Getting Started On LinkedIn Part 2

Today’s post is from our regular contributor, Sally.

This post is also part 2 in a 2-part series on getting started on LinkedIn.

Welcome to the second post in this series! If you would like to read the first one, you can do so here.

Now that you are at least set up with an account, it’s time to really jazz up your profile and make sure it’s perfect for perspective employers to view it! I wrote a post a while back that included suggestions and tips on how to improve your LinkedIn profile – David also wrote a post about 10 skills that people should include on their profile. While you may spend quite a bit of time on how everything looks and sounds for when people view your page, you’ll note that it’s worth it when companies begin to contact you.

Once you have your profile exactly how you would like, it’s time for you to take matters into your own hands. You’ll notice that there are a few different tabs at the top of the page – Home, Profile, Network, Jobs, Interests. While ‘home’ and ‘profile’ are pretty self-explanatory and ‘interests’ allows you to customize your LinkedIn experience a little more, let’s concentrate on the other two.

1) Network

We can’t stress enough how important it is to network with people. Everyone does it and honestly, the majority of people that you know most likely are in the job they are in because they knew someone in the right place, at the right time.

LinkedIn allows you to add contacts from your email addresses, or you can add people by looking them up by name. Once you have connected with someone, LinkedIn now offers a “relationship” and “contact info” tab with each person, where you can keep specific information (that only you can see) for every contact. You can write down notes, their birthday, anything that might help you remember something about them and give you an advantage on the fact that you remembered something specific about them – it can also help ease a conversation if you have some talking points to pull from as well!

If you can’t remember someone’s name or just have no idea where to start when it comes to adding connections, look under the network tab for ‘find alumni’. Once you click on it, possible connections will come up from your main university. You can always change that if you want to look at a different college, as well as edit to more specific years/where people work/etc. Pretty snazzy and easy!

2) Jobs

As with many other job search sites, you can enter a company or job title you are interested in and off you will be taken to several possibilities. I have my profile settings set so that after I search within a specific job title or company, LinkedIn will then email me with job openings that have the same job title and similar openings in that company. I find that extremely useful because if I am not able to get on LinkedIn for a few days, I don’t miss out on applying for a job that I otherwise might have. I can save job postings, save my previous searches, and look at where I’ve applied before – all of which are amazingly beneficial, especially if you’ve been looking at new jobs for awhile and things are starting to run together.

Once you have clicked on a job posting that you are interested in, you’ll see that like many other job search sites, there is an explanation about the position, what the company is looking for, information about the company, and similar positions at other companies that you can check out too. My favorite part though, is that you are able to contact the person who posted the job – utilizing this point of contact may help you tip the scales in your favor, even if it’s simply to tell them that your application is on the way and let them know how excited you are about applying for the position. Every bit helps.

I hope these two posts have allowed you to see more of what the LinkedIn experience can offer for you – and we only skimmed the surface. Set up and spend some time on your own LinkedIn, you might be amazed at the opportunities that come from it!
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Photo by Nan Palmero