The more complete your LinkedIn profile is, the more jobs LinkedIn will be able to suggest for you. A complete profile obviously also appeals to people viewing it, as the reason they’re looking at it is to find out as much as they can about you. When a potential employer looks at your profile, they’ll be forming an opinion based on your tag line, summary box, and specialities. Your experience and education will most probably be important to them too, but you have more freedom in how you word those first three fields mentioned, so make the most of them. Also, right at the bottom there’s a field where you can put what you’re ‘interested in’. This basically means you get to say what you’re on LinkedIn for and what people can approach you with. If you’re on LinkedIn to boost your job search, don’t be shy, select ‘career opportunities’!
LinkedIn does actually have a dedicated jobs section. Employers post vacancies in the hope that a savvy jobseeker like you will come across them and turn out to be the ideal candidate. Click on the Jobs tab at the top of the homepage and you’ll be taken to a keyword search box as well as a list of suggested vacancies based on what your profile says.
LinkedIn brands itself as the social network for professionals and a lot of people do use it successfully for sharing information and news about their companies or discussing key issues in their industry. But what can LinkedIn do for the job seeking professional? Many of us are not as clued in to all of LinkedIn’s different features as we might be. However, it’s worth getting to know this social network better as it has a surprising number of tools for helping your job search. Here are ten ways in which we can use LinkedIn in our pursuit for the right career.