Four Ways LinkedIn Can Help Your Career

The following is excerpted with permission from How to Succeed in Business Using LinkedIn: Making Connections and Capturing Opportunities on the World's #1 Business Networking Site by Eric Butow and Kathleen Taylor (AMACOM 2008). We've talked previously about the value of LinkedIn and this piece adds some meat to that discussion.

Promote Yourself

LinkedIn is designed for business professionals and business owners instead of for the general public. You establish yourself on LinkedIn by creating a profile that summarizes your professional and/or business accomplishments. Without a profile you can’t link to anyone else in LinkedIn, and no other LinkedIn users can learn more about you. So creating a profile is one of the first tasks you need to complete. For example, when I joined LinkedIn, I set up a profile for my business and linked the profile to several colleagues.

The text that you include in your profile is searchable. So, if you’re looking for work in a particular area, such as telecommunications, be sure to add this information in your profile. As an example, Penelope Trunk, a syndicated career columnist for The Boston Globe, who uses LinkedIn extensively to network with others, pointed out in her April 24, 2007, blog entry about 10 ways that journalists can use LinkedIn. A thoughtfully completed and properly linked profile is an excellent way of promoting yourself and/or your business.

Grow Your Network Fast

LinkedIn offers subscribers a remarkably fast way to grow their networks. When I joined LinkedIn, about 14 of my colleagues asked to link with me, and I asked to link with some of them. By degrees I expanded my link network to hundreds of LinkedIn members because my originally linked members have links to hundreds of other connections. And those hundreds of connections have thousands more. In a very short time you’ll have more connections than you ever thought possible. Fortunately, LinkedIn makes it easy to search for other LinkedIn members who share your interests, including, for example, the company you work for (or the company you worked for sometime in the hazy past), as well as for people you went to school with (in the even more hazier past).

Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist, managing director of the venture capital firm Garage Technology Ventures, author, and LinkedIn user, offers a valuable tip. He notes in his January 4, 2007 blog that if you make your profile available to everyone and use your actual name for your public profile URL (also known as a Web site address), you make your profile information easier for search engines to index. This is especially true when people use Google to search for you because your site has a higher Google PageRank, that is, your profile comes up more quickly in search results when people search for your name, giving you more opportunities for people to network with you.

Get a Job, Man!

When a friend of mine told me recently that he was looking for a job, one of the first things I told him was to sign onto LinkedIn and let me know when he did, so that I could not only link to his site but also write a recommendation for him. When you write recommendations for other users, they appear in the users’ profiles so that others can read about how great your contacts are. Not only are other LinkedIn users searching for fellow users with similar interests, but recruiters and business owners also use LinkedIn to find great employees by posting job listings. And your LinkedIn home page shows you who’s hiring in your network.

In addition, as Guy Kawasaki notes in the same blog entry, LinkedIn also enables you to perform reverse checks on your prospective manager as well as the company you’re thinking of working for. You can use LinkedIn to contact people who have worked at the company, get feedback from them, and find out about the current rate of turnover.

Give and Get Inside Information

LinkedIn is also a great place for members to collaborate. You can question only the people in your network, or you can expand your search for information in LinkedIn Answers, which is a section for asking and answering questions at-large. You can ask a question in as many as 16 different forums, from issues about business administration to using LinkedIn. You also can participate in discussions and answer questions from other users.

What’s more, as Penelope Trunk notes (in the same blog entry), you can get ideas for topics and trends in your industry. For example, she notes that, if you look for information about the iPhone, you get some of the buzz about the product from other LinkedIn users. If you’re looking to work or start a business in a particular industry, Guy Kawasaki points out that you can use LinkedIn to find out who worked for your competitors and see who’s starting up businesses in the same industry.

The more questions you answer, the more you become recognized as an expert in the LinkedIn community, and that leads to more opportunities for you.

Comments

[MC]

"Linked in" is valuable? You're kidding!

Everytime I do a Google search for someone and find someone on Linked in, there is nothing at all listed there--only their name. Sometimes some former places where they (might have) worked, but no dates about when they worked there or anything useful at all. No picture, no address, no resume, no nothing.

[Karl]

MC,

It all depends on what someone shares publicly. My public LinkedIn page has pretty much the same information as my resume excluding address and phone number.

[Jen]

I recently got linkedin to build my network as a recent grad. I really love the professionalism it provides for communicating your own personal brand. Another site that I use is joined.com that is focused on building profiles and networking for youthful career seekers.

[Harte]

I use LinkedIn on pretty much a daily basis during the course of my work, as do many of my co-workers. We're in a fairly dynamic industry where people move around quite a bit. It's been invaluable in keeping track of current clients, former clients, and finding prospective clients. They get to see what new things we're working on as well as events we're hosting. It took us two years to get our president to join but once he did, it only took him about a week to see what an incredibly useful tool it was. He found that many of his contacts had changed companies or positions and he hadn't been aware of it - understandable since our client data base is pretty large. I've also reconnected with a lot of former co-workers and even some relatives I'd lost track of!

[guinness416]

I like linkedin despite being in a very non-tech field, and have hooked up with ex colleagues on it, learned more about my current colleagues' experience, gotten decent info from the groups/forums, etc. If you're a good candidate and can show it there it is certainly a good resource for job seeking - some of the recruiters who've sought me out via linkedin are useless but I have also met with a couple who are very much on the inside track and have shared useful information (and genuine opportunities, not timewasters) with me.

If anyone wants a Toronto construction economist in their linkedin network drop me a line at gmail!