Kevin Ian Schmidt

With the advancing world, how we live and work is constantly changing. Many industries that used to be labor-run are now automated, so working in a leadership position in any industry now is not how it used to be. There are many jobs that have become common due to the popularity of the internet, creating more job opportunities. The vastness of job opportunities and modern take on the job descriptions of many posts has made job searches around the world both more difficult and easier at the same time. The latter is because of the number of jobs available, while the former is observed because finding the right job between all of these opportunities becomes difficult. In fact, job searching is now a talent in itself.

LinkedIn is a service that serves simply as a Facebook for professionals, as many already call it. How it works is that any individual or organization can share their professional details online on a well-organized site that categorizes each type of experience, capabilities, and employment details. This serves as an online CV of a kind since many employers look at the LinkedIn profiles of people that they might employ.

While making it easy to look for jobs, LinkedIn also allows employers to research their potential employees and helps organizations and professionals connect with one another more easily.

This article will cover the job searching factor of LinkedIn, discussing how the service helps people look for jobs to find something that they are interested in and that they are suitable for, but first, let’s discuss how your LinkedIn shows how you are suitable for where you’re applying.

LinkedIn Profile Optimization

LinkedIn is a site with over 337 million professionals, making it one of the top networks for professional development as well as job searching. However, with all this traffic, it is difficult for an individual to stand out for any job. How you can assure this for yourself is by optimizing your LinkedIn profile to maximize your chances of successfully landing a job, which includes being able to build a powerful presence by making the most of its features and sharing your expertise.

Sharing All Your Necessary Professional Details

If you look at LinkedIn as an online, customizable CV, you will understand that adding information about yourself on this site will clearly be beneficial to those evaluating your profile. Completing and adding details about your employment history, including your current position, past positions, capabilities and skills, a professional picture of yourself or your industry, your education information as well your current industry and location makes for a LinkedIn profile that really sells itself.

Adding to all those details, you can also make your LinkedIn profile stand out by selecting a proper URL for yourself, which is SEO friendly as well as easy to remember. All of this is the basic information any user has to add for their profile to stand out.

Sharing Your Purpose

An excellent way to land a job is by fueling any chances to stand out in a recruitment search. The number one way to catch the eye of any recruiter to finally end that long job search of yours is to make your purpose clear.

Now, your purpose may be as simple as ‘looking for a job’ or can be tailored to explain with accurate detail what your purpose in the industry or for job searching is. Again, the latter can be simplified to a simple reason where one tells the type of job they’re searching for.

Recommendations

Getting recommendations from your peers is important. LinkedIn maintains and keeps these recommendations online, sharing them with professionals only. The peers that you get recommendations from may be one of your customers, colleagues, employers or people working for you.

Adding Skills

As stated before, this is a part of completing one’s professional profile on LinkedIn. Adding details about skills is much more sophisticated and professional on LinkedIn than just simply writing skills. Once you write about these skills, your peers and work group are sent a confirmation regarding this and the skills that are verified by people are known as endorsements.

Endorsements are very important for your LinkedIn profile as they show what skills you are known for, which would give the right impression to the recruiters as to why you’re suited for a job, hence making your job hunt easy for you.

Your Summary

We can look at this part of the LinkedIn profile as the very professional and influential counterpart of Facebook’s description. It has to be a precise summary about an individual’s professional life, what they have accomplished and what they have set out to accomplish. The summary can be about 200 characters long and is important for your profile to stand out, so be sure to write a precise and impressive summary that will catch the attention of recruiters.

Links to Relevant Websites

Add links to the websites of the organizations you work for, blogs you write, or any pages or publications that are relevant to your professional life. Editing these and adding in the right keywords for these sites is important too since it gives a good impression and helps recruiters browse through your online profile.

Order and Arrangement of Your Linkedin Profile

LinkedIn allows one to customize their profile considerably for ease of use and so that you may note down and showcase your accomplishments and abilities as best you can. One of the features that LinkedIn offers is the option to change the order of your profile to however you want it to be; the sections can be rearranged and suited especially for your professional profile. Rearranging the profile is easy too since all you require is a simple click-and-drag action to change the order.

