Tag: Using Your LinkedIn Profile Effectively

From time to time, Joshua Waldman hears from clients looking for jobs that LinkedIn just doesn’t work.

“My response is simple, ‘Have you been using it actively, or just waiting for opportunities to fall into your lap?’ ”

The key to success on LinkedIn is creating a nice-looking profile (visit here to find out if yours is good enough) and then reaching out to people. Joshua recommends setting a goal of contacting at least three people every day.

He quotes Mark Zuckerberg, who said the power of Facebook is Engineered Serendipity when discussing the networking power of all social media.

“You can engineer your own serendipity simply by putting yourself out there more,” he says. “Post. Connect. The more you do, the more chance something great will come to you.”

Joshua is the founder of Career Enlightenment, which among other things, offers professional LinkedIn Profile writing services. Here, he discusses best practices for using LinkedIn and other social media when hunting for your next job. Read on:

Tell us about Career Enlightenment. What services do you offer? Who should be using them?

We offer Professional LinkedIn Profile writing services, training and certification classes. Any job seeker who knows the importance of LinkedIn for their success should be working with a professional writer.

We also work with schools and government organizations to teach them how to teach social media job search skills.

What are the smartest things everyone searching for a job right now should be doing?

Networking.

That’s where jobs come from way more than job boards.

For example, my wife just graduated from school and was looking for work. She did the job board thing. But then we had some friends over for dinner and their daughter works for a temp agency. So Lily, my wife, followed up and got in their database; and her resume was flagged as a referral.

Several months later, she got a call to see if she can start the very next day at a medical imaging center. No one else was called for this opportunity. She had no competition at all.

That’s the power of networking.

How should job seekers be using social media?

Social media is an extension of someone’s networking. That’s the whole point. Every online decision you make will either improve or break down your networking.

For example, do your profiles make it easy for other people to know what you do and how you can add value to them?

Do your posts enhance your personal brand or detract from it?

When you message someone, are you taking their point of view, or are you just asking for favors?

What shouldn’t they be doing on social media?

Beyond the obvious (not posting inappropriately), the biggest mistake I see people make is not posting frequently enough.

Believe it or not. Maybe there’s a shyness, or an apology people feel. But you have every right in the world to share your voice, and for that matter to reach out to new people and ask for the connection.

Here are my recommended daily averages for posting to the big three:

Facebook: Three to five times/day
Twitter: Five to 20 times/day
LinkedIn status updates and/or groups: One to two times per day

What are some best practices for writing your LinkedIn profile?

The big gotcha when I teach resume writers this skill is to stop copying someone’s resume and putting it online.

Your LinkedIn profile is not your online resume. It’s a platform for creating meaningful connections.

When writing a LinkedIn profile, my writers always start from scratch and they focus on storytelling in the first person.

The reason why this works so well is that the reader of your profile has a screen up in front of them - about the same distance away from where you would be if you two were having coffee. It’s a very intimate medium.

When they read your profile, they’ve already looked at your photo, so they have your voice running in their head. So you want to talk to them like you would anyone you were having coffee with.

Another biggie is the use of the professional headline. Most people just have their job title there.

Although it’s good to have your job title there, chances are it hasn’t even come close to using up all 120 characters of space in that area. This is a great opportunity to tell someone why they should click on your profile out of all the others on the search results page.

How are employers researching recruits online today?

According to Jobvite, about 94 percent of all recruiters surveyed use LinkedIn to source candidates.

That means they open up a people search, enter some keywords, specify a location, and get a list of possible matches in order of connection. First-degree connections appear first and so forth.

And they look at pictures and headlines to determine which profiles to click on.

What should job seekers do to shore up their online reputations ahead of their job search?

First, you should just Google yourself. Your future boss is doing it right now. Do you like what they’ll see?

If not, you actually need to start publishing more content. This will essentially bury the bad stuff and start to grow your SERP (search engine results page).

A great tool you can use, which is free, is the Brandyourself.com Google audit.

What’s one of your favorite stories about a job hunter leveraging social media to land a job?

I had a blog reader who wanted to work for Symantec in Ohio.

