Finding a Job on the Social Web...

Over 200 million users have flocked to LinkedIn, most are professionals trying to network with colleagues some are job hunters looking for their next career.  LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social media sites for job hunters, with the majority of employers claiming that their most recent hires come straight from the Social Web.

                With more and more Job recruiters and hiring managers flocking to these sites to find their next talent they are routinely checking the site before making their decisions. This makes making sure your profile is current and is a trustworthy as your paper resume. Today we will discuss some tips to landing your next job and making sure that your LinkedIn profile is what your employers are looking for.

                Within LinkedIn you have the ability to customize your URL to make it easier to remember. Along with making the URL easier to remember this will also help drive traffic to your site via Google search results. Many employers will simply input your name into Google to see what results show up. Chance are the top sites will be your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Being sure that your URL has your name in it will help drive this traffic to your profile.

Although the most common would be your name, let’s say your name is a very common name such as “John Smith”. I would imagine there are thousand if not millions of John Smith’s in the world. Making sure your URL has either your middle initial or state you live in, to help differentiate you from all the other John Smith’s in the world will help people find you.

Next step is to make sure your intro paragraph is crisp clean and catchy. This is the first thing your employer sees when visiting your site and this will be similar to that of your Overview found on your resume. Keep this short and to the point but being as descriptive as possible will help keep the interest of the visitor. Similar to the practices used in SEO, utilizing Keywords in our Intro summary will help boost search rankings to our LinkedIn page.

Your experience section is your chance to build your online resume. Often time’s people fail in this section and fail to include past employers, most people only use their current role. Using this section to list relevant jobs that help sell you and not including jobs not of interest is key. Potential employers do not want to see that you were a lifeguard at 14, when your profession is Graphic Design. That job though is important, is not relevant to your future career.

Along with job experience it is important to list skills you may have. Like your resume using catchy keywords will help grab the reader. Unlike a paper copy of your resume, using keywords will also boost your search rankings as well. Skills you may have are important to an employer and can also be the selling point as to your next job.

We have listed a few tips to making sure your profile is better and more useful to potential employers. Although this list does not cover all, it only scratches the surface of LinkedIn. As the job market and job hunting become more and more digital the importance of making sure not only is your LinkedIn profile current but also making sure your Facebook, Twitter and others are free and clear of damaging material.   

Until Next Time…





http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/04/25/7-ways-to-make-linkedin-help-you-find-a-job/