LinkedIn’s new portfolio feature shows up right on your profile page, and is directly correlated to your work experience. Image: LinkedIn
LinkedIn now lets users add visual content like photos, presentations and videos to their profile pages — a feature that has been in high demand with creative professionals like designers and photographers.
The new LinkedIn Professional Portfolio feature turns the bare, word-heavy resumes of LinkedIn into potentially very image- and video-heavy portfolios. It’s an especially important enhancement for people who absolutely need to provide examples of their visual work to get a job, but could also be useful for others who just want to add some depth to their resumes.
“From the analyst who makes annual predictions on tech trends to the 3D animator who is looking to fund a new short film, the opportunities are limitless for how professionals can now use the LinkedIn profile to help showcase these unique stories in a visual way,” LinkedIn Project Manager Udi Milo wrote in a blog post.
You can upload any number of images, videos and presentations directly into the summary, work experience and education sections of your LinkedIn profile with descriptions of the work. For example, a designer can upload a magazine spread and describe their thought process behind the design. Or an actor can upload a short clip of a recent performance. All of these visuals show up as thumbnails on a user’s profile page, directly beneath a specific job, work summary, and education history. You can then click the thumbnails to get full-screen views. LinkedIn will eventually add the ability to like and comment on individual images and videos.
This is an important addition to LinkedIn, which has traditionally been a professional network for office-bound, white-collar workers. The move could potentially attract many more creative professional, who can now display their portfolios alongside their resumes.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/linkedin-professional-portfolio/
Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts
Tips for managing your career on social media
Whether you are a recent graduate or a seasoned professional, at some point you’ll likely find yourself searching for a new job. And as you start your job search, it’s important to understand the impact your use of social media may have on your career.
The hard truth: You can’t be too cautious when it comes to participating in social media. According to a 2012 CareerBuilder.com survey, 37 percent of employers check sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in their research of candidates. And the employer scrutiny of social media takes on a whole new dimension for many once on the job as a growing number of employers are establishing policies about the use of social media on and off the clock for their employees.
The clash between employee use of social media and employers has come to a head with the dramatic rise in the number of legal cases involving employees and their use of the Internet both on and off the job, according to FindLaw.com, the nation’s leading website for free legal information.
“The photos and comments you post on social media websites can follow your career for years to come,” says Solomon Gresen, an employment law attorney with the Law Offices of Rheuban & Gresen in Los Angeles. “When you start posting online, you create a digital trail that’s available for all to see – including current and future employers. And, in many ways, what you post remains forever.”
In one case, an employee was fired when she posted photos of herself dancing and throwing a Frisbee at a festival on her Facebook profile. Why? She was on a temporary leave and claimed she was in severe pain from an old back injury.
“I would strongly urge parents to talk to their high school- and college-age children about the importance of building a reputable online presence,” adds Gresen. “One careless Facebook post or inappropriate tweet could wind up damaging your reputation and negatively impacting your career potential.”
Here are some additional tips from FindLaw.com on how to avoid career-limiting social media mistakes:
Ask about your company’s social media policies. With more companies adopting social media policies, educating yourself is key. If there aren’t any policies at your workplace, it’s best to use common sense.
Search yourself. Want to check out what your potential or current employer may see about you online? Do a search of your name on any of the leading search engines to get a snapshot of how you appear digitally to others. If you see any red flags, manage them right away – or be prepared for the situation should an employer bring it up with you.
Complete your LinkedIn profile. Many recruiters search LinkedIn for candidates. This is one place to put your best foot forward and attract employers. Don’t treat it as an online resume with every career detail – just include highlights of your work history and accomplishments.
Don’t lie or exaggerate your work experience. The Internet offers employers the opportunity to corroborate information you claim about yourself. Therefore, it’s wise to not lie or exaggerate on your resume or LinkedIn profile.
Avoid sharing sensitive work-related information. Don’t share privileged or confidential information about your company or customers. It could put your career and the company at risk.
Don’t vent about work. Don’t complain about your boss. Don’t gripe about how boring work is. Don’t play hooky and then post photos about your incredible day off. Always assume that someone from your company may be watching what you say or post.
Be careful about what photos you share. With smartphone cameras connected directly to social networks, photos can easily be posted without a second thought. Photos of you participating in inappropriate or risky behavior can quickly tarnish your professional reputation. Employers want employees who mirror company values. If they’re looking for ways to quickly whittle down a large pool of candidates, this is one of them.
Be cautious about who you connect with. In the world of business you’re known by the company you keep. The same rule applies to social media. Everything you like on Facebook or follow on LinkedIn or Twitter factors into your online reputation.
Use your privacy settings. Want to limit some of the problems mentioned and put space between your personal and professional life? Adjust your privacy settings. Many social media platforms have controls that allow you to fine-tune how your information and posts are displayed.
Read more here
The hard truth: You can’t be too cautious when it comes to participating in social media. According to a 2012 CareerBuilder.com survey, 37 percent of employers check sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in their research of candidates. And the employer scrutiny of social media takes on a whole new dimension for many once on the job as a growing number of employers are establishing policies about the use of social media on and off the clock for their employees.
The clash between employee use of social media and employers has come to a head with the dramatic rise in the number of legal cases involving employees and their use of the Internet both on and off the job, according to FindLaw.com, the nation’s leading website for free legal information.
“The photos and comments you post on social media websites can follow your career for years to come,” says Solomon Gresen, an employment law attorney with the Law Offices of Rheuban & Gresen in Los Angeles. “When you start posting online, you create a digital trail that’s available for all to see – including current and future employers. And, in many ways, what you post remains forever.”
In one case, an employee was fired when she posted photos of herself dancing and throwing a Frisbee at a festival on her Facebook profile. Why? She was on a temporary leave and claimed she was in severe pain from an old back injury.
“I would strongly urge parents to talk to their high school- and college-age children about the importance of building a reputable online presence,” adds Gresen. “One careless Facebook post or inappropriate tweet could wind up damaging your reputation and negatively impacting your career potential.”
Here are some additional tips from FindLaw.com on how to avoid career-limiting social media mistakes:
Ask about your company’s social media policies. With more companies adopting social media policies, educating yourself is key. If there aren’t any policies at your workplace, it’s best to use common sense.
Search yourself. Want to check out what your potential or current employer may see about you online? Do a search of your name on any of the leading search engines to get a snapshot of how you appear digitally to others. If you see any red flags, manage them right away – or be prepared for the situation should an employer bring it up with you.
Complete your LinkedIn profile. Many recruiters search LinkedIn for candidates. This is one place to put your best foot forward and attract employers. Don’t treat it as an online resume with every career detail – just include highlights of your work history and accomplishments.
Don’t lie or exaggerate your work experience. The Internet offers employers the opportunity to corroborate information you claim about yourself. Therefore, it’s wise to not lie or exaggerate on your resume or LinkedIn profile.
Avoid sharing sensitive work-related information. Don’t share privileged or confidential information about your company or customers. It could put your career and the company at risk.
Don’t vent about work. Don’t complain about your boss. Don’t gripe about how boring work is. Don’t play hooky and then post photos about your incredible day off. Always assume that someone from your company may be watching what you say or post.
Be careful about what photos you share. With smartphone cameras connected directly to social networks, photos can easily be posted without a second thought. Photos of you participating in inappropriate or risky behavior can quickly tarnish your professional reputation. Employers want employees who mirror company values. If they’re looking for ways to quickly whittle down a large pool of candidates, this is one of them.
Be cautious about who you connect with. In the world of business you’re known by the company you keep. The same rule applies to social media. Everything you like on Facebook or follow on LinkedIn or Twitter factors into your online reputation.
Use your privacy settings. Want to limit some of the problems mentioned and put space between your personal and professional life? Adjust your privacy settings. Many social media platforms have controls that allow you to fine-tune how your information and posts are displayed.
Read more here
The Most Important LinkedIn Page You’ve Never Seen
Tucked behind your professional, yet pretty, profile picture, the descriptions of all your past jobs, and that column of “People You May Know” is a section of LinkedIn that most people have never heard of, let alone seen. And yet it’s the real reason why you should actually care about sprucing up your LinkedIn profile and network.
Dubbed LinkedIn Recruiter, it’s the company’s flagship product and the core of the professional social network’s Talent Solutions. Talent Solutions drive just over half of LinkedIn’s revenue, $161 million in the last quarter. While any LinkedIn user can see jobs and the pages companies build for themselves, Recruiter is only visible to companies that pay to use LinkedIn as a candidate sourcing and hiring tool.
Recruiter is a bit like a two-way mirror where companies and recruiters can see all of your profile information, without you knowing they’re checking you out. For example, recruiters can search for people with specific skill sets, flag them and add a dossier to their profile — all without that person knowing. They can all of the jobs they’ve listed and people they’re watching. Sure, there is a “Who’s Viewed Your Profile,” but those using LinkedIn Recruiter can make themselves anonymous (as can paying LinkedIn premium account members).
LinkedIn wants to make sure those well-paying recruiters and companies have the best possible experience so that they stick around, maybe even tell their HR buddies. To that end, LinkedIn recently unveiled a refreshed Recruiter home page more in line with its consumer-facing products.
The Recruiter search tool lets recruiters search for specific types of people. Image: LinkedIn
“We’ve seen the impact that simplification has had on member growth and engagement,” Parker Barrile, Senior Director of Product Management for Talent Solutions, tells Wired. “This new page is about bringing that same principle into Recruiter.”
Recruiter is basically getting “Katyfied”. The redesigned page features a new search tool, update stream, and section called “People You May Want to Hire.” Recruiters can more easily scour LinkedIn’s network of 200 million and growing profiles and keep track of who they are considering for jobs.
To date, more than 16,000 clients or companies pay to use LinkedIn Recruiter. The list includes big names like Google, Facebook, Unilever, BP, and L’Oreal, amongst thousands of other large, medium and small business and recruiting firms. The average cost per recruiter account is about $8,000, and it goes way up from there depending how many HR folks are hammering away on it. Suffice to say, even with volume discounts, the companies who have thousands of recruiters are paying a hefty amount for LinkedIn’s tools.
It’s easy to see what LinkedIn is doing here. The more it improves Recruiter, the more the service becomes money well spent. Happy recruiters mean more and more recruiters using LinkedIn, which in true network effects fashion translates to LinkedIn becoming the future of hiring (not to mention the fatter future of LinkedIn’s revenue stream). By design it’s going to be very hard for anyone else to catch up.
Recruiter already offers several unique features that are incredibly hard for companies to build or find elsewhere: a giant data set of more than 200 million users and growing, a way to engage passive employees, and the ability to build career branding around a company. The value of the LinkedIn’s data is clear — it would take companies years and years to build a candidate pool even a fraction of that size, and it would be nearly impossible to keep up to date.
The company has already dropped a “nuclear bomb on recruiting,” according to Ed Nathanson, director of talent acquisition at security software company Rapid7. Nathanson says that Rapid7 now uses LinkedIn Recruiter for all of its recruiting purposes, and that the company’s recruiters spend anywhere from four to five hours on LinkedIn each day. He and his team have used LinkedIn to more than double the size of Rapid7 in the last year and a half.
In other words, Nathanson finds the vast majority of future employees on LinkedIn. And if you aren’t on LinkedIn? He’ll probably never find you. And even if he did, he probably wouldn’t hire you. “I’m always amazed at people who aren’t there now,” Nathanson says. “When I talk to candidates and they aren’t on there that’s a big red flag for me.”
Let that sink in for a moment. If you care a whit about your career not only do you have to be on LinkedIn, you should have a detailed profile with your job history. It should look like your resume. Taking advantage of LinkedIn features like Skills can also make you more searchable to recruiters. And of course, build out your network with people you know.
An update stream feeds recruiters the latest news of people they are following and potential candidates.
You don’t even have to be looking for a job right now for LinkedIn’s Recruiter to impact your career. The ability to source passive candidates, people who are not actively looking for a job but might be the most qualified, is incredibly valuable to LinkedIn Recruiter users. Instead of sticking to the usual job board or paying an outside agency to find candidates, recruiters can use LinkedIn to find exactly who they want with the skills and experience they want. Diane Hughes, the head headhunter at financial services company Northern Trust, says that LinkedIn is the best place to efficiently find high-quality candidates. “It’s quality, it’s quantity, and it’s speed for me,” she says.
LinkedIn’s messaging service, InMail, gives recruiters the ability to contact anybody that piques their interest. But even if they don’t decide to send an InMail, recruiters can still watch and receive updates on potential candidates. They can add the people to hiring “projects” and see who else in the company is tracking that person. There’s even a new beta feature that allows a recruiter to see people within her company who can provide feedback on a potential candidate, all before the recruiter even gets in touch with that person.
It would be incredibly creepy were it not for LinkedIn’s laser-focused mission on connecting the world’s professionals and helping them be more successful and productive in their careers. You’re putting your information on LinkedIn to be looked at, to help you get a job, if not now, at some point down the road.
“Our mission is to help people hire and I think it’s easy to lose sight of that and simply focus on helping people find profiles,” Barille says. “But that’s only one step in the hiring process. This is about broadening Recruiter from just a tool to search and look at profiles to something that helps you discover new talent, but also drives much deeper into the recruiting workflow.”
Going forward, LinkedIn will likely add more features to address this goal. Hughes says that she wants LinkedIn to add more features to source internal candidates, receive and track employee referrals, and a more fully developed applicant tracking system. The vision: LinkedIn as not only her top recruiting tool, but the only one.
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/04/the-real-reason-you-should-care-about-linkedin/
Dubbed LinkedIn Recruiter, it’s the company’s flagship product and the core of the professional social network’s Talent Solutions. Talent Solutions drive just over half of LinkedIn’s revenue, $161 million in the last quarter. While any LinkedIn user can see jobs and the pages companies build for themselves, Recruiter is only visible to companies that pay to use LinkedIn as a candidate sourcing and hiring tool.
Recruiter is a bit like a two-way mirror where companies and recruiters can see all of your profile information, without you knowing they’re checking you out. For example, recruiters can search for people with specific skill sets, flag them and add a dossier to their profile — all without that person knowing. They can all of the jobs they’ve listed and people they’re watching. Sure, there is a “Who’s Viewed Your Profile,” but those using LinkedIn Recruiter can make themselves anonymous (as can paying LinkedIn premium account members).
LinkedIn wants to make sure those well-paying recruiters and companies have the best possible experience so that they stick around, maybe even tell their HR buddies. To that end, LinkedIn recently unveiled a refreshed Recruiter home page more in line with its consumer-facing products.
The Recruiter search tool lets recruiters search for specific types of people. Image: LinkedIn
“We’ve seen the impact that simplification has had on member growth and engagement,” Parker Barrile, Senior Director of Product Management for Talent Solutions, tells Wired. “This new page is about bringing that same principle into Recruiter.”
Recruiter is basically getting “Katyfied”. The redesigned page features a new search tool, update stream, and section called “People You May Want to Hire.” Recruiters can more easily scour LinkedIn’s network of 200 million and growing profiles and keep track of who they are considering for jobs.
To date, more than 16,000 clients or companies pay to use LinkedIn Recruiter. The list includes big names like Google, Facebook, Unilever, BP, and L’Oreal, amongst thousands of other large, medium and small business and recruiting firms. The average cost per recruiter account is about $8,000, and it goes way up from there depending how many HR folks are hammering away on it. Suffice to say, even with volume discounts, the companies who have thousands of recruiters are paying a hefty amount for LinkedIn’s tools.
It’s easy to see what LinkedIn is doing here. The more it improves Recruiter, the more the service becomes money well spent. Happy recruiters mean more and more recruiters using LinkedIn, which in true network effects fashion translates to LinkedIn becoming the future of hiring (not to mention the fatter future of LinkedIn’s revenue stream). By design it’s going to be very hard for anyone else to catch up.
Recruiter already offers several unique features that are incredibly hard for companies to build or find elsewhere: a giant data set of more than 200 million users and growing, a way to engage passive employees, and the ability to build career branding around a company. The value of the LinkedIn’s data is clear — it would take companies years and years to build a candidate pool even a fraction of that size, and it would be nearly impossible to keep up to date.