Use Specific Keywords

What will help recruiters and potential connections find you is the use of precise and to-the-point keywords that you add to your profile. These have to be eye-catching and serve to give off a good impression. Another benefit that specific and catchy keywords provide is to search engine optimize your profile. The more relevant keywords you add, the more chances are of you to pop up on a Google search. This will help you end your job search by bringing organizations to you.

Add the Specifics

Writing about the projects you’ve worked on, the awards you’ve won, the causes you care about, and the places you’ve volunteered at will help brighten up your profile significantly. This will be the final touch to your profile and would help with your job hunt more than you think.

The causes you care about and the places you’ve volunteered at help describe how you are as a person and matter in the profile you’ve created for your job hunt.

Linkedin Job Search

Once your LinkedIn profile has been created and optimized to ensure you get some views every day or simply pull in a good audience, your job search will be made much easier since it increases your chance of getting selected by a lot. However, just optimizing your profile like this will only serve to increase your chances and raising the possibility of ending your job search altogether. Searching for a job yourself is a whole other story which requires patience and a very thorough approach.

This section of the article will cover how you can search for the jobs you are suited for so that you have a higher chance of landing one.

Check Out: Job Interview Ultimate Guide

Headline

After optimizing your profile and making sure all of your professional details are filled in and optimized for organizations, including a headline about your current job search status will let employers find you and scoop you in. However, this is very much a challenge, and although adding a catchy headline would draw in a number of views to your profile, if your profile isn’t edited to stand out, the headline won’t help with your job search at all.

Following Companies

LinkedIn offers more than just pages of individuals. This site with over 337 million professionals helps by making pages and details about companies themselves. These pages can be followed and it’ll be in your best interest to do that since that way, you’ll be up to date with the current events of every company while updating you if any of these companies is searching for people to recruit. This is a major step in your job search as your target companies will be right there for you. Thus, you can research about them as well as keep yourself up to date about any opportunities that arise.

Connect

While you’re searching for your job, a lot of things factor into finding just the right job. One of the most important steps you should follow is to increase your connections as much as possible and as soon as possible. After creating a good account, showcasing your abilities, getting recommendations and following companies, it’s very important to connect with as many individuals and organizations as possible. Remember that this will help you connect further with other people and all of these connections will be helpful for your career at more than just one point in your life.

I am always open to connecting with people on LinkedIn, here is my profile

So what this basically means that although LinkedIn profiles help showcase your skills and connect with people, nothing helps more than promoting yourself in person among your peers. So watch out for the people that can be of use to you. Keep a look out for well-known companies that you can work for or new and rising companies that you can help promote both in person and on the internet. As we mentioned before, this site is like a Facebook for professional connections, so even though making new connections through LinkedIn itself is efficient, it’s better to connect with people you have worked with, people you have worked for as well as the people working for you since you know their capabilities well and they know yours.

Contacting Peers

Once you have made connections, contacting them through LinkedIn is also easy since the site offers the option of messaging your connections privately. With a fully functional instant messaging option, you can manage your work optimally.

This feature also helps with job searches as you can contact many companies and individuals regarding your job directly through LinkedIn and keep track of the available positions and their current state.

Conclusion

A lot of things factor into a successful job search, including your achievements and capabilities, but what bears fruit in your job search is not the achievements themselves but how you showcase them. Adding what you learn from any experience and the skills you have learned throughout your personal life that will affect your professional life, pinpointing certain strengths, and using precise keywords will ensure that your LinkedIn profile is search engine optimized, which will, in turn, ensure that your profile pops up on searches on Google and other search engines whenever a search about a particular keyword is made.

Adding to that, completing your profile is necessary with the summary, causes you care about, recommendations, and the entirety of the sections listed above so that your profile provides all information to any recruiter. The advantage this gives you is significant and it can factor into your job search well enough for better job opportunities.

In conclusion, the jobs out there are numerous, but ironically, finding jobs – especially the right one – is really an issue many of us face. In fact, job hunts of even the most capable of people bear no fruit until they finally catch their big break, so LinkedIn is a service that comes in very handy. Keep all of the tips mentioned above in mind, keep seeking opportunities and stay vigilant in your job search because on LinkedIn, the right job is just a few clicks away.