Are you on LinkedIn, yet?

by James Ellis on March 9th, 2010

I've recently gone through a long-term job search, and I can tell you that if you are not on LinkedIn you are missing out.

As a job hunter, it let me have room to post all my skills and experiences, even things that wouldn't fit on a two-page resume. I could connect with people in my industry, people in the city I wanted to move to, and get leads on who i should try and contact. I was able to met people (friends of friends, people who went to the same school as I did, people who were headhunters in Chicago, etc) that I normally wouldn't have been able to meet.

I was also able to use LinkedIn to learn more about my prospective employers before the interview. It was very useful to know where each interviewer went to school, what their background was before, what their current job entailed and what they looked like (which is nice when you're standing in a waiting room: you can be the one to put your hand out first because you know what they look like).

Here's what you need to do to have a killer LinkedIn page:

  • Sign up! It's free, so there's nothing stopping you.
  • Put all your jobs that are relevant to your job search up (don't add your middle-school paper route or that month you spent jockeying a cash register between semesters unless you can find a way to make it look like an experience a new employer would want to have on staff). Be sure to explain what you did at each job and how your work impacted the company. Did you add value? Did you save the company a lot of money? Did you speed a process up? What were the things you did that impressed your boss and your boss's boss?
  • Add your education (academic and professional) and any certificates and honors you have.
  • Find everyone you know on LinkedIn and connect with them.
  • Once you have a good network built up, ask a few of them to write recommendations for you (I'd even go so far to say that you should write recommendations of them first).
  • Go join some industry groups (and be active in them).
  • Put a nice professional-looking picture up.

And then dive in!

Also, take a look at the Wall Street Journal's take on using LinkedIn for promotion.

Also, How to improve your LinkedIn profile.

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