The company has already dropped a “nuclear bomb on recruiting,” according to Ed Nathanson, director of talent acquisition at security software company Rapid7. Nathanson says that Rapid7 now uses LinkedIn Recruiter for all of its recruiting purposes, and that the company’s recruiters spend anywhere from four to five hours on LinkedIn each day. He and his team have used LinkedIn to more than double the size of Rapid7 in the last year and a half.
In other words, Nathanson finds the vast majority of future employees on LinkedIn. And if you aren’t on LinkedIn? He’ll probably never find you. And even if he did, he probably wouldn’t hire you. “I’m always amazed at people who aren’t there now,” Nathanson says. “When I talk to candidates and they aren’t on there that’s a big red flag for me.”
Let that sink in for a moment. If you care a whit about your career not only do you have to be on LinkedIn, you should have a detailed profile with your job history. It should look like your resume. Taking advantage of LinkedIn features like Skills can also make you more searchable to recruiters. And of course, build out your network with people you know.
An update stream feeds recruiters the latest news of people they are following and potential candidates.
You don’t even have to be looking for a job right now for LinkedIn’s Recruiter to impact your career. The ability to source passive candidates, people who are not actively looking for a job but might be the most qualified, is incredibly valuable to LinkedIn Recruiter users. Instead of sticking to the usual job board or paying an outside agency to find candidates, recruiters can use LinkedIn to find exactly who they want with the skills and experience they want. Diane Hughes, the head headhunter at financial services company Northern Trust, says that LinkedIn is the best place to efficiently find high-quality candidates. “It’s quality, it’s quantity, and it’s speed for me,” she says.
LinkedIn’s messaging service, InMail, gives recruiters the ability to contact anybody that piques their interest. But even if they don’t decide to send an InMail, recruiters can still watch and receive updates on potential candidates. They can add the people to hiring “projects” and see who else in the company is tracking that person. There’s even a new beta feature that allows a recruiter to see people within her company who can provide feedback on a potential candidate, all before the recruiter even gets in touch with that person.
It would be incredibly creepy were it not for LinkedIn’s laser-focused mission on connecting the world’s professionals and helping them be more successful and productive in their careers. You’re putting your information on LinkedIn to be looked at, to help you get a job, if not now, at some point down the road.
“Our mission is to help people hire and I think it’s easy to lose sight of that and simply focus on helping people find profiles,” Barille says. “But that’s only one step in the hiring process. This is about broadening Recruiter from just a tool to search and look at profiles to something that helps you discover new talent, but also drives much deeper into the recruiting workflow.”
Going forward, LinkedIn will likely add more features to address this goal. Hughes says that she wants LinkedIn to add more features to source internal candidates, receive and track employee referrals, and a more fully developed applicant tracking system. The vision: LinkedIn as not only her top recruiting tool, but the only one.
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/04/the-real-reason-you-should-care-about-linkedin/
8 ways to irritate your LinkedIn connections
Ah, social media. Alas, it's a club anyone can join as long as he or she
has a browser and an Internet connection. We're all still learning the
rules
together, and behaviors you might consider absolutely benign could be
annoying the rest of us.
When it comes to social media activity in your personal life, breaches of etiquette can easily be dismissed by your friends and family. However, on LinkedIn, the dominant social network for business, mistakes can affect your career and the way your peers and colleagues view you.
A friend might tell you nicely when you're being annoying, but you won't get the same patience in a business setting—and you might not get a second chance. Be careful how you conduct yourself. Otherwise, you risk soiling your professional reputation and being "that guy."
Are you a LinkedIn misfit? The following are annoying LinkedIn behaviors that you might want to review to ensure that you are not sending out the wrong message to your peers. In the interest of full transparency, I admit I have been guilty of a few of these, and I plan to revisit some of my own LinkedIn practices.
Oversharing
This is a common issue that goes back to the beginning of the Web. It started with email. Who among us doesn't have a family member who feels the need to broadcast every joke, recipe, meme, how-to, or news brief they encounter? In their mind, it's just a click to delete—so what's the harm?
The problem is that we have so much communication coming at us these days—via cell phones, home phones, IM, texting, email, social media, etc.—that we just don't need unnecessary clutter. (I appreciate the soy chocolate chip cookie recipes, Aunt Marge, but you're filling up my inbox.)
Ridiculous titling
With regards to LinkedIn, ridiculous titling (which I wrote about last year) can send the absolutely wrong message to the world. "Social Ninja"? "Chief Visionary Officer"? Be careful. What might seem like an innocent demonstration that you don't take yourself too seriously might be misunderstood.
LinkedIn is a business setting, not a comedy club. Half the population might get the joke, but the other half might think you're the joke. Remember that 93 percent of recruiters use LinkedIn.
Ultimately, the decision is yours. Just remember that humor and personality are great, but written communication can be easily misinterpreted.
Multi-jobbing
Listing a ton of current jobs on LinkedIn makes you look like you're overcompensating. You're an account executive at a big company, a CEO/CTO/CFO of your own startup, a blogger, an advisor, an activist, a judge for the local talent show, etc.
OK—awkward moment here, as I am culpable. Yes, I work at a great company, I write for two great publications, and I volunteer at an industry association. However, I feel it's important for me to list these things, as they are relevant to telling my professional story. The takeaway is to be cautious about sending mixed messages with multi-jobbing. Don't go overboard with the jobs you list; you could confuse the reader as to what you're really about. The roles you list should seem to complement one another rather than compete.
Using LinkedIn mail too much
Choose your method of communication wisely, young grasshopper. Does this message deserve a call, a letter, a Facebook status update, an email, or is LinkedIn the right place?
Based on my experience with LinkedIn response rates, the average person keeps this social network at a fairly low priority in their overall communication schedule. Yes, they'll get back to you, but it might take a few days. I often miss timely messages inviting me to an event or something similar, and I feel bad that the senders might think I ignored them.
Never checking your LinkedIn Mail
On the flipside of the above annoyance, people who never check their LinkedIn mail can be even more annoying than people who use it too much. I sent out a notice of a change in my professional status last May, and (this is absolutely true) I am still receiving a trickle of congrats from folks who are just now getting to that message—almost a year later. If you're going to have an account, use it. If not, shut it down.
Overstepping bounds
Social media pundits have been using Dunbar's number of about 100 to 200 as a rule of thumb in terms of the maximum number of social connections that any single person can truly know and follow. If you're like me, you haven't accepted every invitation to connect on LinkedIn, but maybe you haven't been as narrowly selective as you could have been. So, based on that metric, if you have 500 connections, it's highly likely that you don't know 300 to 400 of them very well. That's not a big deal on LinkedIn because it's meant to be your professional network, not your intimate personal one.
I'm sure I've reached out to connections with whom I'm not very close—I might have been researching a company, checking up on a potential hire, or just trying to strengthen a relationship with someone I would like to know better. However, some people really go a bit overboard and ask for recommendations and referrals that a contact isn't comfortable giving.
Whenever I've felt like I might be crossing the line, I try to send a very brief LinkedIn message that asks the person to speak on the phone with me for a few minutes at their convenience. Then, once we chat, I am able to phrase the request in a manner that lets the other person ask the questions needed to feel comfortable. I also try to keep the call very friendly and—what's important—I give the person an out. That's only fair.
Such a call might go something like this:
"Hey, Anne, thanks for taking my call. I know we're joined on LinkedIn, but I wanted to be respectful and not just shoot this request over, as it's been a long time since we first connected. If you aren't comfortable with this, I completely understand. This is something I would normally request from someone who I know a bit better, but frankly, I just haven't been able to find another path to take other than asking you."
Not adding a picture
This is a pet peeve of mine. I can completely understand the privacy (and security) aspect here, and I wouldn't hold it against anyone who didn't want to share an image of himself or herself. However, even though LinkedIn is a professional social network, it's still a social network. We're on it to get to know each other, to research business contacts before we meet to see whether there's an interesting connecting point between us, etc. What's the harm? Adding a face to a name helps us recognize each other at conferences and lunch appointments.
Having multiple profiles
This is not something I encounter very often, but sometimes I'll look someone up to invite them to connect, and the person has multiple profiles. Which one is the real you? What's the call here? Do I try to connect with all three of your profiles or just the one I think is most used?
Conclusion
This list might not represent all of your LinkedIn pet peeves. For example, one of the main annoyances in LinkedIn etiquette I've seen documented is when people try to connect using the default "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn" message.
My feeling is that when the motivation for connection is fairly obvious, you don't need to write a personalized greeting. For example, I just started at a new company, and I sent out a few LinkedIn default requests to new colleagues. Was it bad manners for me to not spend the time to customize each invitation? I don't think so-but I might be wrong. What do you think?
Overall, I find LinkedIn to be a very helpful resource. Before I meet someone new for a business appointment, I try to check them out to see where we connect: Do we have similar experiences? Where did that person go to school? Do we know some of the same people? Walking into a meeting with a bit of context absolutely helps smooth the initial learning curve in getting to know each other. But to ensure that LinkedIn is helping you put your best foot forward, you need to use proper social media business etiquette.
Josh Dreller is director or marketing research at Kenshoo. This article first appeared on iMediaConnection.
When it comes to social media activity in your personal life, breaches of etiquette can easily be dismissed by your friends and family. However, on LinkedIn, the dominant social network for business, mistakes can affect your career and the way your peers and colleagues view you.
A friend might tell you nicely when you're being annoying, but you won't get the same patience in a business setting—and you might not get a second chance. Be careful how you conduct yourself. Otherwise, you risk soiling your professional reputation and being "that guy."
Are you a LinkedIn misfit? The following are annoying LinkedIn behaviors that you might want to review to ensure that you are not sending out the wrong message to your peers. In the interest of full transparency, I admit I have been guilty of a few of these, and I plan to revisit some of my own LinkedIn practices.
Oversharing
This is a common issue that goes back to the beginning of the Web. It started with email. Who among us doesn't have a family member who feels the need to broadcast every joke, recipe, meme, how-to, or news brief they encounter? In their mind, it's just a click to delete—so what's the harm?
The problem is that we have so much communication coming at us these days—via cell phones, home phones, IM, texting, email, social media, etc.—that we just don't need unnecessary clutter. (I appreciate the soy chocolate chip cookie recipes, Aunt Marge, but you're filling up my inbox.)
Ridiculous titling
With regards to LinkedIn, ridiculous titling (which I wrote about last year) can send the absolutely wrong message to the world. "Social Ninja"? "Chief Visionary Officer"? Be careful. What might seem like an innocent demonstration that you don't take yourself too seriously might be misunderstood.
LinkedIn is a business setting, not a comedy club. Half the population might get the joke, but the other half might think you're the joke. Remember that 93 percent of recruiters use LinkedIn.
Ultimately, the decision is yours. Just remember that humor and personality are great, but written communication can be easily misinterpreted.
Multi-jobbing
Listing a ton of current jobs on LinkedIn makes you look like you're overcompensating. You're an account executive at a big company, a CEO/CTO/CFO of your own startup, a blogger, an advisor, an activist, a judge for the local talent show, etc.
OK—awkward moment here, as I am culpable. Yes, I work at a great company, I write for two great publications, and I volunteer at an industry association. However, I feel it's important for me to list these things, as they are relevant to telling my professional story. The takeaway is to be cautious about sending mixed messages with multi-jobbing. Don't go overboard with the jobs you list; you could confuse the reader as to what you're really about. The roles you list should seem to complement one another rather than compete.
Using LinkedIn mail too much
Choose your method of communication wisely, young grasshopper. Does this message deserve a call, a letter, a Facebook status update, an email, or is LinkedIn the right place?
Based on my experience with LinkedIn response rates, the average person keeps this social network at a fairly low priority in their overall communication schedule. Yes, they'll get back to you, but it might take a few days. I often miss timely messages inviting me to an event or something similar, and I feel bad that the senders might think I ignored them.
Never checking your LinkedIn Mail
On the flipside of the above annoyance, people who never check their LinkedIn mail can be even more annoying than people who use it too much. I sent out a notice of a change in my professional status last May, and (this is absolutely true) I am still receiving a trickle of congrats from folks who are just now getting to that message—almost a year later. If you're going to have an account, use it. If not, shut it down.
Overstepping bounds
Social media pundits have been using Dunbar's number of about 100 to 200 as a rule of thumb in terms of the maximum number of social connections that any single person can truly know and follow. If you're like me, you haven't accepted every invitation to connect on LinkedIn, but maybe you haven't been as narrowly selective as you could have been. So, based on that metric, if you have 500 connections, it's highly likely that you don't know 300 to 400 of them very well. That's not a big deal on LinkedIn because it's meant to be your professional network, not your intimate personal one.
I'm sure I've reached out to connections with whom I'm not very close—I might have been researching a company, checking up on a potential hire, or just trying to strengthen a relationship with someone I would like to know better. However, some people really go a bit overboard and ask for recommendations and referrals that a contact isn't comfortable giving.
Whenever I've felt like I might be crossing the line, I try to send a very brief LinkedIn message that asks the person to speak on the phone with me for a few minutes at their convenience. Then, once we chat, I am able to phrase the request in a manner that lets the other person ask the questions needed to feel comfortable. I also try to keep the call very friendly and—what's important—I give the person an out. That's only fair.
Such a call might go something like this:
"Hey, Anne, thanks for taking my call. I know we're joined on LinkedIn, but I wanted to be respectful and not just shoot this request over, as it's been a long time since we first connected. If you aren't comfortable with this, I completely understand. This is something I would normally request from someone who I know a bit better, but frankly, I just haven't been able to find another path to take other than asking you."
Not adding a picture
This is a pet peeve of mine. I can completely understand the privacy (and security) aspect here, and I wouldn't hold it against anyone who didn't want to share an image of himself or herself. However, even though LinkedIn is a professional social network, it's still a social network. We're on it to get to know each other, to research business contacts before we meet to see whether there's an interesting connecting point between us, etc. What's the harm? Adding a face to a name helps us recognize each other at conferences and lunch appointments.
Having multiple profiles
This is not something I encounter very often, but sometimes I'll look someone up to invite them to connect, and the person has multiple profiles. Which one is the real you? What's the call here? Do I try to connect with all three of your profiles or just the one I think is most used?
Conclusion
This list might not represent all of your LinkedIn pet peeves. For example, one of the main annoyances in LinkedIn etiquette I've seen documented is when people try to connect using the default "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn" message.
My feeling is that when the motivation for connection is fairly obvious, you don't need to write a personalized greeting. For example, I just started at a new company, and I sent out a few LinkedIn default requests to new colleagues. Was it bad manners for me to not spend the time to customize each invitation? I don't think so-but I might be wrong. What do you think?
Overall, I find LinkedIn to be a very helpful resource. Before I meet someone new for a business appointment, I try to check them out to see where we connect: Do we have similar experiences? Where did that person go to school? Do we know some of the same people? Walking into a meeting with a bit of context absolutely helps smooth the initial learning curve in getting to know each other. But to ensure that LinkedIn is helping you put your best foot forward, you need to use proper social media business etiquette.
Josh Dreller is director or marketing research at Kenshoo. This article first appeared on iMediaConnection.
http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/14289.aspx#
What a hiring suggestion feature can teach us about LinkedIn and corporate recruiting
One of the biggest drivers for LinkedIn’s business isn’t the consumer-facing side that you see — it’s the set of tools the company provides professional recruiters to match people with jobs. And the company is using data and technology to improve those tools.
If LinkedIn has become the quiet success of the major social web companies, LinkedIn’s Recruiter page is the quiet success — and cash machine – within the company. And a brand new feature shows how the company is turning your professional data into a gold mine for recruiters.
LinkedIn’s “talent solutions” service, which gives recruiters and hiring managers the ability to post job ads and hunt for candidates, is the fastest-growing and most profitable portion of LinkedIn’s business. The talent solutions homepage saw an update last week that involved several design changes, but it was the addition of the “People You Might Want to Hire” tool that’s sheds the most light on how LinkedIn makes money.
At this point, most professional people are at least aware of LinkedIn, and with the company boasting 200 million registered users, a good number of people now have profile pages listing their work experience and other relevant information on the social networking site. But the consumer-facing side of LinkedIn that you might see is not the portion of the company that brings in the most revenue — or, at least not directly.
