intricacies in the whole “social media game” to begin with, they still understand that it’s important. Many just don’t know exactly why. One way to really punch up your LinkedIn profile is by using an available plugin for LinkedIn which allows you to bring your Twitter feed to your LinkedIn page. There are also plugins which can bring an RSS feed from a blog to your LinkedIn page. This helps complement your recommendations in highlighting how well-rounded you are without needing to clutter up your page with a lot of links. The time it takes to make sure that your LinkedIn profile and resume are working in concert is minimal. If you also focus on networking and continue to build relationships and get good recommendations, you’ll likely find the job hunt more efficient and effective.
Jesse Langley lives near Chicago. He divides his time among work, writing and family life. He has a keen interest in blogging and social media and also writes on behalf of American InterContinental University.
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Twitter: shawnmentor
December 14, 2011 at 6:38 am
I think such tactics will work for making a job hunt a successful strategy.
Many professionals these are adding themselves to the this professional network and it’s still growing up huge, so there are lots of opportunities coming your way.
resume writing invites you to read..25 Things Not to Be Included in Your Resume – Continued
Twitter: wilsoncarol908
December 20, 2011 at 1:17 am
ya your resume with LinkedIn link in it will act as an add on to your Cvs.
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