7 Ways to Make LinkedIn Help You Find A Job

Career experts agree that LinkedIn is an essential job search tool. Your LinkedIn profile can serve as a passive job magnet ,since recruiters and hiring managers use the site as a gold mine for locating candidates . Let's take a look at ways to make LinkedIn help you find a job 

1. Customize your URL. Your URL (uniform resource locator) is the address of your LinkedIn page on the Web. Customizing it will drive it toward the top of a Google search on your name. On your profile page next to the rectangular grey “Edit” button to the right of your name, click on the drop-down menu, and then click on “Public profile settings.” Halfway down the page on the right side you’ll see a grey bar that says “Your public profile URL.” Underneath the bar, click on the blue phrase that says “Customize your public profile URL.” 

2. Write a crisp, detailed summary of your career. Shoot for between 100 and 300 words, and try to tell a compelling story about yourself that includes specifics and quantifiable achievements. Use keywords and phrases that you would find in a job description that would interest you. 

3. Flesh out the experience section. This is your chance to write an online résumé. Many people only include their current job. Take the time to list the significant jobs that built your career. You don’t need to be exhaustive.

4. List your skills. Below Experience and Education you’ll find “Skills & Expertise.” LinkedIn introduced this feature in Feb. 2011, so if you created your profile before then, as I did, you may have never fleshed this out. Take a minimum of 10 minutes and do it. This section offers a shorthand way to tell potential employers what you can do. It also gives your connections the chance to “endorse” you for those skills, an option since Sept. 2012.Add to your skills by clicking the grey “Edit” button next to your picture and typing a skill into the box under the Skills & Expertise heading. You can also put your cursor on the word “More” on the dark line at the top of your profile page and scroll down to “Skills & Expertise.” This takes you to a page where you can type in a word and a helpful list of related skills will appear on the left-hand side of the page. The page will also show you a list of people who have that skill in their profile and LinkedIn groups centered on that skill.

5. Get at least five recommendations. In brief, though they can seem repetitive and gratuitous, they can also be helpful because not only do they show up on your LinkedIn page, they also appear on the page of the recommendation writer, and his or her connections can all read them. Also, recruiters do read them. Like your career summary, recommendations should include meaty specifics about skills and accomplishments. In the world of LinkedIn, it’s acceptable to offer to draft a recommendation for the person you’re asking to recommend you. 

6. Add websites that showcase your work. For a journalist, this is easier than for other types of workers, since our writing gets posted online with ready Web addresses. For a designer or photographer, this is an opportunity to include a link to a personal website that showcases your work. If you’re in sales, you can link to customers

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7. Connect. Connections are the backbone of your LinkedIn profile, and what gives you the strength to network. For instance, if you’re interested in working for Company X and you see that one of your connections has a contact there, you can ask your connection to make an introduction to that contact for you. .

There are different views on how aggressively you should increase your list of connections..and the one LinkedIn professionals recommend: Do I know the person in a professional or personal context, and would I want to connect with the person on professional matters, face to face? Would I be willing to ask that person for an introduction, and would I be willing to make one for them, if they asked?

One the other hand, some people think you should connect with as many people as possible because of the compound effect of multiple connections. Forbes contributor Dan Schawbel, who has a hard-to-fathom 7,400 connections, has written a compelling argument here. He says that you appear more influential and more powerful to others if you have more than 500 connections.

SOURCE: FORBES.