The talent solutions portion of LinkedIn brought in 53 percent of the company’s revenue last quarter. The basic service allows corporate recruiters and human resources employeees to post job ads for the company, search for relevant candidates, track responses, and monitor people they might like to hire (yes, a recruiter can put an alert on your profile and know when you make updates or switch jobs.) Companies pay for access to those recruiting features, and the more accurate the data LinkedIn can provide, the more value the companies will derive from the service.
The new feature on the Recruiter page is an intelligent recommendation engine that suggests to recruiters people they might want to hire. It sounds simple enough, and with similar features all over sites like Facebook and Twitter, maybe not so novel. But the feature is huge for LinkedIn on the consumer side already, where the company reports that 50 percent of job seeker engagement comes from the recommended jobs tool, with the other 50 percent coming from people typing into the search bar. Users who are actively looking for jobs might be willing to put in search terms. But people who aren’t actively looking to switch jobs — which LinkedIn estimates is about 80 percent of the current workforce — are far less likely to search.
“Recommendations have fundamentally changed the trajectory of Linkedin.com,” said Parker Barrile, head of product for talent solutions, in an interview this week. “The recommendations technology that suggests things for members totally change the game. Because we’ve realized how important it is not to expect consumers to actively search for things.”
linkedinMy colleague Derrick Harris recently wrote about the engineering shift at LinkedIn over the past five years that now allows the company to put significant resources behind engineering projects like recommendations, and Barrile said that refining and perfecting the suggestions has become critically important.
“We’ve invested a lot into the technology that works on those recommendations,” he said. “All of these recommendation technologies learn from the way users interact with them. And LinkedIn’s recommendation technologies have become especiallly responsive because they’re so important to the business.”
The “People You Might Want To Hire” tool takes into account past behavior on the part of the recruiter, as well as data signals from within the job ad, to put together a list of candidates who might be a fit based on a variety of signals. For instance, let’s say you’re an tech company looking to hire for a PR position. The tool won’t just surface people working in technology PR. Instead, it might surface people working in technology who list writing and editing as their skills, or have a number of endorsements for communication or working with a team. Or, let’s say you’re hiring for a venture capital position in San Francisco — the system might also suggest relevant candidates from New York, since it knows people in venture capital are likely to move between the two cities.
Potentially creepy if you start getting a lot of messages from recruiters asking you to move to New York? Maybe. But for people who end up with job offers out of the process, there’s a strong upside to that technology.
http://gigaom.com/2013/04/19/what-a-hiring-suggestion-feature-can-teach-us-about-linkedin-and-corporate-recruiting/
If LinkedIn has become the quiet success of the major social web companies, LinkedIn’s Recruiter page is the quiet success — and cash machine – within the company. And a brand new feature shows how the company is turning your professional data into a gold mine for recruiters.
LinkedIn’s “talent solutions” service, which gives recruiters and hiring managers the ability to post job ads and hunt for candidates, is the fastest-growing and most profitable portion of LinkedIn’s business. The talent solutions homepage saw an update last week that involved several design changes, but it was the addition of the “People You Might Want to Hire” tool that’s sheds the most light on how LinkedIn makes money.
At this point, most professional people are at least aware of LinkedIn, and with the company boasting 200 million registered users, a good number of people now have profile pages listing their work experience and other relevant information on the social networking site. But the consumer-facing side of LinkedIn that you might see is not the portion of the company that brings in the most revenue — or, at least not directly.
The talent solutions portion of LinkedIn brought in 53 percent of the company’s revenue last quarter. The basic service allows corporate recruiters and human resources employeees to post job ads for the company, search for relevant candidates, track responses, and monitor people they might like to hire (yes, a recruiter can put an alert on your profile and know when you make updates or switch jobs.) Companies pay for access to those recruiting features, and the more accurate the data LinkedIn can provide, the more value the companies will derive from the service.
The new feature on the Recruiter page is an intelligent recommendation engine that suggests to recruiters people they might want to hire. It sounds simple enough, and with similar features all over sites like Facebook and Twitter, maybe not so novel. But the feature is huge for LinkedIn on the consumer side already, where the company reports that 50 percent of job seeker engagement comes from the recommended jobs tool, with the other 50 percent coming from people typing into the search bar. Users who are actively looking for jobs might be willing to put in search terms. But people who aren’t actively looking to switch jobs — which LinkedIn estimates is about 80 percent of the current workforce — are far less likely to search.
“Recommendations have fundamentally changed the trajectory of Linkedin.com,” said Parker Barrile, head of product for talent solutions, in an interview this week. “The recommendations technology that suggests things for members totally change the game. Because we’ve realized how important it is not to expect consumers to actively search for things.”
linkedinMy colleague Derrick Harris recently wrote about the engineering shift at LinkedIn over the past five years that now allows the company to put significant resources behind engineering projects like recommendations, and Barrile said that refining and perfecting the suggestions has become critically important.
“We’ve invested a lot into the technology that works on those recommendations,” he said. “All of these recommendation technologies learn from the way users interact with them. And LinkedIn’s recommendation technologies have become especiallly responsive because they’re so important to the business.”
The “People You Might Want To Hire” tool takes into account past behavior on the part of the recruiter, as well as data signals from within the job ad, to put together a list of candidates who might be a fit based on a variety of signals. For instance, let’s say you’re an tech company looking to hire for a PR position. The tool won’t just surface people working in technology PR. Instead, it might surface people working in technology who list writing and editing as their skills, or have a number of endorsements for communication or working with a team. Or, let’s say you’re hiring for a venture capital position in San Francisco — the system might also suggest relevant candidates from New York, since it knows people in venture capital are likely to move between the two cities.
Potentially creepy if you start getting a lot of messages from recruiters asking you to move to New York? Maybe. But for people who end up with job offers out of the process, there’s a strong upside to that technology.
http://gigaom.com/2013/04/19/what-a-hiring-suggestion-feature-can-teach-us-about-linkedin-and-corporate-recruiting/
LinkedIn: Busting 8 Damaging Myths About What It Can Do For Your Career
As a career and executive coach, speaker and recruitment consultant, I use LinkedIn (LI) extensively each day, and I truly enjoy it. I’ve found that building my network to over 1,000 direct contacts (accessing 10 million+ indirect contacts) has been well worth the two years of time and energy. I’m a big fan of LI – and truly appreciate the power of the tool and all the opportunities, gigs, partnerships, insights, information and support that have come my way from it.
I like LinkedIn so much that I often refer to it as the “great cocktail party in the sky.” The analogy of the cocktail party truly fits. LinkedIn has the following aspects in common with an awesome cocktail party:
You get the chance to connect with like-minded people who you may otherwise never have had the chance to meet. By investing just a bit of time each day, you can learn a great deal. It’s a blast to connect to people that you admire from afar, and who can teach you vital things about how to be more of what you want to be You can determine in an instant if you want to invest any more time and energy in getting to know new folks you see. Socializing beyond your limited sphere helps you build a powerful community that supports and enriches. You can add great diversity to your pool of colleagues and peers by branching out and connecting with new people across the country and globally. Meeting new people who are doing amazing and inspiring things in this world is exhilarating.
But after two years of using LinkedIn for several hours each day, and after counseling others on how to build their personal brand on LinkedIn for professional advantage, I’m witnessing some negative effects of the misguided notions people have gleaned about what LinkedIn can do for them. I’d like to share what I’ve observed to be the Top 8 Myths about LinkedIn as a professional tool, and offer some straight talk about what you can expect it to do for you.
Here are the Top 8 Myths we need to bust:
Myth #1: LinkedIn will get me a job
Nothing is going to “get you a job” but you. Yes, you can search new job openings in your area, and discover who posted the job, and connect with these folks. You can find people who work at companies posting jobs, check them out, and ask their help to introduce you. But these steps aren’t going to land you a job. You must still do the rigorous internal and external work of knowing what you’re great at, communicating your talents, finding strong-fitting positions, then get on the radar of the hiring manager or recruiters involved, and present yourself as a highly qualified and desirable candidate.
Myth #2: LinkedIn will replace recruiters
There’s a growing fear out there that LinkedIn will replace recruiters as conduits for connecting talented candidates to leading employers. It’s just not so. There’s an important personal dimension to recruiting that a tool such as LinkedIn simply can’t provide. From critically sifting through hundreds of resumes, to understanding the components of true “fit” for the hiring company, to personally interviewing and filtering candidates, and doing the extensive legwork of communicating “fit” to both employer and candidate — recruiting is a labor-intensive job that requires expert, personalized skill and attention. Again, LI is a powerful tool that certainly has changed the recruiting landscape, but recruiters remain vitally important in the process.
Myth #3: There’s no need to fully flesh out my profile – a brief line or two is fine
OK, this one makes me nuts. Here’s this vastly powerful free networking tool that allows you to tell the world who you are as a professional – what you stand for, how you’re different from all the rest, what you’re passionate about, and how you’ve contributed in the workforce. And yet thousands of folks simply don’t spend any time to articulate who they are, or present themselves in a compelling, engaging manner. As a recruiter, when I view a poorly executed profile, I see a lack of interest in promoting yourself that speaks volumes about how committed and excited you are in your professional endeavors overall.
Myth #4: Because I have over 100 (or 1000) connections, new opportunities will come easily to me
As in everything in life, quality matters over quantity. If you have scores of folks in your community who have nothing to do with anything you care about (or who aren’t interested in what you’re doing), then your connections will not generate productive or beneficial results for you.
Myth #5: When folks accept my LI invitation, they want to partner with me or connect more deeply
I’ve learned this the hard way in my recruiting work — just because people accept your invitation to connect, doesn’t mean they care about being in connection with you in any deeper way. It may simply mean that they saw your network as something advantageous to THEM, and they linked in for their own professional gain. Connections are interesting as far as they go – but it’s you who must make something positive of them.
Myth #6: LinkedIn is the best professional networking tool for all businesses or careers
LinkedIn is not the best tool for all businesses, jobs and careers alike. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can be more powerful and effective, and reach more of your target audience. Know your audience and their tastes and behaviors, and select the best tool to connect with your prospective clients, colleagues and partners.
Myth #7: The more updates I post the better
Again, quality reigns supreme here. Choose carefully what you put out there in the world, and be respectful of the time and energy of those who read your updates. Make sure what you share performs at least one of these important functions: 1) informs, 2) entertains, 3) enlivens, 4) supports others, and/or 5) adds value.
Myth #8: Being highly connected on LinkedIn is a sign of professional success
Having hundreds (or thousands) of connections does not necessarily equate to financial success, business prowess or entrepreneurial acumen. It means only that the user has spent time and energy to build his/her network, and that others have felt it of some value to mutually connect. Don’t mistake volumes of connections with professional credibility or success.
In the end, while the LinkedIn “cocktail party in the sky” has had a dramatic impact on how we connect and engage with each other professionally, it’s not able, on its own, to bring your career to the level of success, fulfillment and reward you want.
LinkedIn is only a tool, and is only as effective, engaging, and productive as the user behind it.
Kathy Caprino, M.A.
I like LinkedIn so much that I often refer to it as the “great cocktail party in the sky.” The analogy of the cocktail party truly fits. LinkedIn has the following aspects in common with an awesome cocktail party:
You get the chance to connect with like-minded people who you may otherwise never have had the chance to meet. By investing just a bit of time each day, you can learn a great deal. It’s a blast to connect to people that you admire from afar, and who can teach you vital things about how to be more of what you want to be You can determine in an instant if you want to invest any more time and energy in getting to know new folks you see. Socializing beyond your limited sphere helps you build a powerful community that supports and enriches. You can add great diversity to your pool of colleagues and peers by branching out and connecting with new people across the country and globally. Meeting new people who are doing amazing and inspiring things in this world is exhilarating.
But after two years of using LinkedIn for several hours each day, and after counseling others on how to build their personal brand on LinkedIn for professional advantage, I’m witnessing some negative effects of the misguided notions people have gleaned about what LinkedIn can do for them. I’d like to share what I’ve observed to be the Top 8 Myths about LinkedIn as a professional tool, and offer some straight talk about what you can expect it to do for you.
Here are the Top 8 Myths we need to bust:
Myth #1: LinkedIn will get me a job
Nothing is going to “get you a job” but you. Yes, you can search new job openings in your area, and discover who posted the job, and connect with these folks. You can find people who work at companies posting jobs, check them out, and ask their help to introduce you. But these steps aren’t going to land you a job. You must still do the rigorous internal and external work of knowing what you’re great at, communicating your talents, finding strong-fitting positions, then get on the radar of the hiring manager or recruiters involved, and present yourself as a highly qualified and desirable candidate.
Myth #2: LinkedIn will replace recruiters
There’s a growing fear out there that LinkedIn will replace recruiters as conduits for connecting talented candidates to leading employers. It’s just not so. There’s an important personal dimension to recruiting that a tool such as LinkedIn simply can’t provide. From critically sifting through hundreds of resumes, to understanding the components of true “fit” for the hiring company, to personally interviewing and filtering candidates, and doing the extensive legwork of communicating “fit” to both employer and candidate — recruiting is a labor-intensive job that requires expert, personalized skill and attention. Again, LI is a powerful tool that certainly has changed the recruiting landscape, but recruiters remain vitally important in the process.
Myth #3: There’s no need to fully flesh out my profile – a brief line or two is fine
OK, this one makes me nuts. Here’s this vastly powerful free networking tool that allows you to tell the world who you are as a professional – what you stand for, how you’re different from all the rest, what you’re passionate about, and how you’ve contributed in the workforce. And yet thousands of folks simply don’t spend any time to articulate who they are, or present themselves in a compelling, engaging manner. As a recruiter, when I view a poorly executed profile, I see a lack of interest in promoting yourself that speaks volumes about how committed and excited you are in your professional endeavors overall.
Myth #4: Because I have over 100 (or 1000) connections, new opportunities will come easily to me
As in everything in life, quality matters over quantity. If you have scores of folks in your community who have nothing to do with anything you care about (or who aren’t interested in what you’re doing), then your connections will not generate productive or beneficial results for you.
Myth #5: When folks accept my LI invitation, they want to partner with me or connect more deeply
I’ve learned this the hard way in my recruiting work — just because people accept your invitation to connect, doesn’t mean they care about being in connection with you in any deeper way. It may simply mean that they saw your network as something advantageous to THEM, and they linked in for their own professional gain. Connections are interesting as far as they go – but it’s you who must make something positive of them.
Myth #6: LinkedIn is the best professional networking tool for all businesses or careers
LinkedIn is not the best tool for all businesses, jobs and careers alike. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can be more powerful and effective, and reach more of your target audience. Know your audience and their tastes and behaviors, and select the best tool to connect with your prospective clients, colleagues and partners.
Myth #7: The more updates I post the better
Again, quality reigns supreme here. Choose carefully what you put out there in the world, and be respectful of the time and energy of those who read your updates. Make sure what you share performs at least one of these important functions: 1) informs, 2) entertains, 3) enlivens, 4) supports others, and/or 5) adds value.
Myth #8: Being highly connected on LinkedIn is a sign of professional success
Having hundreds (or thousands) of connections does not necessarily equate to financial success, business prowess or entrepreneurial acumen. It means only that the user has spent time and energy to build his/her network, and that others have felt it of some value to mutually connect. Don’t mistake volumes of connections with professional credibility or success.
In the end, while the LinkedIn “cocktail party in the sky” has had a dramatic impact on how we connect and engage with each other professionally, it’s not able, on its own, to bring your career to the level of success, fulfillment and reward you want.
LinkedIn is only a tool, and is only as effective, engaging, and productive as the user behind it.
Kathy Caprino, M.A.
The Do's and Don'ts of LinkedIn Etiquette
For any career-minded college student or recent grad, having a profile on LinkedIn is basically expected in order to stay ahead of the game and network with peers, companies, and other professionals. As a member of this 65 million person network, not only do you get to shamelessly market yourself for the entire world to see, but you are able to stay on the radar of recruiters for potential job opportunities, something no unemployed recent grad can afford to pass up.
There is no question that LinkedIn is a great tool for promoting yourself and garnering invaluable professional contacts, but the same reason LinkedIn is so great is what makes it so scary to use. Unlike Facebook, with its more carefree and social atmosphere, on LinkedIn you are potentially connecting with your employer, your professors, and other contacts you typically would not want perusing your Facebook profile and having access to your personal information.
