At CareerGlider, we’ve been doing a series on how to use LinkedIn to raise your profile and help you to find great jobs. Our earlier posts (here and here) showed you how to improve your LinkedIn profile. This week, we talk about how to grow, deepen and make the best use of your network—how and when to connect with people, and how to use groups, recommendations, and endorsements.
Connection Requests
It’s important to connect with people you know early and often.
For one thing, recruiters will see the size of your network. While it doesn’t help you to have masses of connections for the sake of it, some recruiters will think less of candidates with few connections, especially in fields like recruiting or media where networking is an essential part of the job.
Also, people move around, and the coworker sitting next to you today may be a valuable contact in another company tomorrow. It’s much better to have that connection ahead of time than to be reaching out when you want something. So make a habit of checking for people you can connect with on LinkedIn, and if you come across interesting people, remember to add them to your network shortly after meeting them.
Some people advise you to personalize every invitation to connect. If you’re connecting with your work friends, that’s probably overkill, but generally it’s important to send a personalized note.
Partly, that’s because when reaching out to people you don’t know you (or don’t know you well) you need to be careful. When you ask someone to connect, that person has the option of telling LinkedIn “I don’t know this person.” If that happens too many times, you may be asked to provide an email address for future invitations, or be prevented from sending invitations at all.
Here are some tips for getting in touch with people you don’t know well:
If you do know the person, remind them how you met;
If you don’t, explain honestly and directly why you’re trying to connect with them, and mention something you have in common (LinkedIn groups can help with this),
Try to frame the request as what a matter of you can do for them;
Personalize: include something specific about the person, or their company, that distinguishes them and interests you;
Be warm and enthusiastic, and thank them.
Groups
There are several advantages of groups. You can message members of groups without purchasing LinkedIn’s InMail. You can learn what professionals in your field are reading, thinking, and talking about—which is especially valuable if you’re trying to break into a new industry. You can join up to 50 groups at any one time.
Joining 50 may be excessive, but make sure you join a number of groups. Joining groups with breadth, such as alumni groups from your college, will give you access to people you might not otherwise have any connection to. Also join groups which are devoted to specialities or fields you’re interested in, and have people you’re most likely to want to connect with.
Be aware that by default, what you write in a Group is visible to everyone in your network. So make sure what you write is well-polished, and don’t say anything—about job-hunting, say—you wouldn’t want your network to know. (You can change that default in your Privacy Settings by changing who can see your activity feed.)
Recommendations and Endorsements
A recommendation in LinkedIn is what it sounds like—a written recommendation from someone who knows you and your work. Endorsements differ from recommendations in two ways: they’re one-click, not written, and you’re endorsed for individual skills.
It’s pretty effortless to endorse someone for a skill on LinkedIn, and for that very reason it seems that recruiters don’t place great weight on them, unless they’re comparing you to a candidate who has dozens when you have none. A quality recommendation, by contrast, is highly valuable, and you should solicit them, ideally from your direct manager when you’re about to leave a role.
Next week, we’ll put it all together by looking at the features of LinkedIn Jobs. In the meantime, best of luck growing and deepening your network!
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1w5Xdsv via small business marketing company
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1CYqhS7
No comments:
Post a Comment