The first thing everyone who is job hunting on LINKEDIN® should know is that job hunting is contact sport.
You will have no more success job hunting simply putting up a LinkedIn profile and waiting than sending resumes to HR people. You must take proactive steps both in and with your profile if you want to be successful.
Job Hunting and Recruiters
I am not a huge fan of recruiters because their focus is company driven. In other words, they are looking for specific people to fill specific jobs.
However, a recruiter’s LinkedIn profile and account work just like yours, so if you want them to find you need to be connected.
When they do a search, the listings that show up are the people in their network – that is why they have big networks. If you are not in their network, they may not see you at all.
This means one of the first things you should do is get connected to as many recruiters as possible targeting the ones that work in your industry.
Recruiters are motivated to have large networks so getting connected with them should not be difficult. This is especially true if you have been reading my stuff for any period.
The next thing to understand is that recruiters are searching on keywords relevant to the jobs they are trying to fill. This means in your job hunting efforts you need to do a good job getting those keywords into your profile.
How word clouds can help your job hunting efforts
The first trick with keywords is to find out which are the most important. One great way to do this is “word clouds.’’
A word cloud examines documents, like a resume or a webpage, to see the number of occurrences and importance given to certain words. It then displays the words in a graphic representation where the most important words are the largest.
This can help you target certain positions and keywords more effectively. I suggest that you go to Google and search “word cloud.”
Here is one site that will come up in the listings:
You can use this site to examine the text in your resume, your LinkedIn profile, or specific job descriptions you are interested in. It will tell you what is important thus allowing you to make adjustments in your profile or resume for better results.
I would suggest scanning the web for positions you are interested in and seeing the most common and important keywords that come up.
Next go to your profile and employ those words. Since the LinkedIn search algorithm counts the number of occurrences of a word and decides by frequency which keywords are most important, it is quite easy to improve your results in those searches by using the word throughout your profile.
Just remember when doing this not to force the word or words in. You must keep up a natural sounding content for the reader or you may lose more than you gain. However, if you’re job hunting you want to leverage the best keyword searches on LinkedIn to get more visibility.
Be proactive in your job hunting
As I said earlier, job hunting is a contact sport so do not stop and posting a profile. You need to make an active effort to seek out the primary hiring managers and get in front of them.
The hiring manager has the following piles in his scenario.
- He has a job opening for a specific individual
- He knows some people internally that may be viable
- He has candidates he has interviewed
- He has candidates he has talked to
- He has resumes he has read
- He has resumes that have been collected
- He may have recruiters looking
If you are only sitting in piles five or six, the manager does not even know your name. If you are in pile 4, at least he has heard your name. But like everyone, the people he is most familiar with are those he has spoken to, piles 3 and 4.
It is to your advantage to get in any conversation with the decision maker. It makes you much more visible. Here is another useful article in reaching these key people: http://www.onlinebusinessnetworker.com/a-subtle-approach-for-connectin g-to-decision-makers
The advantage of using LinkedIn for job hunting is that it gives you ways to get in communication with people you do not know. Use it to find ways to communicate as directly as possible with the hiring manager.
Unfortunately, in such an article I simply cannot tell you how to do all of these things. However, if you are not trying to do them, if you are sitting and waiting, or sending resumes to the HR department, you are not going to be anywhere near as successful at securing interviews that bring jobs as if you get in and fight.
