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
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.”