While it is pretty easy to figure out the basics of LinkedIn, the specifics of how exactly you should utilize LinkedIn’s functions and figuring out what is appropriate and what is not can be tricky.
Neal Schaffer, author of Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn, is pretty much Her Campus’s go-to guy when it comes to learning about LinkedIn, having sat down with Her Campus contributing writer Betty Jin earlier this year to discuss almost everything there is to know about the site. In this article, Neal shares what exactly is acceptable on LinkedIn when inviting people to connect, asking for recommendations, and posting status updates. With his advice, next time you get that queasy feeling in your stomach when you go to connect with your boss on LinkedIn, you can breathe a little easier knowing that you are acting just as any professional should.
Inviting people to join your network is one of the most basic functions of LinkedIn and embodies the whole purpose of the site. This simple task of reaching out to people may seem harmless enough, but becomes complicated when you come across someone such as one of your professors or the editor-in-chief of the magazine you interned for, and you are not quite sure whether or not to take the plunge and actually hit “connect”.
LinkedIn was designed to encourage people to connect with others they have actually met and know somewhat well. Friends, classmates, professors, and contacts from jobs and internships are all great people to use to expand your network. It becomes tricky when you want to connect with someone you may have met a job fair who told you to keep in touch or the head honcho of the company you interned for who you only met a couple times and doubt remembers you. Luckily, LinkedIn is evolving and it has become acceptable to connect with these types of people as well as people you might not know at all under some conditions; it just takes a little more work on your part.
Deciding how to go about connecting with a person on LinkedIn can be one of the most challenging parts of using the site. If you know the person well, the options that LinkedIn gives you when you go to add them to your network such as “Friend”, “Colleague”, “Classmate”, etc. should be easy enough to figure out. On the other hand, if you are trying to reach out to someone you do not know quite as well and who does not necessarily fit into those categories, you need to go the extra mile and pull a few tricks.
Look at the person’s profile and see what groups they are members of on LinkedIn Become a member of one of their groups ONLY if it is relevant to you When you go to connect with the person again, an option will come up that you can select to explain that you are members of the same group OR you can use the group to send a message to the person explaining why you would like to connect
When inviting a person to join your network, you are always given the option to add a personal note to the request. Not including a personal message is a pet peeve of many LinkedIn users and could hurt your chance of gaining the connection; it also helps the person to remember you and gives you a chance to explain why you want to connect with them.
“Regardless as to how well you know the person that you invite, they may not remember you as well,” advises Neal. “Therefore, as a rule of thumb, you should always customize your invitations so that you indicate how you know the person and why you want to connect with them.”
Your note can be something short such as, “My name is Michelle and I interned for your company last summer. I really enjoyed working for the marketing department and would love to use LinkedIn to stay in touch with some of the people I met while interning there and build up my network on LinkedIn.” The most important thing to remember is to use common sense when reaching out to different people on LinkedIn, and to plan out your actions before you have the chance to make any mistakes.
Recommendations on LinkedIn are virtual versions of letters of recommendation you would normally ask for from someone on paper, although these types are much shorter. If you are a serious user of LinkedIn, meaning you do not just have a profile because everyone else does, but because you honestly want to network and create a professional image for yourself, then recommendations are a necessary part of being a member of LinkedIn. Recommendations are also a must if you want to use LinkedIn to find future jobs and internships. They give you more credibility and add a sense of completeness to your profile which is appealing to those looking at your profile.
You only want to ask for recommendations from people who know you well and can vouch for your skills and abilities, not someone you hardly know. Internship or work supervisors are great people to ask for recommendations, as well as professors whose classes you did exceedingly well in. The best time to ask for a recommendation is shortly after you worked with the person or took their class, although asking for recommendations later is also fine as long as you provide a refresher on who you are and why they would want to recommend you.
Be sure to provide a thorough explanation for why you are seeking a recommendation, whether you are looking for a job or internship, trying to improve your profile, or whatever your reasons may be. Just as you would do when asking for a typical letter of recommendation, you should remind the person what you accomplished while working for them or what skills you displayed that were noteworthy.
“You're not writing your recommendation for them, but merely serving to remind them about what you did for them so that they can paint a complete picture of you from memory,” said Neal.
If you ask someone for an actual letter of recommendation, discreetly ask if they might be willing to use an excerpt of it to recommend you on LinkedIn as well. The worst they can do is say no. Since we are talking about etiquette, one of the most important parts of asking for a recommendation on LinkedIn is to thank the person for taking the time to write one for you. Taking the time to do so will leave the door open for future opportunities, which can never hurt.
While tweeting what you are doing every five minutes is the new trend, I hate to break it to you, but your professional contacts probably do not care. Just like Facebook and Twitter, on LinkedIn you have the opportunity to post updates through the “Status Update” box on your profile, but beware, updates on LinkedIn should be treated significantly different than posting on other networking sites.
“The LinkedIn Status Update, while seemingly innocent, will post your update to your network in the News Feed on their Home Page,” warned Neal. “Since the majority of LinkedIn users used it before Facebook or Twitter, the current environment is one in which status updates no more than once a day are tolerated.”
Whatever you do, DO NOT link your Twitter account with your LinkedIn profile in a way that automatically posts every tweet to LinkedIn, especially if you tweet often. Status updates on LinkedIn should consist of positive information about your life that helps promote you professionally, such as updates about professional events you attended or projects you are working on for school, while blurbs about your tailgating plans for the weekend and how you loved the new episode of “The Jersey Shore” are not.
With these clarifications, you are now ready to fearlessly brave the seas of LinkedIn and use it to your utmost benefit!
http://www.hercampus.com/career/dos-and-donts-linkedin-etiquette
There is no question that LinkedIn is a great tool for promoting yourself and garnering invaluable professional contacts, but the same reason LinkedIn is so great is what makes it so scary to use. Unlike Facebook, with its more carefree and social atmosphere, on LinkedIn you are potentially connecting with your employer, your professors, and other contacts you typically would not want perusing your Facebook profile and having access to your personal information.
While it is pretty easy to figure out the basics of LinkedIn, the specifics of how exactly you should utilize LinkedIn’s functions and figuring out what is appropriate and what is not can be tricky.
Neal Schaffer, author of Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn, is pretty much Her Campus’s go-to guy when it comes to learning about LinkedIn, having sat down with Her Campus contributing writer Betty Jin earlier this year to discuss almost everything there is to know about the site. In this article, Neal shares what exactly is acceptable on LinkedIn when inviting people to connect, asking for recommendations, and posting status updates. With his advice, next time you get that queasy feeling in your stomach when you go to connect with your boss on LinkedIn, you can breathe a little easier knowing that you are acting just as any professional should.
Inviting people to join your network is one of the most basic functions of LinkedIn and embodies the whole purpose of the site. This simple task of reaching out to people may seem harmless enough, but becomes complicated when you come across someone such as one of your professors or the editor-in-chief of the magazine you interned for, and you are not quite sure whether or not to take the plunge and actually hit “connect”.
LinkedIn was designed to encourage people to connect with others they have actually met and know somewhat well. Friends, classmates, professors, and contacts from jobs and internships are all great people to use to expand your network. It becomes tricky when you want to connect with someone you may have met a job fair who told you to keep in touch or the head honcho of the company you interned for who you only met a couple times and doubt remembers you. Luckily, LinkedIn is evolving and it has become acceptable to connect with these types of people as well as people you might not know at all under some conditions; it just takes a little more work on your part.
Deciding how to go about connecting with a person on LinkedIn can be one of the most challenging parts of using the site. If you know the person well, the options that LinkedIn gives you when you go to add them to your network such as “Friend”, “Colleague”, “Classmate”, etc. should be easy enough to figure out. On the other hand, if you are trying to reach out to someone you do not know quite as well and who does not necessarily fit into those categories, you need to go the extra mile and pull a few tricks.
Look at the person’s profile and see what groups they are members of on LinkedIn Become a member of one of their groups ONLY if it is relevant to you When you go to connect with the person again, an option will come up that you can select to explain that you are members of the same group OR you can use the group to send a message to the person explaining why you would like to connect
When inviting a person to join your network, you are always given the option to add a personal note to the request. Not including a personal message is a pet peeve of many LinkedIn users and could hurt your chance of gaining the connection; it also helps the person to remember you and gives you a chance to explain why you want to connect with them.
“Regardless as to how well you know the person that you invite, they may not remember you as well,” advises Neal. “Therefore, as a rule of thumb, you should always customize your invitations so that you indicate how you know the person and why you want to connect with them.”
Your note can be something short such as, “My name is Michelle and I interned for your company last summer. I really enjoyed working for the marketing department and would love to use LinkedIn to stay in touch with some of the people I met while interning there and build up my network on LinkedIn.” The most important thing to remember is to use common sense when reaching out to different people on LinkedIn, and to plan out your actions before you have the chance to make any mistakes.
Recommendations on LinkedIn are virtual versions of letters of recommendation you would normally ask for from someone on paper, although these types are much shorter. If you are a serious user of LinkedIn, meaning you do not just have a profile because everyone else does, but because you honestly want to network and create a professional image for yourself, then recommendations are a necessary part of being a member of LinkedIn. Recommendations are also a must if you want to use LinkedIn to find future jobs and internships. They give you more credibility and add a sense of completeness to your profile which is appealing to those looking at your profile.
You only want to ask for recommendations from people who know you well and can vouch for your skills and abilities, not someone you hardly know. Internship or work supervisors are great people to ask for recommendations, as well as professors whose classes you did exceedingly well in. The best time to ask for a recommendation is shortly after you worked with the person or took their class, although asking for recommendations later is also fine as long as you provide a refresher on who you are and why they would want to recommend you.
Be sure to provide a thorough explanation for why you are seeking a recommendation, whether you are looking for a job or internship, trying to improve your profile, or whatever your reasons may be. Just as you would do when asking for a typical letter of recommendation, you should remind the person what you accomplished while working for them or what skills you displayed that were noteworthy.
“You're not writing your recommendation for them, but merely serving to remind them about what you did for them so that they can paint a complete picture of you from memory,” said Neal.
If you ask someone for an actual letter of recommendation, discreetly ask if they might be willing to use an excerpt of it to recommend you on LinkedIn as well. The worst they can do is say no. Since we are talking about etiquette, one of the most important parts of asking for a recommendation on LinkedIn is to thank the person for taking the time to write one for you. Taking the time to do so will leave the door open for future opportunities, which can never hurt.
While tweeting what you are doing every five minutes is the new trend, I hate to break it to you, but your professional contacts probably do not care. Just like Facebook and Twitter, on LinkedIn you have the opportunity to post updates through the “Status Update” box on your profile, but beware, updates on LinkedIn should be treated significantly different than posting on other networking sites.
“The LinkedIn Status Update, while seemingly innocent, will post your update to your network in the News Feed on their Home Page,” warned Neal. “Since the majority of LinkedIn users used it before Facebook or Twitter, the current environment is one in which status updates no more than once a day are tolerated.”
Whatever you do, DO NOT link your Twitter account with your LinkedIn profile in a way that automatically posts every tweet to LinkedIn, especially if you tweet often. Status updates on LinkedIn should consist of positive information about your life that helps promote you professionally, such as updates about professional events you attended or projects you are working on for school, while blurbs about your tailgating plans for the weekend and how you loved the new episode of “The Jersey Shore” are not.
With these clarifications, you are now ready to fearlessly brave the seas of LinkedIn and use it to your utmost benefit!
http://www.hercampus.com/career/dos-and-donts-linkedin-etiquette
The real way to build a social network
Many people are turned off by the topic of networking. They think
it's slimy, inauthentic. Picture the consummate networker: a high-energy
fast talker who collects as many business cards as he can and attends
mixers sporting slicked-back hair. Or the overambitious college kid who
frantically e-mails alumni, schmoozes with the board of trustees, and
adds anyone he's ever met as an online friend. Such people are drunk on
networking Kool-Aid -- and are looking at a potentially nasty hangover.
Luckily, building your network doesn't have to be like that.
Old-school networkers are transactional. They pursue relationships
thinking solely about what other people can do for them. Relationship
builders, on the other hand, try to help others first. They don't keep
score. And they prioritize high-quality relationships over a large
number of connections.
Building a genuine relationship with another person depends on at
least two abilities. The first is seeing the world from another person's
perspective. No one knows that better than the skilled entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurs succeed when they make stuff people will pay money for --
and that means understanding what's going on in the heads of customers.
Likewise, in relationships it's only when you put yourself in the other
person's shoes that you begin to develop an honest connection.
The second ability is being able to think about how you can
collaborate with and help the other person rather than thinking about
what you can get. We're not suggesting that you be so saintly that a
self-interested thought never crosses your mind. What we're saying is
that your first move should always be to help. A study on negotiation
found that a key difference between skilled and average negotiators was
the time spent searching for shared interests and asking questions of
the other person.
Follow that model. Start with a friendly gesture and genuinely mean
it. Dale Carnegie's classic book on relationships, despite all its
wisdom, has the unfortunate title How to Win Friends and Influence People.
This makes Carnegie widely misunderstood. You don't "win" a friend. A
friend is not an asset you own; a friend is an ally, a collaborator.
When you can tell that someone is attempting sincerity, it leaves you
cold. It is like the feeling you have when someone calls you by your
first name repeatedly in conversation. Novelist Jonathan Franzen gets it
right when he says inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.
Strengthen your alliances
The best way to engage with new people is not by cold calling or by
"networking" with strangers at cocktail parties, but by working with the
people you already know. Of the many types of professional
relationships, among the most important are your close allies. Most
professionals maintain five to 10 active alliances. What makes a
relationship an alliance? First, an ally is someone you consult
regularly for advice. Second, you proactively share and collaborate on
opportunities together. You keep your antennae attuned to an ally's
interests, and when it makes sense to pursue something jointly, you do.
Third, you talk up an ally. You promote his or her brand. Finally, when
an ally runs into conflict, you defend him and stand up for his
reputation, and he does the same for you.
I [Reid] first met Mark Pincus while
at PayPal in 2002. I was giving him advice on a startup he was working
on. From our first conversation, I felt inspired by Mark's wild
creativity and how he seems to bounce off the walls with energy. I'm
more restrained, preferring to fit ideas into strategic frameworks
instead of unleashing them fire-hose-style. But it's our similar
interests and vision that have made our collaborations so successful.
We invested in Friendster together in 2002. In 2003 the two of us
bought the Six Degrees patent, which covers some of the foundational
technology of social networking. Mark then started his own social
network, Tribe; I started LinkedIn (LNKD). When Peter Thiel and I were set to put the first money into Facebook in 2004,
I suggested that Mark take half of my investment allocation. I wanted
to involve Mark in any opportunity that seemed intriguing, especially
one that played to his social networking background. In 2007, Mark
called me to talk about his idea for Zynga (ZNGA),
the social gaming company he co-founded and now leads. I knew almost
immediately that I wanted to invest and join the board, which I did. An
alliance is always an exchange, but not a transactional one. A
transactional relationship is when your accountant files your tax
returns and you pay him for his time.
An alliance is when a co-worker needs last-minute help on Sunday
night preparing for a Monday morning presentation, and even though
you're busy, you agree to go over to his house and help. You cooperate
and sacrifice because you want to help a friend in need but also because
you figure you'll be able to call on him in the future when you are the
one in a bind. That isn't being selfish; it's being human.
The diversity of weak ties
Allies, by the nature of the bond, are few in number. By contrast,
there are potentially hundreds or thousands of looser connections that
also play a role in your professional life. These are the folks you meet
at conferences, old classmates, co-workers, or just interesting people.
Sociologists refer to these contacts as "weak ties": people with whom
you have spent low amounts of low-intensity time but with whom you're
still friendly.
Weak ties in a career context were formally researched in 1973, when
sociologist Mark Granovetter asked a random sample of professionals how
they had found their new job. It turns out that 82% of them found their
position through a contact they saw only occasionally or rarely. In
other words, the contacts who referred jobs were "weak ties."
Granovetter accounts for this result by explaining that your good
friends tend to be from the same industry, neighborhood, religious
group, etc. Consequently, their information is similar to yours -- a job
a good friend knows about, you probably already know about too.