She started networking like crazy with LinkedIn. After three months or so, she saw a job open up on a job board saved search. So she applied.

But then she called her closest contact at Symantec that she cultivated over the previous months to say that she applied and would they mind letting HR know. The contact did this, her resume was flagged as a referral, and she was called the very next day.

A few weeks later she was hired.

This kind of thing happens all the time.

What other tried-and-true advice can you offer job seekers today? Something you find yourself repeating over and over?

First, know your message. Know what you’re good at and why someone would want to hire you, your value.

Second, translate that message into social media profiles. Make sure your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Profiles all reflect that message clearly. You can also use Instagram to get more social media activity, includes even buy likes on Instagram to help you get more mediatics.

Finally, use that platform to initiate info interviews with as many people as possible. I have some templates you can use for that for free here.

With an extensive amount of job search activities taking place online, having a good profile picture can make you stand out from the pack of applicants.

While choosing a candidate based on looks is obviously not allowed, a profile picture does have an impact and does influence the selection process.

Since you have some control over your profile pic, you need to make sure it’s creating a positive impression on recruiters and hiring managers.

Keep reading to learn more about its importance and how to have a great profile picture.

HIRING MANAGERS WILL GOOGLE YOU. SO PUT YOUR BEST FOOT FORWARD.

When you’re applying for a position, it has become common practice for hiring managers to search for candidates online. That means they will likely find many of your social media accounts and briefly check them out.

Studies say it takes only 100 milliseconds to draw a conclusion about you from your profile picture. This first impression can be completely different depending on your expression and other aspects of your picture.

In one such study, participants were given photos of two people and asked to pick which person had higher levels of extraversion and trustworthiness.

The results were interesting. When just slight facial expressions were modified in the photos, the conclusions drawn by participants were quite different.

Recent research shows that your profile picture goes a long way in affecting your friends’ reactions as well. For instance, if you ask a friend to do a favor during your job search, they’re much more likely to do it if they like your profile photo.

Since a picture is only a moment in time, it can’t possibly capture our entire personality. Therefore it is vital that you pick a photo that puts your best professional foot forward.

WHY WE OFTEN PICK THE WRONG PROFILE PHOTO

Scientists have seen in study after study that we often judge ourselves a lot less harshly than we do others. This principle is called “self-enhancement.” And we do this by believing that we’re more objective than our peers. In a sense, we believe that we think more clearly than other people.

Because we believe we’re being objective, we don’t often pick the photo that does us justice.

We judge photos of ourselves differently from how other people do. This happens because we know too much about ourselves and have insider information which others do not. We have stored up so much information about who we are and how we think we look over the years, that we have trouble being objective.

A perfect example could be those photos you took while on your hiking trip. Once you got to the top of the mountain, you were feeling proud and confident that you made it to the top. And so you might choose one of those pictures assuming others will be able to see the pride, confidence and determination, that you were feeling. Unfortunately, what we’re feeling in the moment often doesn’t translate into the photos themselves. That leaves a lot of space for others to interpret the photos as they see.

Additionally, we may have difficulty getting past our feelings about ourselves. If we have a feature we dislike, we might enhance its importance in our mind. Therefore, when looking at a photo, familiar thoughts might enter our mind and we might discard any photo that we believe highlights our flaws.

This tendency influences which photos we choose. Although a certain photo might have our best smile and a great composition, we might get rid of it because we feel like it shows our perceived flaw. And contrastingly, if we have a favorite feature, we might trash any photos that don’t highlight it even if they’re not the best photos in the bunch.

GET THE PERFECT PROFILE PICTURE

In an effort to help people get the perfect professional profile photo, PhotoFeeler conducted an 800 profile pic study and got 60,000 ratings of their perceived influence, likeability, and competence.

The photos went through an extensive process in order to control for variables like darkness and brightness in order to give the most accurate results.

So what were the study’s takeaways?

