LinkedIn’s profile wizard will take you through the steps of entering your region, industry, company and current job title. You will also be asked whether you are employed, a business owner, looking for work, working independently or a student. This information completes your basic profile.
LinkedIn will prompt you to search for connections by crawling your email, which you give LinkedIn access to. You can use this to see who among your email connections already has a LinkedIn account and invite them to become part of your professional network. You may opt to skip this step if you prefer to add connections individually.
Use a clear, vertical rectangular image.
Linkedin recommendations are known for being overly positive and therefore not especially exciting. Focus requests for recommendations on people who can talk best about your skills, such as ex bosses and customers.
If you browse the connections of one of your connections, you may invite them to become your connections. Only do this if you know the person professionally. You may also ask your connections to introduce you by sending your profile and a note to someone in their networks.
All of your information should be current and you should add occasional updates in the space provided. Members of your LinkedIn network will be notified when you update your profile or add a new contact.
Lying on a resume is never a good idea, but it is worse in LinkedIn. Potential employers can use your own LinkedIn connections to check up on you. Do not worry too much about filling out the recommendations and skills on your LinkedIn profile. Employers pretty much discount recommendations as being sappy and always positive. The skills are only useful for keyword searches.
It is still unlikely to get hit up out of the blue for a job, but it can happen. It mostly happens to people who have specific skills an employer is looking for.
LinkedIn job postings are helpful, and you should look for them. Compared to free message boards, they tend to have higher quality jobs, and it is very unlikely that you would find anything unsavory or dangerous. Still, they are “just a job board. " LinkedIn searching is best if you have a specific skill that an employer is hiring for. You may find an employer looking for someone exactly like you.
Job seeker premium lets you see the names of people at companies you might be interested in. Better yet, it lets you contact them directly via LinkedIn messaging (known as InMail. ) LinkedIn gives you only a few of these premium messages a month, so it is useful if you know exactly what you are looking for. The other benefits of Job Seeker premium are not as helpful. Getting a badge as a Featured Applicant can actually be counterproductive, since recruiters might see it as you being desperate. So, again, better if you are looking for a specific position rather than just looking around.
For these kinds of less specific jobs, the key to using LinkedIn is to target specific companies you might want to work for, or use it to find people in your network to contact.
Find candidates with very specific skill sets Target people from specific companies Reach out to people who are not currently looking for a job. (Passive job seekers. ) Hit up contacts of contacts. It is good for helping find friends of current employees.
Very general skills. New college graduates Hourly employees
Search LinkedIn to see your current company profile. For example, the wikiHow entry is here: https://www. linkedin. com/company/wikihow/about/. Look at the “Careers” section in particular. If the company profile is not to your liking, ask the right person at your company to update it. Your marketing people may have specific thoughts as to the content, so you want to keep them in the loop. If there is no company profile, set it up from the Companies>Add a Company. You can then follow the prompts to verify your identity and fill out the sections for Overview, Careers, Product Pages, Employees and Statistics. Obviously, the part you want to flesh out is the “Careers” section.
Similar to Craigslist, a job posting will be not as effective to recruit people in very high demand. It will be effective if you have a specific skill set that lends itself to keyword search. As an example, if you want to hire a copy-editor in Sydney, you will find people can find you easily and apply. You have to ask yourself if you will get too many applicants (Salesperson in London) or no applicants (actuary in Marfa, Texas. )
Recruiter accounts are expensive. The most powerful version approaches USD$10,000 per year. You can find just the right person you are looking for, and contact them with a “LinkedIn InMail. " InMails are opened most of the time; much more frequently than regular emails. Some people don’t check their LinkedIn, though, so you probably want to follow with a regular email or phone call. Reaching out to people who are not looking for a job can be amazingly effective in finding highly qualified candidates. Naturally, it will take longer, but you may find better people. You also will see who viewed your profile, so you can tell which candidates are interested and you can follow up with them. The hillbilly version of using LinkedIn for cheap is to find the person you are looking for on LinkedIn search, but then to contact them off of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is making that harder by hiding the family names of the people you are searching for. With a recruiter account, you see the person’s full name and can contact them directly with an InMail.
Check up on the references your candidate provided, to ensure they are who they are who the candidate said they are. Find “backdoor” references using LinkedIn. Search for people with similar jobs at the company your job candidate came from, and you can find and reach out to people who can give you the true scoop about him or her. Ignore the recommendations about your candidate on LinkedIn. They are useless; in fact, glowing recommendations mean nothing more than the candidate has been trying to get good recommendations. The skills and expertise section is rarely helpful. It can be inaccurate, it might give you clues only if the candidate is stressing a skillset they don’t really have.
Belong to a company that is not well known Can’t always find the right person at a large company to sell to Are looking for leads for big ticket items Are selling to companies where nobody picks up a phone any more
LinkedIn selling is somewhat limited if you are selling to individuals. LinkedIn is great for finding leads. But if you are already in contact with the right people at prospect companies, it won’t be very helpful.
When you search with a Premium account, you will be able to read the full name of the people you find in search. Premium account holders can also send a limited number of “LinkedIn InMails” directly to the sales prospects they find. They are “guaranteed opened,” meaning, if the person you are trying to contact does not open the message in seven days, your credit is refunded and you get to try with someone else. Sales accounts cost USD$ a few hundred to USD$1000 per year.
You probably already know who the economic buyers for your product are, but you may not know what their job titles are. For example, if you want to set up meetings with materials managers of food manufacturing companies, you simply set your search filter to show you people in food manufacturing with title material manager. You may need to specify additional keywords to get the exact list of people you are looking for.
Consider hand crafting the message to the prospect. LinkedIn only gives you a limited number of InMails, and charges you for them, so you want to make each one count. LinkedIn fits the VITO letter model a lot more than the smile and dial model. Remember that putting in a personal note referencing your connection to the prospect increases your success dramatically.
Guessing their email address. Using a lead database. Phone call Facebook messages. Facebook also charges for premium emails, but sometimes it is pretty cheap.
Make a list of your happy/reference customers who might introduce you to their friends. Add these customers as connections on LinkedIn. Browse your customers’ connections. You will find some connections that could also be sales prospects for you. You can approach these new prospects in several ways. You can hit them with an InMail, do a LinkedIn introduction request (which does not count against your InMail quota), contact them offline, or ask your customer for an introduction. Note that adding your customers as your connections can have risks. A clever competitor sales rep might be able to see who you are connected to unless you set your privacy correctly. You can avoid this by hiding your connections.
By adding more details about what you are doing, you can directly see how many more people are finding you online.
Influencers also can write mini blog posts that include images, which also boosts your readership.
There are ways to show LinkedIn that you are an influencer. You can tie your personal blog to LinkedIn so LinkedIn knows your readership carries over to LinkedIn. If you want to try to become an Influence, you can email to influencers@linkedin. com. Another good method is to hit someone who works at LinkedIn with a LinkedIn message.