Weak ties, however, usually sit outside the inner circle. Thus,
there's a greater likelihood that a weak tie will be exposed to new
information or a new job opportunity you'd otherwise miss. To be sure,
weak ties are uniquely helpful so long as they hail from a different
social circle or industry niche and therefore bring new information and
opportunities. A weak-tie acquaintance whose job and background is
identical to yours is unlikely to offer unique network intelligence. So
when connecting with acquaintances, prioritize diversity in order to
broaden the overall reach of your network.
Just as a digital camera cannot store an infinite number of photos
and videos, you cannot maintain an infinite number of allies or
acquaintances. The maximum number of relationships we can realistically
manage -- the number that can fit on the memory card, as it were -- is
described as Dunbar's Number, after the evolutionary psychologist Robin
Dunbar. In the early 1990s, Dunbar studied the social connections within
groups of monkeys and apes. He theorized that the maximum size of their
overall social group was limited by the small size of their neocortex.
Based on our neocortex size, Dunbar calculated that humans should be
able to maintain relationships with roughly 150 people at a time. He
also found that many businesses and military groups organize their
people into cliques of about 150. Hence, Dunbar's Number of 150.
There is indeed a limit to the number of relationships you can
maintain, but a crucial qualifier is that there is not one blunt limit
of 150; in fact, there are different limits for different types of
relationships. Think back to the digital camera. Either you can take
low-resolution photographs and store 100 of them in total, or you can
take high-resolution photographs and store 40. In relationships, you may
have only a few close buddies you see every day, yet you can stay in
touch with many distant friends if you e-mail them only once or twice a
year. But there's a twist: You can actually maintain a much broader
social network than the people you currently "know."
Three degrees of separation
Your allies, weak ties, and the other people you know right now are
your first-degree connections. But your friends know people you don't
know. These friends of friends are your second-degree connections. And
those friends of friends have friends -- those are your third-degree
connections.
Stanley Milgram's and Duncan Watts's "small world" research shows the
planet Earth as one massive social network; every human being is
connected to every other via no more than about six intermediaries.
Academically the theory is correct, but when it comes to meeting people
who can help you professionally, three degrees of separation
is what matters. Three degrees is the magic number because when you're
introduced to a second- or third-degree connection, at least one person
personally knows the origin or target person. That's how trust is
preserved.
Suppose you have 40 connections, and assume that each friend has 35
other friends in turn, and each of those friends of friends has 45
unique friends of his own. If you do the math (40 × 35 × 45), that's
63,000 people you can reach via an introduction. People's extended
networks are frequently larger than they realize, which is why an early
tagline at LinkedIn was "Your network is bigger than you think." So how
do you actually reach those connections? Via an introduction from
someone you know, who knows the person you want to reach.
I receive about 50 entrepreneur pitches by e-mail every day. I have
never funded a company directly from a cold solicitation, and my guess
is that I never will. When an entrepreneur comes referred by
introduction, it's as if he has a passport at a national border -- he
can walk right through, because someone I trust has already vetted that
entrepreneur. Anytime you want to meet a new person in your extended
network, you should ask for an introduction. You need to ask, directly
and specifically, and you do need to present a compelling reason for why
your connection should do it: "I'd love to meet Rebecca because she
works in the technology industry." Not good enough. "I'm interested in
talking to Rebecca because my company is looking to partner with
companies just like hers." Better, as it appears to benefit both
parties.
OkCupid, a free online dating site, analyzed more than 500,000 first
messages between a man or a woman and a potential suitor. They found
that those with the highest response rates included phrases like "You
mention …" or "I noticed that …" In other words, phrases that showed
that the person had carefully read the other's profile. People do this
in online dating, but when it comes to professional correspondence, it
doesn't happen. People send out appallingly unresearched and generic
requests. If you spend 30 minutes researching a person's professional
profile, your request will stand out. For example, "I noticed you spent a
summer working at a German architecture firm. I once worked for an ad
agency in Berlin and am thinking about returning -- perhaps we could
swap notes about business opportunities?"
You can conceptualize and map your network all you want, but if you
can't effectively request and broker introductions, it adds up to a lot
of nothing. Take it seriously. If you are not receiving or making at
least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your
extended professional network.
The best network: Wide and (selectively) deep
Several years ago sociologist Brian Uzzi did a study of why certain
Broadway musicals made between 1945 and 1989 were successful and others
flopped. The explanation he arrived at had to do with the people behind
the productions. For failed productions, one of two extremes was common.
The first was a collaboration between creative artists and producers
who tended to all know one another. When there were mostly strong ties,
the production lacked the fresh, creative insights that come from
diverse experience. The other type of failed production was one in which
none of the artists had experience working together. When the group was
made up of mostly weak ties, teamwork and group cohesion suffered.
In contrast, the social networks of the people behind successful
productions had a healthy balance: There were some strong ties, some
weak ties. There was some established trust, but also enough new blood
in the system to generate new ideas. Think of your network of
relationships in the same way: The best professional network is both
narrow/deep (allies with whom you collaborate regularly) and wide/
shallow (weak-tie acquaintances who offer fresh information and ideas).
Giving helpful help
The best way to strengthen a relationship is to do something for another person. But how? Here's a good example. When Jack Dorsey was co-founding Square -- the mobile-payments company -- he had loads of investor interest. Digg and Milk founder Kevin Rose had
seen a prototype of the Square device and immediately realized the
potential. When he asked Jack whether there was room for another person
to join the initial funding round, Jack told him it was full. But Kevin
still wanted to be helpful. He noticed that Square didn't have a demo on
its website showing how the device worked. So he put together a
high-definition video and then showed it to Jack. Impressed, Jack turned
around and invited Kevin to invest in the Series A round of financing.
To be truly helpful, as Kevin was, you need to have a sense of your
friend's values and priorities. What keeps him up at 2 a.m.? What are
his talents? His challenges? Once you understand his needs, think about
offering him a small gift. A small gift is something that's easy for you
to give, unique to the relationship, and unusually helpful for the
other person. Classic small gifts include relevant information,
introductions, and advice. A really expensive big gift is actually
counterproductive -- it can feel like a bribe. When deciding what to
give, reflect on your unique experiences and capabilities. What might
you have that the other person does not?
My passion for entrepreneurship and my interest in board game design
led me to introduce many of my entrepreneur friends to the German board
game The Settlers of Catan.
Set up an "interesting people" fund
Relationships are living, breathing things. Feed, nurture, and care
about them; they grow. Neglect them; they die. You might be nodding your
head at the importance of staying in touch. But behavioral change isn't
easy. That's why Steve Garrity budgeted and precommitted real time and
money to it.
Garrity studied computer science at Stanford and interned at startups
over the summers. After graduating from a master's program in 2005, he
was convinced that he wanted to start a tech company of his own in
Silicon Valley. But he had spent his entire adult life in the Bay Area
and was worried that he would be tied down to one location for many more
years. So he took a job as an engineer at Microsoft (MSFT) to work on its mobile-search technology.
Garrity had one big worry: What would happen to his network of
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and friends? He knew
he would someday move back to start a company. He did not want his local
network to become stale. So he set aside time and money in advance to
keep his network up-to-date.
The state of Washington doesn't tax personal (or corporate) income,
so Garrity figured he was saving a meaningful amount of money by living
there. Upon moving to Seattle, he declared that $7,000 of his savings
would be "California money." Anytime someone interesting in the Valley
invited him to lunch, dinner, or coffee, Garrity would fly to San
Francisco to do the meeting. One of his old Stanford professors called
him, not realizing he had left town, and invited him over to meet some
interesting students. The following evening, he arrived at the
professor's house, suitcase in hand. Because he had allocated money, he
didn't have to worry about the cost of flights or the stress of
decision-making.
Over his 31/2 years at Microsoft, Garrity visited the Bay Area at
least once a month. After returning to California in 2009, he started a
company, Hearsay Labs,
with a friend whose couch had served as his bed during his regular
pilgrimages to the Bay Area from Seattle. It shows the power of what we
call Iwe: Your capabilities and potential get magnified exponentially by
an active, up-to-date network.
Reid's rules
In the next day: Look at your calendar for the past
six months and identify the five people you spend the most time with --
are you happy with their influence on you?
In the next week: Introduce two people who do not
know each other but ought to. Then think about a challenge you face and
ask for an introduction to a connection in your network who could help.
Imagine you got laid off from your job today. Who are the 10 people
you'd e-mail for advice? Don't wait -- invest in those relationships
now.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/24/reid-hoffman-linkedin-startup-you/
The Do's and Don'ts of LinkedIn Etiquette
For any career-minded college student or recent grad, having a profile on LinkedIn is basically expected in order to stay ahead of the game and network with peers, companies, and other professionals. As a member of this 65 million-person network, not only do you get to shamelessly market yourself for the entire world to see, but you are able to stay on the radar of recruiters for potential job opportunities, something no unemployed recent grad can afford to pass up.
There is no question that LinkedIn is a great tool for promoting yourself and garnering invaluable professional contacts, but the same reason LinkedIn is so great is what makes it so scary to use. Unlike Facebook, with its more carefree and social atmosphere, on LinkedIn you are potentially connecting with your employer, your professors, and other contacts you typically would not want perusing your Facebook profile and having access to your personal information.
While it is pretty easy to figure out the basics of LinkedIn, the specifics of how exactly you should utilize LinkedIn's functions and figuring out what is appropriate and what is not can be tricky.
Neal Schaffer, author of Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn, is pretty much Her Campus's go-to guy when it comes to learning about LinkedIn, having sat down with Her Campus contributing writer Betty Jin earlier this year to discuss almost everything there is to know about the site. In this article, Neal shares what exactly is acceptable on LinkedIn when inviting people to connect, asking for recommendations, and posting status updates. With his advice, next time you get that queasy feeling in your stomach when you go to connect with your boss on LinkedIn, you can breathe a little easier knowing that you are acting just as any professional should.
Inviting people to connect
Inviting people to join your network is one of the most basic functions of LinkedIn and embodies the whole purpose of the site. This simple task of reaching out to people may seem harmless enough, but becomes complicated when you come across someone such as one of your professors or the editor-in-chief of the magazine you interned for, and you are not quite sure whether or not to take the plunge and actually hit "connect".
LinkedIn was designed to encourage people to connect with others they have actually met and know somewhat well. Friends, classmates, professors, and contacts from jobs and internships are all great people to use to expand your network. It becomes tricky when you want to connect with someone you may have met a job fair who told you to keep in touch or the head honcho of the company you interned for who you only met a couple times and doubt remembers you. Luckily, LinkedIn is evolving and it has become acceptable to connect with these types of people as well as people you might not know at all under some conditions; it just takes a little more work on your part.
Deciding how to go about connecting with a person on LinkedIn can be one of the most challenging parts of using the site. If you know the person well, the options that LinkedIn gives you when you go to add them to your network such as "Friend", "Colleague", "Classmate", etc. should be easy enough to figure out. On the other hand, if you are trying to reach out to someone you do not know quite as well and who does not necessarily fit into those categories, you need to go the extra mile and pull a few tricks.
Look at the person's profile and see what groups they are members of on LinkedIn
Become a member of one of their groups ONLY if it is relevant to you
When you go to connect with the person again, an option will come up that you can select to explain that you are members of the same group
OR you can use the group to send a message to the person explaining why you would like to connect
When inviting a person to join your network, you are always given the option to add a personal note to the request. Not including a personal message is a pet peeve of many LinkedIn users and could hurt your chance of gaining the connection; it also helps the person to remember you and gives you a chance to explain why you want to connect with them.
“Regardless as to how well you know the person that you invite, they may not remember you as well,” advises Neal. “Therefore, as a rule of thumb, you should always customize your invitations so that you indicate how you know the person and why you want to connect with them.”
Your note can be something short such as, “My name is Michelle and I interned for your company last summer. I really enjoyed working for the marketing department and would love to use LinkedIn to stay in touch with some of the people I met while interning there and build up my network on LinkedIn.” The most important thing to remember is to use common sense when reaching out to different people on LinkedIn, and to plan out your actions before you have the chance to make any mistakes.
Asking for recommendations
Recommendations on LinkedIn are virtual versions of letters of recommendation you would normally ask for from someone on paper, although these types are much shorter. If you are a serious user of LinkedIn, meaning you do not just have a profile because everyone else does, but because you honestly want to network and create a professional image for yourself, then recommendations are a necessary part of being a member of LinkedIn. Recommendations are also a must if you want to use LinkedIn to find future jobs and internships. They give you more credibility and add a sense of completeness to your profile which is appealing to those looking at your profile.
You only want to ask for recommendations from people who know you well and can vouch for your skills and abilities, not someone you hardly know. Internship or work supervisors are great people to ask for recommendations, as well as professors whose classes you did exceedingly well in. The best time to ask for a recommendation is shortly after you worked with the person or took their class, although asking for recommendations later is also fine as long as you provide a refresher on who you are and why they would want to recommend you.
Be sure to provide a thorough explanation for why you are seeking a recommendation, whether you are looking for a job or internship, trying to improve your profile, or whatever your reasons may be. Just as you would do when asking for a typical letter of recommendation, you should remind the person what you accomplished while working for them or what skills you displayed that were noteworthy.
“You're not writing your recommendation for them, but merely serving to remind them about what you did for them so that they can paint a complete picture of you from memory,” said Neal.
If you ask someone for an actual letter of recommendation, discreetly ask if they might be willing to use an excerpt of it to recommend you on LinkedIn as well. The worst they can do is say no. Since we are talking about etiquette, one of the most important parts of asking for a recommendation on LinkedIn is to thank the person for taking the time to write one for you. Taking the time to do so will leave the door open for future opportunities, which can never hurt.
Posting updates
businessman typing laptop work computerWhile tweeting what you are doing every five minutes is the new trend, I hate to break it to you, but your professional contacts probably do not care. Just like Facebook and Twitter, on LinkedIn you have the opportunity to post updates through the “Status Update” box on your profile, but beware, updates on LinkedIn should be treated significantly different than posting on other networking sites.
“The LinkedIn Status Update, while seemingly innocent, will post your update to your network in the News Feed on their Home Page,” warned Neal. “Since the majority of LinkedIn users used it before Facebook or Twitter, the current environment is one in which status updates no more than once a day are tolerated.”
Whatever you do, DO NOT link your Twitter account with your LinkedIn profile in a way that automatically posts every tweet to LinkedIn, especially if you tweet often. Status updates on LinkedIn should consist of positive information about your life that helps promote you professionally, such as updates about professional events you attended or projects you are working on for school, while blurbs about your tailgating plans for the weekend and how you loved the new episode of “The Jersey Shore” are not.
With these clarifications, you are now ready to fearlessly brave the seas of LinkedIn and use it to your utmost benefit!
http://www.hercampus.com/career/dos-and-donts-linkedin-etiquette
There is no question that LinkedIn is a great tool for promoting yourself and garnering invaluable professional contacts, but the same reason LinkedIn is so great is what makes it so scary to use. Unlike Facebook, with its more carefree and social atmosphere, on LinkedIn you are potentially connecting with your employer, your professors, and other contacts you typically would not want perusing your Facebook profile and having access to your personal information.
While it is pretty easy to figure out the basics of LinkedIn, the specifics of how exactly you should utilize LinkedIn's functions and figuring out what is appropriate and what is not can be tricky.
Neal Schaffer, author of Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn, is pretty much Her Campus's go-to guy when it comes to learning about LinkedIn, having sat down with Her Campus contributing writer Betty Jin earlier this year to discuss almost everything there is to know about the site. In this article, Neal shares what exactly is acceptable on LinkedIn when inviting people to connect, asking for recommendations, and posting status updates. With his advice, next time you get that queasy feeling in your stomach when you go to connect with your boss on LinkedIn, you can breathe a little easier knowing that you are acting just as any professional should.
Inviting people to connect
Inviting people to join your network is one of the most basic functions of LinkedIn and embodies the whole purpose of the site. This simple task of reaching out to people may seem harmless enough, but becomes complicated when you come across someone such as one of your professors or the editor-in-chief of the magazine you interned for, and you are not quite sure whether or not to take the plunge and actually hit "connect".
LinkedIn was designed to encourage people to connect with others they have actually met and know somewhat well. Friends, classmates, professors, and contacts from jobs and internships are all great people to use to expand your network. It becomes tricky when you want to connect with someone you may have met a job fair who told you to keep in touch or the head honcho of the company you interned for who you only met a couple times and doubt remembers you. Luckily, LinkedIn is evolving and it has become acceptable to connect with these types of people as well as people you might not know at all under some conditions; it just takes a little more work on your part.
Deciding how to go about connecting with a person on LinkedIn can be one of the most challenging parts of using the site. If you know the person well, the options that LinkedIn gives you when you go to add them to your network such as "Friend", "Colleague", "Classmate", etc. should be easy enough to figure out. On the other hand, if you are trying to reach out to someone you do not know quite as well and who does not necessarily fit into those categories, you need to go the extra mile and pull a few tricks.
Look at the person's profile and see what groups they are members of on LinkedIn
Become a member of one of their groups ONLY if it is relevant to you
When you go to connect with the person again, an option will come up that you can select to explain that you are members of the same group
OR you can use the group to send a message to the person explaining why you would like to connect
When inviting a person to join your network, you are always given the option to add a personal note to the request. Not including a personal message is a pet peeve of many LinkedIn users and could hurt your chance of gaining the connection; it also helps the person to remember you and gives you a chance to explain why you want to connect with them.
“Regardless as to how well you know the person that you invite, they may not remember you as well,” advises Neal. “Therefore, as a rule of thumb, you should always customize your invitations so that you indicate how you know the person and why you want to connect with them.”
Your note can be something short such as, “My name is Michelle and I interned for your company last summer. I really enjoyed working for the marketing department and would love to use LinkedIn to stay in touch with some of the people I met while interning there and build up my network on LinkedIn.” The most important thing to remember is to use common sense when reaching out to different people on LinkedIn, and to plan out your actions before you have the chance to make any mistakes.
Asking for recommendations
Recommendations on LinkedIn are virtual versions of letters of recommendation you would normally ask for from someone on paper, although these types are much shorter. If you are a serious user of LinkedIn, meaning you do not just have a profile because everyone else does, but because you honestly want to network and create a professional image for yourself, then recommendations are a necessary part of being a member of LinkedIn. Recommendations are also a must if you want to use LinkedIn to find future jobs and internships. They give you more credibility and add a sense of completeness to your profile which is appealing to those looking at your profile.
You only want to ask for recommendations from people who know you well and can vouch for your skills and abilities, not someone you hardly know. Internship or work supervisors are great people to ask for recommendations, as well as professors whose classes you did exceedingly well in. The best time to ask for a recommendation is shortly after you worked with the person or took their class, although asking for recommendations later is also fine as long as you provide a refresher on who you are and why they would want to recommend you.
Be sure to provide a thorough explanation for why you are seeking a recommendation, whether you are looking for a job or internship, trying to improve your profile, or whatever your reasons may be. Just as you would do when asking for a typical letter of recommendation, you should remind the person what you accomplished while working for them or what skills you displayed that were noteworthy.
“You're not writing your recommendation for them, but merely serving to remind them about what you did for them so that they can paint a complete picture of you from memory,” said Neal.
If you ask someone for an actual letter of recommendation, discreetly ask if they might be willing to use an excerpt of it to recommend you on LinkedIn as well. The worst they can do is say no. Since we are talking about etiquette, one of the most important parts of asking for a recommendation on LinkedIn is to thank the person for taking the time to write one for you. Taking the time to do so will leave the door open for future opportunities, which can never hurt.
Posting updates
businessman typing laptop work computerWhile tweeting what you are doing every five minutes is the new trend, I hate to break it to you, but your professional contacts probably do not care. Just like Facebook and Twitter, on LinkedIn you have the opportunity to post updates through the “Status Update” box on your profile, but beware, updates on LinkedIn should be treated significantly different than posting on other networking sites.
“The LinkedIn Status Update, while seemingly innocent, will post your update to your network in the News Feed on their Home Page,” warned Neal. “Since the majority of LinkedIn users used it before Facebook or Twitter, the current environment is one in which status updates no more than once a day are tolerated.”
Whatever you do, DO NOT link your Twitter account with your LinkedIn profile in a way that automatically posts every tweet to LinkedIn, especially if you tweet often. Status updates on LinkedIn should consist of positive information about your life that helps promote you professionally, such as updates about professional events you attended or projects you are working on for school, while blurbs about your tailgating plans for the weekend and how you loved the new episode of “The Jersey Shore” are not.
With these clarifications, you are now ready to fearlessly brave the seas of LinkedIn and use it to your utmost benefit!
http://www.hercampus.com/career/dos-and-donts-linkedin-etiquette
Promoting Yourself on LinkedIn
Q: As a LinkedIn user, I am seeing many people stating, "looking for a job opportunity" and other similar statements in their profile or status. If you are unemployed, is it good to announce that you are looking for a job this way, or does it potentially damage your image?
A: In the past, it was common to try to hide the fact that you'd lost your job. But that has changed in the current economy. "The stigma of being unemployed in this economy is almost non-existent," says Terry Karp, career counselor and co-founder of the Bay Area Career Center in San Francisco. "It is commonly understood that many talented people have been laid off completely due to a business decision by the company, not their performance."
While it's acceptable to let people know that you are looking for a position, it's important to approach it professionally and to be specific about your needs. One way to do this is to use LinkedIn's "professional headline" to establish your identity. Ms. Karp recommends adding the words "in transition" or "seeking a new challenge" to your title. LinkedIn also gives you the opportunity to fill in a status box. "Use this area to describe contract or consulting gigs you have as well as any volunteer work you are doing," suggests Ms. Karp. "This approach enables you to reinforce your brand through the headline as well as highlight current relevant projects."
Dan Schawbel, author of "Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success," also believes in getting the word out. "If your network is unaware that you're job searching, then how are they supposed to support your search?" he asks. "Visibility creates opportunities, both in marketing products and with people."
When crafting your profile, you need to be honest, says LinkedIn spokeswoman Krista Canfield. "Don't list on your profile or résumé that you're doing free-lance work if you really aren't," she says. "Hiring managers may ask you about that free-lance work or consulting gig during the interview and if you don't have the references to back that work up, it could count against you."
If you aren't doing any contract or other work, then you'll want to at least list a position that reflects the type of role you're seeking. For example, you could include something along the lines of: "open to free-lance and consulting work in the graphic design industry" or "seeking a challenging sales position in the real-estate sector," suggests Ms. Canfield.
You'll also want to update your status regularly. "Status updates remind your network that you're looking for a position and what types of jobs you're looking for," she says. "Plus, you never know. Someone in your network might know someone that works at the company you're researching."
Andrew Ravens, assistant vice president for corporate communications at Eastern Bank in Boston, credits LinkedIn status updates for helping two friends land jobs. One friend mentioned in her update that she was moving back to the Washington, D.C., area. Mr. Ravens saw the update and immediately put her in touch with an old college roommate who works in the same field. Through the connection, the friend eventually landed a job. In the other case, a friend posted an update that she was looking for broadcast journalism work. Again, Mr. Ravens was able to connect her with someone in the field. "It made me feel really good to help them out, especially with things so tough out there," says Mr. Ravens. "If it weren't for their status updates, I wouldn't have even known they were looking."
In order to have your status updates seen, you'll need to grow your network, say the experts. "The larger your LinkedIn network is, both in volume and in real relationships, the better your chances are at finding a job," says Mr. Schawbel. "Most jobs come from second- and third-degree contacts anyway, so it's not just who you know but who they know and who knows you."
Wall Street Journal
A: In the past, it was common to try to hide the fact that you'd lost your job. But that has changed in the current economy. "The stigma of being unemployed in this economy is almost non-existent," says Terry Karp, career counselor and co-founder of the Bay Area Career Center in San Francisco. "It is commonly understood that many talented people have been laid off completely due to a business decision by the company, not their performance."
While it's acceptable to let people know that you are looking for a position, it's important to approach it professionally and to be specific about your needs. One way to do this is to use LinkedIn's "professional headline" to establish your identity. Ms. Karp recommends adding the words "in transition" or "seeking a new challenge" to your title. LinkedIn also gives you the opportunity to fill in a status box. "Use this area to describe contract or consulting gigs you have as well as any volunteer work you are doing," suggests Ms. Karp. "This approach enables you to reinforce your brand through the headline as well as highlight current relevant projects."
Dan Schawbel, author of "Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success," also believes in getting the word out. "If your network is unaware that you're job searching, then how are they supposed to support your search?" he asks. "Visibility creates opportunities, both in marketing products and with people."
When crafting your profile, you need to be honest, says LinkedIn spokeswoman Krista Canfield. "Don't list on your profile or résumé that you're doing free-lance work if you really aren't," she says. "Hiring managers may ask you about that free-lance work or consulting gig during the interview and if you don't have the references to back that work up, it could count against you."
If you aren't doing any contract or other work, then you'll want to at least list a position that reflects the type of role you're seeking. For example, you could include something along the lines of: "open to free-lance and consulting work in the graphic design industry" or "seeking a challenging sales position in the real-estate sector," suggests Ms. Canfield.
You'll also want to update your status regularly. "Status updates remind your network that you're looking for a position and what types of jobs you're looking for," she says. "Plus, you never know. Someone in your network might know someone that works at the company you're researching."
Andrew Ravens, assistant vice president for corporate communications at Eastern Bank in Boston, credits LinkedIn status updates for helping two friends land jobs. One friend mentioned in her update that she was moving back to the Washington, D.C., area. Mr. Ravens saw the update and immediately put her in touch with an old college roommate who works in the same field. Through the connection, the friend eventually landed a job. In the other case, a friend posted an update that she was looking for broadcast journalism work. Again, Mr. Ravens was able to connect her with someone in the field. "It made me feel really good to help them out, especially with things so tough out there," says Mr. Ravens. "If it weren't for their status updates, I wouldn't have even known they were looking."
In order to have your status updates seen, you'll need to grow your network, say the experts. "The larger your LinkedIn network is, both in volume and in real relationships, the better your chances are at finding a job," says Mr. Schawbel. "Most jobs come from second- and third-degree contacts anyway, so it's not just who you know but who they know and who knows you."
Wall Street Journal
Manage Your Online Reputation—Before Someone Else Does
Did you know you’re being Googled right now? You are.
Google isn’t the only search engine that recruiters are using to find out more information about you. Social networks have search engines too. A recent Microsoft survey, “Online Reputation in a Connected World,” stated that 78% of recruiters are using search engines, and 63% are using social networks, to conduct background checks on candidates.
As an employer myself, I’ve received a lot of internship applications from students who are just plain careless about their online reputation. For instance, I searched for a student’s name on Facebook, and a group appeared that was protesting her getting kicked out of her dormitory. I decided to hire someone else!
The Internet is the global talent pool, which means that everyone in the world, including you, has to have an online presence. It also means that you have to own it, and manage it, for the rest of your life.
Here are the top ways to control your online reputation:
Purchase your domain name. For approximately $10 a year at GoDaddy.com, you can claim your full name as a domain name. This will help you protect yourself from others who may share the same name as you. If your name isn’t available, then use your middle initial, your full middle name, or a shortened version of your name. The .com extension carries the most weight in search engines and then .net. Don’t bother registering .org, .us, or another domain name extension, because they aren’t authoritative in search engines. In addition, if you buy hosting, you can create a Web site that displays your credentials under your domain name. Domain names usually rank first for those keyword terms. For example, if you Google “McDonalds,” McDonalds.com comes up first.
Develop a blog and connect it with your name. You may choose to either have a static Web site or a blog under your name. To get started, I recommend installing Wordpress.org on your hosting service. Your blog doesn’t have to be under yourfullname.com either. You can purchase an additional domain of your choice, as long as you put your name in the description and title. This way, the search engines will recognize the site as being associated with your name, and it will rank high accordingly. A blog can help you control more of your digital presence because you have more opportunities for “backlinks” (links pointing back to your site) and you can publish multiple posts, which is looked upon highly by search engines.
Claim your name on social networks. You should own vanity URLs for the following networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google. Just like your Web site or blog, these are all web properties that you can manage. For Facebook, go to Facebook.com/usernames to claim your short URL. For LinkedIn, create a custom URL when editing your profile. For Twitter, just register your full name as your account name. Finally, for Google, go to Google.com/profiles and fill out your profile completely, because the most thorough profiles (for each full name) will appear at the bottom of the Google search results. If you want to know if your name is available on other social networks, go to KnowEm.com.
Contribute content to other sites. By writing a guest article, or blog post for another site, you’ll not only be able to include links back to your profiles or Web site, but it will increase the number of search-engine results that appear under your name. Create a Web site or a blog before you reach out to others asking to write, so that you can direct traffic back to your Web site, and increase its authority in search engines.
Get attention from the media. If you have a story to tell or expertise to share, locate bloggers and traditional journalists online and build relationships with them. Comment on their blogs or articles for a few weeks, and then send them a note with resources, tips, or even your story. Who knows, you might even get your name in The Wall Street Journal or a small niche blog. When you receive media attention, your name will not only appear in your search engine results, but it may also emerge in Google news feeds.
Review your social network privacy settings. It’s easy for students or young professionals to neglect their privacy settings on Facebook. You now have complete control over how you’re viewed by each one of your Facebook friends. You can set your privacy settings, and then use the PrivacyDefender application to view a graphical representation of what information you’re sharing with your network. This is important, especially when you start connecting to coworkers, managers, and other professionals online.
Use reputation management tools. To protect, and monitor, your online reputation, use a variety of tools, along with Google Reader. Google Reader will capture alerts for your name as they appear across the Web. First, set a comprehensive Google alert for your full name, and common misspellings, so that when you’re mentioned on a blog or in a news story, you’ll be aware of it. Next, use Backtype.com to set an alert for your name within blog comments, and then BoardTracker.com so that you’re notified when your name appears in a discussion forum thread. Use TweetBeep.com to get alerts for when your name is mentioned on Twitter. Finally, use Social Mention occasionally to search through all social sites for your name.
By being proactive with your online reputation, you’re able to have more control over what other people see when they search for you. This will not only help you right now, but for the rest of your career, as long as you keep tabs on it and manage it.
Dan Schawbel is managing partner of Millennial Branding LLC and founder of the Student Branding Blog.
Wall Street Journal
Google isn’t the only search engine that recruiters are using to find out more information about you. Social networks have search engines too. A recent Microsoft survey, “Online Reputation in a Connected World,” stated that 78% of recruiters are using search engines, and 63% are using social networks, to conduct background checks on candidates.
As an employer myself, I’ve received a lot of internship applications from students who are just plain careless about their online reputation. For instance, I searched for a student’s name on Facebook, and a group appeared that was protesting her getting kicked out of her dormitory. I decided to hire someone else!
The Internet is the global talent pool, which means that everyone in the world, including you, has to have an online presence. It also means that you have to own it, and manage it, for the rest of your life.
Here are the top ways to control your online reputation:
Purchase your domain name. For approximately $10 a year at GoDaddy.com, you can claim your full name as a domain name. This will help you protect yourself from others who may share the same name as you. If your name isn’t available, then use your middle initial, your full middle name, or a shortened version of your name. The .com extension carries the most weight in search engines and then .net. Don’t bother registering .org, .us, or another domain name extension, because they aren’t authoritative in search engines. In addition, if you buy hosting, you can create a Web site that displays your credentials under your domain name. Domain names usually rank first for those keyword terms. For example, if you Google “McDonalds,” McDonalds.com comes up first.
Develop a blog and connect it with your name. You may choose to either have a static Web site or a blog under your name. To get started, I recommend installing Wordpress.org on your hosting service. Your blog doesn’t have to be under yourfullname.com either. You can purchase an additional domain of your choice, as long as you put your name in the description and title. This way, the search engines will recognize the site as being associated with your name, and it will rank high accordingly. A blog can help you control more of your digital presence because you have more opportunities for “backlinks” (links pointing back to your site) and you can publish multiple posts, which is looked upon highly by search engines.