Eyes

• Take off the sunglasses. In the study likeability dropped for profile pics with shades.
• On the other hand, eyeglasses actually increased scores in perceived competence and likeability.
• Eye obstruction from hair, glare, or a shadow didn’t drop a photo’s likeability. But its ratings on competence and influence did suffer.
• Slightly squinted eyes got higher scores for competence, likeability, and influence. It’s been shown that wide open eyes denote fear while “squinched” eyes portray confidence.

Face

• Photos that have a shadow line outlining the jaw increased scores across the board.
• If a photo didn’t have any smile, likeability took a huge drop while perceived competence and influence also fell.
• Smiling delivered higher scores across the board. Interestingly, a closed mouth smile boosted scores about half as much on likeability and didn’t affect competence or influence.

Body

• Formal clothing increased ratings of competence and influence dramatically. This is an important tip for job seekers.
• A bust (shoulders & head) or torso (head to waist) shot is preferable. Face-only close-ups dropped likeability scores and full-body shots showed a drop in competency.
• In a surprise, PhotoFeeler’s study showed that where the photo was taken had no statistical impact on results.

Photo Editing

• If a photo is too dark like one that mimics nighttime or a darkroom, the likeability scores dropped.
• On the other hand if the colors are too highly saturated, likeability, competence, and influence scores all dropped.
• Black and white photos did not produce any statistically significant results.

As we’ve seen, your profile picture plays a huge part in your online presence.

And if you’re looking for a new job, spending some time finding the best picture is well worth the effort. As salesmen and marketers have known for a long time, image is important. So now that people are able to see what you look like online with a simple search, investing time into your profile picture is not vanity, it is pragmatism.

You can either implement the tips in this article by yourself, or hire a professional photographer to help.

And if you want insights into what your profile photo says about you, try an analysis by the PhotoFeeler tool.

With more than 330 million people registered with LinkedIn, the opportunities for finding jobs, and being found by hiring managers/recruiters is great. But many people haven’t adapted their profiles to facilitate being found and to encourage recruiters to call.

Keep reading to learn how you can get recruiters to call you, by using your LinkedIn profile.

Connect with as Many Recruiters as Possible on LinkedIn

Adding many connections on LinkedIn including recruiters in your industry, has many benefits. Because 93% of recruiters on LinkedIn use it to search for candidates, you’re opening up your potential job search/career network.

Also when recruiters search for candidates on LinkedIn, the results are organized by the degree of connection (1st, 2nd, Group, etc). While the LinkedIn search algorithm is a mystery, keyword density/placement, number of recommendations, degree of connection, and having a picture all play a role in getting to the top of the list.

The more recruiters you have in your network, the greater the chances of you showing up on their search list. By connecting with recruiters, you’re also making their job easier since they now have another qualified candidate to add to their database.

How to Find Recruiters in Your Industry/Function

In order to get recruiters to call you, you need to find them and get connected on LinkedIn. Find the recruiters in your industry in just 5 simple steps.

1. Open up the advanced search feature.
2. Filter by the location you want to work in.
3. Then filter by the industry or current company.
4. Then try keywords such as “recruiter.”
5. You can also search by specific roles like ‘Marketing’ to get more specific results.

As you start to search for recruiters to connect with, start with as many specific filters as you can and then gradually take some off in order to grow the size of the list.

Now Connect to Recruiters

Using the list you created from the previous step, send the recruiters an invitation to connect.

For many second degree connections, you’ll be able to simply click the “Connect” button to the right of their name and an invitation will be sent.

If that doesn’t work, try clicking on their name to open up their profile, then click Connect from inside their profile.

If that doesn’t work either, and also for third degree connections, you will see the following options:

You’re in luck if you have some overlap in your work/education background. If not, then go to the recruiter’s profile and scroll to the bottom to see which LinkedIn Groups they are a part of. You can try joining one of those Groups and then often you’ll see another option for Groups, on the ‘How do you know XYZ’ screen. Select that and send your invitation.

Where possible, customize your invitation message to tell them that you noticed they were a recruiter, you’re open to opportunities and why you are a good/relevant candidate.

Now that you know how to use your LinkedIn profile to get recruiters to call you, start getting connected!

Sources and references: Joshua Waldman, who is a job search expert and author of the book Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies.