LinkedIn has over 20 million members in US and about the same amount from other countries. It claims a new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second. LinkedIn unlike other social networking sites, is exclusively used for jobs, making partnerships and all corporate related activity, rather than fun activities.This gives an idea why LinkedIn has become integral part of job search these days.
Here I am giving the ways I use LinkedIn to do job search.
1. Complete your profile. Give all the relevant information for your job search, including education, experience, any certifications you have. This will help recruiters or hiring manager searching for profiles, understand your experience better.
2. It is better to add a photo and make sure the photo is a professional photo.
3. Once you finish your profile with photo, make it public, so it is searchable.
4. Try to get some recommendations, atleast one from each job you have done. More the better. Lot of managers ask for recommendations now, it serves as reference check for them.
5. Grow your network, the more the connections, more your opportunities to get job.
6. Linkedin itself has a job search engine, where companies post job and also, it uses simplyhired to pull jobs from the web.
7. When you use the job search and click on a job, it will tell you how many of your connections and who works in that particular company. This will help you to contact your connection and ask them to forward your resume.
8. Even if you are looking for jobs outside, LinkedIn can help you find someone you knew works for the company. You can do a search on the LinkedIn for people.
9. One major source of job search and discussion, can be from groups. You can join the groups that are relevant, for example, SQL server developer, SQL server DBA and so on. This way, you can see the direct job postings from recruiters and Managers.
10. The linkedIn groups are also very useful for technical discussions and keeping you upto-date on technology topics.
Really a nice compilation of the merits of becoming a member of LinkedIn.
ReplyDeleteOne more advantage is that we can add any publication/talks/presentation etc in LinkedIn and give the link of the same in our resume. That way the resume need not be inundated with minor details, but at the same time it will give access to more information (it is kind of like making a personal webpage for technical purpose).
Also we can try to customize our link so that its easy to remember (http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname)
Nice blog! Pretty informative. Keep going.
ReplyDelete~Vijay