Claim your name on social networks. You should own vanity URLs for the following networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google. Just like your Web site or blog, these are all web properties that you can manage. For Facebook, go to Facebook.com/usernames to claim your short URL. For LinkedIn, create a custom URL when editing your profile. For Twitter, just register your full name as your account name. Finally, for Google, go to Google.com/profiles and fill out your profile completely, because the most thorough profiles (for each full name) will appear at the bottom of the Google search results. If you want to know if your name is available on other social networks, go to KnowEm.com.
Contribute content to other sites. By writing a guest article, or blog post for another site, you’ll not only be able to include links back to your profiles or Web site, but it will increase the number of search-engine results that appear under your name. Create a Web site or a blog before you reach out to others asking to write, so that you can direct traffic back to your Web site, and increase its authority in search engines.
Get attention from the media. If you have a story to tell or expertise to share, locate bloggers and traditional journalists online and build relationships with them. Comment on their blogs or articles for a few weeks, and then send them a note with resources, tips, or even your story. Who knows, you might even get your name in The Wall Street Journal or a small niche blog. When you receive media attention, your name will not only appear in your search engine results, but it may also emerge in Google news feeds.
Review your social network privacy settings. It’s easy for students or young professionals to neglect their privacy settings on Facebook. You now have complete control over how you’re viewed by each one of your Facebook friends. You can set your privacy settings, and then use the PrivacyDefender application to view a graphical representation of what information you’re sharing with your network. This is important, especially when you start connecting to coworkers, managers, and other professionals online.
Use reputation management tools. To protect, and monitor, your online reputation, use a variety of tools, along with Google Reader. Google Reader will capture alerts for your name as they appear across the Web. First, set a comprehensive Google alert for your full name, and common misspellings, so that when you’re mentioned on a blog or in a news story, you’ll be aware of it. Next, use Backtype.com to set an alert for your name within blog comments, and then BoardTracker.com so that you’re notified when your name appears in a discussion forum thread. Use TweetBeep.com to get alerts for when your name is mentioned on Twitter. Finally, use Social Mention occasionally to search through all social sites for your name.
By being proactive with your online reputation, you’re able to have more control over what other people see when they search for you. This will not only help you right now, but for the rest of your career, as long as you keep tabs on it and manage it.
Dan Schawbel is managing partner of Millennial Branding LLC and founder of the Student Branding Blog.
Wall Street Journal
How LinkedIn will fire up your career
If you need a job, or just want a better one, here's a number that will give you hope: 50,000. That's how many people the giant consulting firm Accenture plans to hire this year. Yes, actual jobs, with pay. It's looking for telecom consultants, finance experts, software specialists, and many more. You could be one of them -- but will Accenture find you?
To pick these hires the old-fashioned way, the firm would rely on headhunters, employee referrals, and job boards. But the game has changed. To get the attention of John Campagnino, Accenture's head of global recruiting, you'd better be on the web.
To put a sharper point on it: If you don't have a profile on LinkedIn, you're nowhere. Partly motivated by the cheaper, faster recruiting he can do online, Campagnino plans to make as many as 40% of his hires in the next few years through social media. Says he: "This is the future of recruiting for our company."
Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life. If you're serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn. In today's job market an invitation to "join my professional network" has become more obligatory -- and more useful -- than swapping business cards and churning out résumés.
More than 60 million members have logged on to create profiles, upload their employment histories, and build connections with people they know. Visitors to the site have jumped 31% from last year to 17.6 million in February. They include your customers. Your colleagues. Your competitors. Your boss. And being on LinkedIn puts you in the company of people with impressive credentials: The average member is a college-educated 43-year-old making $107,000. More than a quarter are senior executives. Every Fortune 500 company is represented. That's why recruiters rely on the site to find even the highest-caliber executives: Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) found CFO Jeff Epstein via LinkedIn in 2008.
The reason LinkedIn works so well for professional matchmaking is that most of its members already have jobs. A cadre of happily employed people use it to research clients before sales calls, ask their connections for advice, and read up on where former colleagues are landing gigs.
In this environment, job seekers can do their networking without looking as if they're shopping themselves around. This population is more valuable to recruiters as well. While online job boards like Monster.com focus on showcasing active job hunters, very often the most talented and sought-after recruits are those currently employed. Headhunters have a name for people like these: passive candidates. The $8 billion recruiting industry is built on the fact that they are hard to find. LinkedIn changes that. It's the equivalent of a little black book -- highly detailed and exposed for everyone to see.
For a generation of professionals trained to cloak their contacts at all costs, this transparency is counterintuitive. So far most conversations about how to use social networks professionally have focused on what not to do: Don't share drunken photos on Facebook. Don't use Twitter to brag about playing hooky from the office.
0:00 /4:42LinkedIn wants you
But as companies turn to the web to mine for prospective job candidates, it's no longer advantageous to refrain from broadcasting personal information. Instead, the new imperative is to present your professional skills as attractively as possible, packing your profile with keywords (marketing manager, global sourcing specialist) that will send your name to the top of recruiters' searches.
At the same time, you can connect your online professional interactions in one place, joining groups on the site (LinkedIn has more than 500,000 of them, based on companies, schools, and affinities), offering advice, and linking your Twitter account and blog updates to your profile.
"You Google other people, so don't you think they're Googling you?" LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman asks. "Part of a networked world is that people will be looking you up, and when they do, you want to control what they find." Helping you present yourself well online is just the start. LinkedIn plans to go far beyond, making itself an active and indispensable tool for your career path. The secrets lie buried in the data: those 60 million profiles, including yours.
In a business where data wonks are rock stars, Dipchand ("Deep") Nishar is Bono. During his five-year tenure at Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Nishar, 41, was instrumental in developing its ad platform, its mobile strategy, and products for the Asia-Pacific region. Hoffman spent almost a year recruiting him to be vice president of products, until finally, in January 2009, Nishar took a right out of Google's Mountain View, Calif., parking lot and drove two blocks to his new office at LinkedIn's headquarters.
Having so much experience in Asia, where mobile messaging and other social networks were adopted even faster than in the U.S., Nishar understood the value of a system that would help consumers organize all those digital relationships.
But it was one personal interaction that really sold him on LinkedIn's potential. Nishar was trying to decide whether his daughter, who was 12 at the time, should spend her summer at a program offered by Johns Hopkins University. He posted the question to his status update on both Facebook and LinkedIn. While he received more comments on Facebook, they were casual and congratulatory. Only four of his LinkedIn contacts wrote him, but they offered a rich analysis, describing experiences with the Johns Hopkins program that left them better off academically; they persuaded him to enroll his daughter. "People are in a different context and mindset when they're in a professional network," he says.
This was Hoffman's bet when he founded the site in 2003. It was just after eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) paid $1.5 billion to buy PayPal, where Hoffman had been a founding board member and executive vice president, and he was casting about for his next big project. Hoffman, 42, was already one of Silicon Valley's most hyperconnected players, with investments in dozens of other startups (including Facebook), so it was natural for him to think of a way for people to build on their links.
"I realized that everyone will have their professional identity online so they can be discoverable for the things that will be important to them," he remembers, waving his hand as he sits back in his chair. "The obvious one is jobs, but it's not just jobs. It's also clients and services. It's people looking to trade tips on how you do, say, debt financing in the new capital markets." Backed by other angel investors like him, Hoffman and four others put up the initial funding and gathered a tiny staff to launch the site as a bare-bones operation in his Mountain View home.
At first, users were slow to embrace the service. Plenty of Web 2.0 entertainment websites were enjoying meteoric rises and monstrous buyouts by big media companies. (In fact, after helping fund YouTube, Hoffman gave its founders office space for three weeks in their early days.)
By comparison, LinkedIn seemed a little static; it was only for résumés. As Facebook caught on among bona fide adults, it created a population of web users fluent in updating their status, posting links, and microblogging. Hoffman could sense that social networking was finally becoming mainstream, and he needed to give LinkedIn's users a reason to stick around before they moved their résumés and other professional information to platforms like Facebook. So last December he recruited former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner to step into the CEO position. And he won over Nishar.
John Klodnicki wasn't looking for a job when he took the call from an IBM recruiter who had found his profile on LinkedIn. As a program director for data-storage company EMC, he spent five days a week on the road consulting with pharmaceutical companies. "I was moderately happy," he said. Sure, all that traveling was a drag.
On that Friday afternoon Klodnicki was scarfing a sandwich while standing in the security line at the airport in Providence, trying to get home to his family in New Jersey. The line was long, so he had the time to chat about opportunities. After going through several rounds of interviews, the initial job fell through, but the relationship had been started. He kept in touch, and last September, Klodnicki started work as an associate partner developing new business with pharmaceutical companies at IBM's Philadelphia office, just half an hour from his home.
Thanks to LinkedIn, people like Klodnicki are increasingly easy to find. "It's a great equalizer for us. It gives the recruiter an opportunity to reach out directly to a candidate," says Annie Shanklin Jones, who heads U.S. recruiting for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500). "In a company the size of IBM, that's significant."
IBM has always been one of the first companies to experiment with new social technologies. Its recruiters use Twitter to broadcast job openings, and the company organizes its own talent communities. But Jones says LinkedIn is the most important social-media site for reaching prospective hires.
Cost saving is a major motivation for companies looking to bypass big headhunting firms. "If I were going to go out to a major recruiting firm, for example, we could potentially pay upwards of $100,000 to $150,000 for one person," says Accenture's Campagnino. "Start multiplying that by a number of senior executives, and you start talking about significant numbers of dollars very quickly."
If anybody should be nervous about that, it's L. Kevin Kelly. As CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, one of the most prominent recruiting firms, he has made a living out of the hiring market's opacity. As he watched the rise of LinkedIn, he knew it was a disruptive force he would have to learn well; last summer he flew to the Bay Area to have dinner with Hoffman.
Their companies have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, LinkedIn is a welcome tool for recruiters, and Heidrick & Struggles is a customer. LinkedIn's software allows recruiters to search its database without access to photographs, thus keeping in compliance with antidiscrimination laws, and to contact anybody in the LinkedIn network. But the recession forced companies to cut back on their budgets for outside firms.
Heidrick & Struggles' revenues fell 36% in 2009, and while business has started to creep back, Kelly is aggressively trying to remake the company as an adviser rather than simply a search company, offering consulting on ways to handle staffing issues and select board members. Now it's just 7% of the business, but he expects it to grow to half of what Heidrick & Struggles does.
There will still be a need for headhunters and traditional methods of hiring, though, because LinkedIn doesn't work for everything. And it has to be used carefully.
"If you're not managing that site, you can erode your brand," says Arlette Guthrie, the vice president of talent management at Home Depot. Guthrie has learned how to use the site through trial and error. Over the past few years she experimented with using LinkedIn for all hires -- including seasonal workers, Home Depot will need 80,000 people in the next year -- but discovered that LinkedIn didn't offer better applicants for the bulk of the company's positions, mostly in their retail stores. Though plenty of cashiers and doctors and teachers join LinkedIn, the site's primary membership is corporate professionals.
Now Guthrie uses LinkedIn mostly for three hard-to-fill areas: supply chain, information technology, and global sourcing. Some of Guthrie's recruiters spend time daily on the site, reading up on potential candidates, chatting with them in groups and on message boards, and responding to inquiries. The approach has worked well. Using services like this on the Internet she has been able to bring down the time it takes to fill the positions, an important metric among recruiters, by nearly half.
At the entry to the "Hope" classroom on the satellite campus of Belhaven University in Houston, Susan Thorpe passes out a small book called 12.5 Ways to Get Ahead on LinkedIn. Up front, her husband, Doug Thorpe, who self-published the guide, has drawn a diagram on the whiteboard that looks like an elaborate football play. A series of circles labeled one, two, and three stretch out from a central bubble labeled you. A dozen job seekers take notes as Thorpe describes how to call upon first-level contacts -- those former colleagues and friends you've befriended on the site -- to reach second-level contacts. It's a process as old as human relations: Hey, could you introduce me to your friend? Thorpe explains the etiquette and technique of doing it digitally. "Write a personal note when you ask someone to connect," he tells his students.
Thorpe, 57, is one of hundreds of consultants who have sprung up to help professionals establish themselves online. After he lost his mortgage company two years ago in the real estate crash, he started Jobs Ministry Southwest, a religious nonprofit that offers free support for job seekers in the greater Houston area. A dozen of the 160 people who attended the previous day's support group have paid $24.95 for a half-day introduction to LinkedIn.
Thorpe's main message to his clients is that it's important to complete your profile. Get recommendations from former co-workers. Use keywords to bring out the skills you want to highlight. Join groups: Recruiters often scour professional groups to round up potential candidates. Answer questions from colleagues that showcase your professional expertise.
One of the students, Heinz Meyer, exhales audibly at the prospect of all that time online. "This could turn into a 24/7 thing real quick," says Meyer, 67, who had just lost his job at Universal Pegasus, a pipeline construction company. Thorpe responds by suggesting the class spend a concentrated amount of time on the site each day, say 30 minutes. Believe it or not, LinkedIn doesn't pay this guy.
There is much debate in the class about Thorpe's suggestion that job seekers should include professional photographs with their profiles. ("Don't use dogs, horses, cats, or cows in the background," he says.) Older job seekers in particular are worried that their gray hair will trigger age discrimination. There are drawbacks to so much transparency, they argue. Doesn't it ensure that employers potentially know more about you than they should?
It's a question Hoffman considered right from the start. For all the benefit that LinkedIn brings to the job hunt, it can't erase fundamental challenges in the job market. One big reality is that plenty of baby boomers are out of work as the industries in which they've developed three decades of expertise move overseas or change irrevocably.
These job hunters will need to reinvent themselves in new careers. The thing about social-networking profiles is that they don't lie, at least not successfully. You can't fudge your experience or hide your age, because your connections know you in real life. So Hoffman is inclined to agree with Thorpe's advice: Post your photo. "A LinkedIn profile lets you represent yourself as strong as you can, so build that to your advantage," he says.
Okay, but how do you finally land a job? It's the last question that Thorpe's students ask as he wraps up his lecture. Thorpe turns back to the elaborate diagram on the board, pointing to the circled numbers. Social networking is just a more efficient way of reaching out to people you know -- and people they know. You work the network. You connect with people like John Campagnino at Accenture if you want a job in consulting. Then you turn off the computer, and you call your connections on the phone. And you invite them to lunch.
Garth Beams
Title: Animator, Art Director, Graphic Designer, Illustrator
URL: linkedin.com/in/garthbeams
Garth is a creative professional with an impressive background, having worked as the Head of the Graphics Department for nine years on The Late Show with David Letterman.
Because he's done so much visual work, it's worth noting that samples of it can't actually be found on his profile. He should use either the SlideShare or Google Presentations application to build a presentation of his work to give visual proof of his design and artistic strengths.
And for richer examples, Garth might also want to link to an online portfolio.
Jodi Glickman Brown
Title: President
Company: Great On The Job
URL: linkedin.com/in/greatonthejob
Jodi has yet another example of a great LinkedIn profile that clearly shows her work history and offers a glimpse into her day-to-day professional life via her blog.
Still, she could make some improvements to the Experience and Education areas. First, she doesn't indicate the years she attended, making it difficult for former classmates to connect with her. Her Experience section doesn't list details about her positions. (Vague titles like "volunteer" don't tell us much.)
Adding information about them would make her easier to find in searches and give readers a better sense of her work. Also, she has the same position of "Policy Analyst" listed three times consecutively. This is probably a mistake, but colleagues pay attention to these kind of details.
Rob Dalton
Title: Dir. of Business Development
Company: Big Belly Solar
URL: linkedin.com/pub/rob-dalton/4/aa7/8a9
The first thing we see when looking at Rob's profile is his apparent distaste for capital letters. In the professional world, presentation goes a long way, and Rob's profile looks like it was written without much care or attention to detail. His headline, "I've got a big belly," trivializes things.
Changing that to a more descriptive title would help those who don't know Rob get a better sense of who he is and what he does.
Still, Rob's profile has some very compelling data hiding beneath the rough presentation. He lists impressive accomplishments, and it's a shame that many interested parties may write him off simply due to the fact he writes in sentence fragments and doesn't capitalize.
Cleaning up the various elements would take his online professional identity to a whole new level.
