Networking: Whether you’re looking at companies as potential customers or for a job, you can search and find those people you are already connected with or should be connected with using LinkedIn.
Competitive Insight: Finding out what makes your competitor, customer, or customer’s competitors tick is easy with LinkedIn.
Business Development: Ideas for new products, new sources for ingredients or products, or just finding new customers are challenges for LinkedIn.
Finding Employees: Recruiting or getting the inside information on job seekers.
Promotion and Advertising: Keeping your company or even personal name out there for all to see is another excellent use for LinkedIn
Finding a Job: LinkedIn is one of the easiest ways to do a job search, and likewise, it is a way to better understand the strength of your resume and learn what needs to be changed to better fit your ideal job.
Research: Researching new career options, lead generation, content marketing, gaining competitive insight and finding new supply sources
Why post this LinkedIn information on this website? →
Why does this site offer a LinkedIn page? Because LinkedIn is an opportunity for everyone. The LinkedIn site has 800 million+ members and allows professionals to manage their professional identity, build and engage a professional network, and access knowledge, insights, and opportunities. It also has some fantastic ways to find out the best way to use their site on their site.
The reason it is included on this site isn’t that this is the best and most complete information source, but it is because it just focuses on what you need to know to get started from the point of view of a person who just lost their job and is in a hurry to use the tools. This insight came from working one on one with over 800 job seekers.
Some of what you need to know will be “intuitive” based on what your resume and job history say about you and finding the best way to sum those experiences up in the About Statement and job titles you chose to put under your headline. Freelancer, Self-Employed, looking for a job and leaving those things behind? Those can require some intuitive focus. LinkedIn, of course, can identify the many parts of the process, but the posts on this site take those approaches adding where experience has shown people trying to be intuitive find roadblocks and need help
8 Common mistakes in making your profile for LinkedIn →
8 Common Mistakes on LinkedIn Profiles
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1. Bad Photo Don’t overdress but do dress well. This is you, and it needs to be a good photo. You probably don’t need a tie in your image if you don't wear a tie at work.
2. Behind the Photo Banner - This space can be blank, but why not make it a good reflection of your professional image? Type your professional title, add “LinkedIn Banner” to the name, and hit enter on Google. Next, shoot “images” and choose from various possible photos that will emphasize this identity. The background banner photo you choose should reinforce who you are (Who you want to be in your next job) and visually support the written portions of your profile, including the “About Statement.” This image should include communication of your overall value, skills, career focus, and professional identity.
3. Bad Headline - The title of your current job automatically goes under your name if you’re still working, and changing this might tip off your current employer that you’re looking. This may be a logical place to add a passion statement about what you like about your field of work. If you are unemployed, you can list job titles you might consider, which can serve as additional valuable keywords for the algorithms. It can open doors to jobs that even algorithms might not find from your experience section.
4. Weak or missing “About Statement” - A statement capturing your general title and what and how you can do what you do. Rather than saying you’re a “Director of Annuity Insurance Sales,” it would be better to say “Experience Insurance Industry Sales,” for example. Your title should reflect your focus on what could be ahead for you. This title is the total of the many parts over your career years.
5. Not enough skills, no Skills, or Skills that are not updated - Cover all skill options offered: Technical, soft & hard skills, people skills ect.
6. Weak Experiences with no keywords: Examples -Direct Reports Areas of responsibilities. Accomplishments. Results
7. Grammatical Mistakes and Typos
8. Most things unrelated to your work should be left off. Sometimes a person adds some of the things they feel passionate about in this site feeling that it makes them look more like a real person. When they need to find the right job it can be hard to help them understand that being passionate about the environment isn’t going to help them advance a “Senior Engineer Job” as quickly as showing how their experiences are the best fit for the job posting.
Summary Thoughts
The LinkedIn profile is what helps you find a job and what helps the company posting a job to find you. It can be a lot longer and broader than a resume but it is still the resume that gets you a job. The profile brings the job to your attention but the resume goes with the application and should be written as much as possible to be a more exact fit to the job posting.
87% of recruiters use LinkedIn and over 70% of employers check LinkedIn before making a hiring decision.
An important and unique feature of LinkedIn is that it gives you important feedback →
LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network with 760+ million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The US has 167 million users. These figures are as of 2020.
With that said, I want to list one handy feature of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is unique in how its job search platform works. They have the traditional approach where you put in the job title you want to search for and where (City, State, or even zip code) brings up the jobs. Google does an excellent job of that too. Most job platforms approach the search task this way, remembering what you searched for, and sending you more ideas on-going. LinkedIn will do that on the traditional job search platform at the top of the Jobs page.
LinkedIn’s essential and unique feature doesn’t just remember what you searched for and continue to feed you other similar job matches, but it also uses algorithms to read your profile. It matches the shape of the job posts and finds the best matches based on the totality of your profile. This then brings notifications to you in the jobs section under “Based on your Profile and Search,” showing where your profile matched best. The algorithms find you; in reality, the best jobs also find you.
Working as a Career Coach, I sometimes have candidates tell me that the jobs they see as “best fits” on the lower part of the Jobs page are ones they have no interest in. I then usually tell them that one of two things are the reason for that? Either they are not qualified for what they want to do, or they didn’t fill out the profile correctly.
This is unique for a job search platform to see what job found you by the algorithm’s evaluation of your profile. What you see as jobs sent to you confirms your profile's strength, and you can, in many cases, know that you are not being clear enough on your profile to see the kind of jobs you want. Instead of searching for a particular job, the job that fits you best is searching for you. This is unique, and nowhere else in the other options for job search can you get this feedback.
“If you can’t find what you want in the job section, either you are not qualified for what you want, or your profile hasn’t been done correctly enough to reflect why you would fit the job you want.”