4 Ways Job Seekers Can Win on LinkedIn

If and when you are looking for your next job, these are 4 easy ways you can use LinkedIn to make the job search process more fruitful and less painful.  

#1: Use Your Time More Effectively

Most job seekers spend the bulk of their time on LinkedIn scrolling looking for job or reading posts from people in their network. I love the job search feature on LinkedIn but I encourage you to spend an equal amount of time using LinkedIn to identify your targets. What do I mean by targets? I mean the actual people inside the company you’d like to work for next. As a job seeker, you need to find a way to break through the large number of applicants for any position. Knowing who’s actually hiring for the role you’re interested in is crucial. Next up, we’ll talk about how to get them to actually notice you.

#2: Position Yourself as an Expert in Your Field (or at least as someone who is highly engaged in your field!)

Most profiles are not well done (see this post if you want help with that) and on top of that, most people are very passive with their activity on LinkedIn. If you’re a job seeker, you need to up your game; you need a strong profile and I recommend regularly posting content related to your field (once every week or two is perfect). Another way to strategically up your game is to like and comment on the posts of your targets. Also occasionally consider sharing their posts. Even people with large followings on LinkedIn pay attention to who interacts with their posts. Liking, commenting, and sharing your target’s posts is an easy way for you to get noticed by people you want seeing you.

#3: Build Real Connections

Most people send out connection requests and that’s it. Going back to my comments in #1 about identifying your targets, ideally you’re getting some level of engagement with your targets once they become connections. How can you do that? First, I’d add a quick note with your connection request. Once they accept your request, send them a direct mail message asking them for 5 minutes of their time. The goal is to have the opportunity to ask them a few questions about the role and even if they don’t respond, the goal is to get noticed by them.

#4: Leverage Recruiters

As a career coach, I can tell you that recruiters are one of the most underused, incredible resources there are in the job search game. There seems to be a misconception that recruiters don’t want to hear from job seekers. Contingency recruiters and executive recruiters (sometimes called headhunters), get paid when the candidate who they find gets hired. Leveraging these experts to help you in your job search is a no-brainer for anyone at the senior level and can also work well for mid-career level job seekers. You can use LinkedIn’s search function to look for recruiters who recruit in your industry at your level. I encourage you to reach out to them.

If you’re going to job search on LinkedIn, these simple tips will help you get more out of your search time. Feel free to email me at merryn@madetohire.com if you have any questions or need help.