Nicolette Toussaint
Title: Showroom and marketing manager
Company: Keane Kitchen Showrooms
URL: linkedin.com/in/ntoussaint
Nicolette has a list of glowing recommendations that lend a lot of credit to her well-organized list of skills and specialties, and she's rearranged her profile to bring them closer to the top of the page.
This is an excellent strategy for guiding the viewer to the best areas of a profile.
Also listed is a thorough and complete job history, noting the highlights and measures of success for each as a bulleted list in each section. Applications powered by TypePad, WordPress, and SlideShare feature her Home Design blog and a visual presentation she has created, though it's worth pointing out that the first two apps serve the same purpose and thus are actually a bit redundant.
Lucas Manfield
Title: Student
Company: Stanford University
URL: linkedin.com/in/manfield
It's not too early for students to start building professional profiles. These temporary positions he's listed serve as great opportunities for young professionals to ask for recommendations from mentors and colleagues.
First, Lucas should add a professional profile photo to boost his recognizability. In the description area for his work as Stanford research assistant, he should discuss the project he was involved in. He may also be able to leverage LinkedIn Applications such as Box.net Files to upload work samples from his classes to highlight his academic prowess.
To build his network, Lucas should search for classmates and professors and connect with them. As he enters the job market, he will find that the work and connections he has made over the course of his school career will give him a great head start.
Fortune Magazine
To pick these hires the old-fashioned way, the firm would rely on headhunters, employee referrals, and job boards. But the game has changed. To get the attention of John Campagnino, Accenture's head of global recruiting, you'd better be on the web.
To put a sharper point on it: If you don't have a profile on LinkedIn, you're nowhere. Partly motivated by the cheaper, faster recruiting he can do online, Campagnino plans to make as many as 40% of his hires in the next few years through social media. Says he: "This is the future of recruiting for our company."
Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life. If you're serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn. In today's job market an invitation to "join my professional network" has become more obligatory -- and more useful -- than swapping business cards and churning out résumés.
More than 60 million members have logged on to create profiles, upload their employment histories, and build connections with people they know. Visitors to the site have jumped 31% from last year to 17.6 million in February. They include your customers. Your colleagues. Your competitors. Your boss. And being on LinkedIn puts you in the company of people with impressive credentials: The average member is a college-educated 43-year-old making $107,000. More than a quarter are senior executives. Every Fortune 500 company is represented. That's why recruiters rely on the site to find even the highest-caliber executives: Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) found CFO Jeff Epstein via LinkedIn in 2008.
The reason LinkedIn works so well for professional matchmaking is that most of its members already have jobs. A cadre of happily employed people use it to research clients before sales calls, ask their connections for advice, and read up on where former colleagues are landing gigs.
In this environment, job seekers can do their networking without looking as if they're shopping themselves around. This population is more valuable to recruiters as well. While online job boards like Monster.com focus on showcasing active job hunters, very often the most talented and sought-after recruits are those currently employed. Headhunters have a name for people like these: passive candidates. The $8 billion recruiting industry is built on the fact that they are hard to find. LinkedIn changes that. It's the equivalent of a little black book -- highly detailed and exposed for everyone to see.
For a generation of professionals trained to cloak their contacts at all costs, this transparency is counterintuitive. So far most conversations about how to use social networks professionally have focused on what not to do: Don't share drunken photos on Facebook. Don't use Twitter to brag about playing hooky from the office.
0:00 /4:42LinkedIn wants you
But as companies turn to the web to mine for prospective job candidates, it's no longer advantageous to refrain from broadcasting personal information. Instead, the new imperative is to present your professional skills as attractively as possible, packing your profile with keywords (marketing manager, global sourcing specialist) that will send your name to the top of recruiters' searches.
At the same time, you can connect your online professional interactions in one place, joining groups on the site (LinkedIn has more than 500,000 of them, based on companies, schools, and affinities), offering advice, and linking your Twitter account and blog updates to your profile.
"You Google other people, so don't you think they're Googling you?" LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman asks. "Part of a networked world is that people will be looking you up, and when they do, you want to control what they find." Helping you present yourself well online is just the start. LinkedIn plans to go far beyond, making itself an active and indispensable tool for your career path. The secrets lie buried in the data: those 60 million profiles, including yours.
In a business where data wonks are rock stars, Dipchand ("Deep") Nishar is Bono. During his five-year tenure at Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Nishar, 41, was instrumental in developing its ad platform, its mobile strategy, and products for the Asia-Pacific region. Hoffman spent almost a year recruiting him to be vice president of products, until finally, in January 2009, Nishar took a right out of Google's Mountain View, Calif., parking lot and drove two blocks to his new office at LinkedIn's headquarters.
Having so much experience in Asia, where mobile messaging and other social networks were adopted even faster than in the U.S., Nishar understood the value of a system that would help consumers organize all those digital relationships.
But it was one personal interaction that really sold him on LinkedIn's potential. Nishar was trying to decide whether his daughter, who was 12 at the time, should spend her summer at a program offered by Johns Hopkins University. He posted the question to his status update on both Facebook and LinkedIn. While he received more comments on Facebook, they were casual and congratulatory. Only four of his LinkedIn contacts wrote him, but they offered a rich analysis, describing experiences with the Johns Hopkins program that left them better off academically; they persuaded him to enroll his daughter. "People are in a different context and mindset when they're in a professional network," he says.
This was Hoffman's bet when he founded the site in 2003. It was just after eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) paid $1.5 billion to buy PayPal, where Hoffman had been a founding board member and executive vice president, and he was casting about for his next big project. Hoffman, 42, was already one of Silicon Valley's most hyperconnected players, with investments in dozens of other startups (including Facebook), so it was natural for him to think of a way for people to build on their links.
"I realized that everyone will have their professional identity online so they can be discoverable for the things that will be important to them," he remembers, waving his hand as he sits back in his chair. "The obvious one is jobs, but it's not just jobs. It's also clients and services. It's people looking to trade tips on how you do, say, debt financing in the new capital markets." Backed by other angel investors like him, Hoffman and four others put up the initial funding and gathered a tiny staff to launch the site as a bare-bones operation in his Mountain View home.
At first, users were slow to embrace the service. Plenty of Web 2.0 entertainment websites were enjoying meteoric rises and monstrous buyouts by big media companies. (In fact, after helping fund YouTube, Hoffman gave its founders office space for three weeks in their early days.)
By comparison, LinkedIn seemed a little static; it was only for résumés. As Facebook caught on among bona fide adults, it created a population of web users fluent in updating their status, posting links, and microblogging. Hoffman could sense that social networking was finally becoming mainstream, and he needed to give LinkedIn's users a reason to stick around before they moved their résumés and other professional information to platforms like Facebook. So last December he recruited former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner to step into the CEO position. And he won over Nishar.
John Klodnicki wasn't looking for a job when he took the call from an IBM recruiter who had found his profile on LinkedIn. As a program director for data-storage company EMC, he spent five days a week on the road consulting with pharmaceutical companies. "I was moderately happy," he said. Sure, all that traveling was a drag.
On that Friday afternoon Klodnicki was scarfing a sandwich while standing in the security line at the airport in Providence, trying to get home to his family in New Jersey. The line was long, so he had the time to chat about opportunities. After going through several rounds of interviews, the initial job fell through, but the relationship had been started. He kept in touch, and last September, Klodnicki started work as an associate partner developing new business with pharmaceutical companies at IBM's Philadelphia office, just half an hour from his home.
Thanks to LinkedIn, people like Klodnicki are increasingly easy to find. "It's a great equalizer for us. It gives the recruiter an opportunity to reach out directly to a candidate," says Annie Shanklin Jones, who heads U.S. recruiting for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500). "In a company the size of IBM, that's significant."
IBM has always been one of the first companies to experiment with new social technologies. Its recruiters use Twitter to broadcast job openings, and the company organizes its own talent communities. But Jones says LinkedIn is the most important social-media site for reaching prospective hires.
Cost saving is a major motivation for companies looking to bypass big headhunting firms. "If I were going to go out to a major recruiting firm, for example, we could potentially pay upwards of $100,000 to $150,000 for one person," says Accenture's Campagnino. "Start multiplying that by a number of senior executives, and you start talking about significant numbers of dollars very quickly."
If anybody should be nervous about that, it's L. Kevin Kelly. As CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, one of the most prominent recruiting firms, he has made a living out of the hiring market's opacity. As he watched the rise of LinkedIn, he knew it was a disruptive force he would have to learn well; last summer he flew to the Bay Area to have dinner with Hoffman.
Their companies have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, LinkedIn is a welcome tool for recruiters, and Heidrick & Struggles is a customer. LinkedIn's software allows recruiters to search its database without access to photographs, thus keeping in compliance with antidiscrimination laws, and to contact anybody in the LinkedIn network. But the recession forced companies to cut back on their budgets for outside firms.
Heidrick & Struggles' revenues fell 36% in 2009, and while business has started to creep back, Kelly is aggressively trying to remake the company as an adviser rather than simply a search company, offering consulting on ways to handle staffing issues and select board members. Now it's just 7% of the business, but he expects it to grow to half of what Heidrick & Struggles does.
There will still be a need for headhunters and traditional methods of hiring, though, because LinkedIn doesn't work for everything. And it has to be used carefully.
"If you're not managing that site, you can erode your brand," says Arlette Guthrie, the vice president of talent management at Home Depot. Guthrie has learned how to use the site through trial and error. Over the past few years she experimented with using LinkedIn for all hires -- including seasonal workers, Home Depot will need 80,000 people in the next year -- but discovered that LinkedIn didn't offer better applicants for the bulk of the company's positions, mostly in their retail stores. Though plenty of cashiers and doctors and teachers join LinkedIn, the site's primary membership is corporate professionals.
Now Guthrie uses LinkedIn mostly for three hard-to-fill areas: supply chain, information technology, and global sourcing. Some of Guthrie's recruiters spend time daily on the site, reading up on potential candidates, chatting with them in groups and on message boards, and responding to inquiries. The approach has worked well. Using services like this on the Internet she has been able to bring down the time it takes to fill the positions, an important metric among recruiters, by nearly half.
At the entry to the "Hope" classroom on the satellite campus of Belhaven University in Houston, Susan Thorpe passes out a small book called 12.5 Ways to Get Ahead on LinkedIn. Up front, her husband, Doug Thorpe, who self-published the guide, has drawn a diagram on the whiteboard that looks like an elaborate football play. A series of circles labeled one, two, and three stretch out from a central bubble labeled you. A dozen job seekers take notes as Thorpe describes how to call upon first-level contacts -- those former colleagues and friends you've befriended on the site -- to reach second-level contacts. It's a process as old as human relations: Hey, could you introduce me to your friend? Thorpe explains the etiquette and technique of doing it digitally. "Write a personal note when you ask someone to connect," he tells his students.
Thorpe, 57, is one of hundreds of consultants who have sprung up to help professionals establish themselves online. After he lost his mortgage company two years ago in the real estate crash, he started Jobs Ministry Southwest, a religious nonprofit that offers free support for job seekers in the greater Houston area. A dozen of the 160 people who attended the previous day's support group have paid $24.95 for a half-day introduction to LinkedIn.
Thorpe's main message to his clients is that it's important to complete your profile. Get recommendations from former co-workers. Use keywords to bring out the skills you want to highlight. Join groups: Recruiters often scour professional groups to round up potential candidates. Answer questions from colleagues that showcase your professional expertise.
One of the students, Heinz Meyer, exhales audibly at the prospect of all that time online. "This could turn into a 24/7 thing real quick," says Meyer, 67, who had just lost his job at Universal Pegasus, a pipeline construction company. Thorpe responds by suggesting the class spend a concentrated amount of time on the site each day, say 30 minutes. Believe it or not, LinkedIn doesn't pay this guy.
There is much debate in the class about Thorpe's suggestion that job seekers should include professional photographs with their profiles. ("Don't use dogs, horses, cats, or cows in the background," he says.) Older job seekers in particular are worried that their gray hair will trigger age discrimination. There are drawbacks to so much transparency, they argue. Doesn't it ensure that employers potentially know more about you than they should?
It's a question Hoffman considered right from the start. For all the benefit that LinkedIn brings to the job hunt, it can't erase fundamental challenges in the job market. One big reality is that plenty of baby boomers are out of work as the industries in which they've developed three decades of expertise move overseas or change irrevocably.
These job hunters will need to reinvent themselves in new careers. The thing about social-networking profiles is that they don't lie, at least not successfully. You can't fudge your experience or hide your age, because your connections know you in real life. So Hoffman is inclined to agree with Thorpe's advice: Post your photo. "A LinkedIn profile lets you represent yourself as strong as you can, so build that to your advantage," he says.
Okay, but how do you finally land a job? It's the last question that Thorpe's students ask as he wraps up his lecture. Thorpe turns back to the elaborate diagram on the board, pointing to the circled numbers. Social networking is just a more efficient way of reaching out to people you know -- and people they know. You work the network. You connect with people like John Campagnino at Accenture if you want a job in consulting. Then you turn off the computer, and you call your connections on the phone. And you invite them to lunch.
Garth Beams
Title: Animator, Art Director, Graphic Designer, Illustrator
URL: linkedin.com/in/garthbeams
Garth is a creative professional with an impressive background, having worked as the Head of the Graphics Department for nine years on The Late Show with David Letterman.
Because he's done so much visual work, it's worth noting that samples of it can't actually be found on his profile. He should use either the SlideShare or Google Presentations application to build a presentation of his work to give visual proof of his design and artistic strengths.
And for richer examples, Garth might also want to link to an online portfolio.
Jodi Glickman Brown
Title: President
Company: Great On The Job
URL: linkedin.com/in/greatonthejob
Jodi has yet another example of a great LinkedIn profile that clearly shows her work history and offers a glimpse into her day-to-day professional life via her blog.
Still, she could make some improvements to the Experience and Education areas. First, she doesn't indicate the years she attended, making it difficult for former classmates to connect with her. Her Experience section doesn't list details about her positions. (Vague titles like "volunteer" don't tell us much.)
Adding information about them would make her easier to find in searches and give readers a better sense of her work. Also, she has the same position of "Policy Analyst" listed three times consecutively. This is probably a mistake, but colleagues pay attention to these kind of details.
Rob Dalton
Title: Dir. of Business Development
Company: Big Belly Solar
URL: linkedin.com/pub/rob-dalton/4/aa7/8a9
The first thing we see when looking at Rob's profile is his apparent distaste for capital letters. In the professional world, presentation goes a long way, and Rob's profile looks like it was written without much care or attention to detail. His headline, "I've got a big belly," trivializes things.
Changing that to a more descriptive title would help those who don't know Rob get a better sense of who he is and what he does.
Still, Rob's profile has some very compelling data hiding beneath the rough presentation. He lists impressive accomplishments, and it's a shame that many interested parties may write him off simply due to the fact he writes in sentence fragments and doesn't capitalize.
Cleaning up the various elements would take his online professional identity to a whole new level.
Nicolette Toussaint
Title: Showroom and marketing manager
Company: Keane Kitchen Showrooms
URL: linkedin.com/in/ntoussaint
Nicolette has a list of glowing recommendations that lend a lot of credit to her well-organized list of skills and specialties, and she's rearranged her profile to bring them closer to the top of the page.
This is an excellent strategy for guiding the viewer to the best areas of a profile.
Also listed is a thorough and complete job history, noting the highlights and measures of success for each as a bulleted list in each section. Applications powered by TypePad, WordPress, and SlideShare feature her Home Design blog and a visual presentation she has created, though it's worth pointing out that the first two apps serve the same purpose and thus are actually a bit redundant.
Lucas Manfield
Title: Student
Company: Stanford University
URL: linkedin.com/in/manfield
It's not too early for students to start building professional profiles. These temporary positions he's listed serve as great opportunities for young professionals to ask for recommendations from mentors and colleagues.
First, Lucas should add a professional profile photo to boost his recognizability. In the description area for his work as Stanford research assistant, he should discuss the project he was involved in. He may also be able to leverage LinkedIn Applications such as Box.net Files to upload work samples from his classes to highlight his academic prowess.
To build his network, Lucas should search for classmates and professors and connect with them. As he enters the job market, he will find that the work and connections he has made over the course of his school career will give him a great head start.
Fortune Magazine
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