Month: May 2015

by: Gillian Shaw

In my previous post, I wrote about the increasing trend in using LinkedIn as a job search tool. Here are top 10 points on how to make your LinkedIn profile work for you when you’re looking for work:

Unemployed? Underemployed? Or just looking for a change? Here’s a top 10 list on how to make  in your job search tool box.

1. If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, start by signing up. If you have one but it’s neglected and has little more than your name and job title, under profile, click on edit profile to get started.

Here are some Linkedin groups that make the hunt a little easier.

 Created: April 2, 2009

Type: Networking Group

Members: 34,851

Helping America get back to work since 2008, JobsDirectUSA is a national workforce organization which connects career professionals across the United States with hiring companies. Different than traditional job boards, or employment agencies, JobsDirectUSA leverages social media resources with in-person community events to facilitate a more effective recruitment process.

3. Career Rocketeer – Job Search & Career Network

Created: October 6, 2008

Type: Networking Group

Members: 8,663

Career Rocketeer was founded in 2009 as the official portal for all go-getters, self-starters and challengers of the status quo who recognize the need to refuel on their flight to job search success and career fulfillment.

8. JibberJobber – Career Management

Created: February 26, 2008

Type: Professional Group

Members: 4,416

Make sure you check out JibberJobber.com to organize your job search and use as a personal relationship management tool even after you land your dream job.

11. Indeed Discussion Group

Created: October 30, 2007

Type: Networking Group

Members: 44,472

As the world’s #1 job site, with over 180 million unique visitors every month from over 50 different countries, Indeed has become the catalyst for putting the world to work. Indeed is intensely passionate about delivering the right fit for every hire. Indeed helps companies of all sizes hire the best talent and offers the best opportunity for job seekers to get hired.

See all 18 groups and the complete article

By Lily Zhang

LinkedIn is striving to replace the paper resume, and there are plenty of people out there hoping that it succeeds. Of course, that’s easier said than done. To get there, LinkedIn has been quickly and quietly tweaking its product and adding new features.

This isn’t just good news for recruiters, it’s good for you, too—even if you’re not currently looking for a new job. After all, LinkedIn is the easiest way to casually get on someone’s radar without personally submitting a resume.

So, check out these four updates to make sure you’re ahead of the competition when you are ready to make a move.

1. You Can Get More Feedback Than Ever on the New Homepage

The new LinkedIn homepage is hard to miss. It continues to be a great place to find curated content related to your professional interests, but now there is a new little dashboard at the top that gives you relevant information, such as how many views your profile has gotten recently and how many times your latest update has been shared.

The most helpful new feature, though, can be found at the top right of the page. You’ll notice a little box where you can cycle through ways to interact with your connections. You can comment on a new profile picture, congratulate a colleague on his or her promotion, or even wish someone a happy birthday. Given that the power of LinkedIn comes from the people it connects you with, creating an easy way to strengthen these relationships makes it an even more powerful tool.

2. You Can Now Learn More About Who’s Reading Your Content

There are plenty of benefits to publishing on LinkedIn (as I explain here), but now there are even more! The social network has added new analytics for everything you post. You can see the top industries your readers work in, the most common job titles they hold, where they’re reading from, and how they found your article.

All this helps you create more effective content for your readers to engage with. Plus, it’s always satisfying to see who is listening when you shout into the void.

See all 4 things and the complete TheMuse article

Sankar Venkatraman

LinkedIn Recruiter isn’t just a tool to find and engage talent. Recent enhancements, such as “custom fields,” allow users to build richer prospect profiles, transforming the product into a central platform for candidate information – viewable and searchable by members on your team.

For example, while anyone can see a prospect’s education and work history on their LinkedIn profile, a recruiter would like to know the prospect’s current and desired salary range or their willingness to relocate – information that is typically only available once you have had a conversation with the prospect.

Custom fields allows you to capture this information and save it in a place that is private, yet easily searchable and accessible to only members on your team.

Setting up custom fields

The first step to creating custom fields in LinkedIn Recruiter is answering this question – “What other information about a prospect is important to me, aside from what’s already on their LinkedIn profile?”

Examples of this could include a prospect’s work authorization status, nationality, security clearances, desired salary range or their willingness to relocate. Any or all of this custom information can be captured and made searchable within Recruiter for only the members on your team.

Once you figure out what you want to track and search, your LinkedIn Recruiter administrator can build custom fields for this information by following these simple steps:

Upon accessing the administrative settings page,

click the “custom fields” button under the “Integrations” toolbar.

From here, you can either create new custom fields or edit your existing custom fields. While we have some often-used custom fields suggested for you, you are free to create any others that you’d like.

Your custom fields, as the name indicates, are customizable and can have any field name. The values can be any alphanumeric combination, including text (e.g. Willing to relocate? – Yes or No), numbers (Desired Salary – $90,000 – $110,000), list of values (Work Authorization – Citizen, Work Permit needed, H4 visa, Student visa), a date range (December 13 2015) and so on.

Note: This custom fields feature is editable only by Recruiter users with administrator rights.

Applying custom fields – see how to apply and read the complete article

Stephanie Taylor Christensen

It’s hard to believe that when LinkedIn first launched in 2003, it attracted as few as 20 new signups some days.

But now, logging on to the social professional network can feel a bit like swimming in a sea of names, faces, titles and status updates.

George from accounting is celebrating his three-year anniversary! Colin from college is on his fifth job!

It’s become such a professional staple that not using the platform to its fullest extent could mean missing out on scoring a dream job, tapping into that elusive contact’s network and even discovering your next best hire.

So to make sure you aren’t squandering your networking opportunities, we tapped LinkedIn experts (including one directly from the source!), along with some super users to share their best LinkedIn tips.

If you’re gunning for a new gig, this may be your year: In LinkedIn’s 2015 U.S. Recruiting Trends report, half of talent managers said that finding quality candidates was their No. 1 priority—and social professional networks have become their top source for ferreting out first-class hires.

Tips Tailored for Job Seekers

Here’s how to prime your profile to make it stand out from the crowd:

1. Let them see you. Selfie lovers, rejoice. You now have a business case for perfecting the angle on those solo shots.

“LinkedIn profiles with a picture are 14 times more likely to be viewed,” says Catherine Fisher, LinkedIn’s career expert.

Not only does simply having a photo get you views, but refreshing your profile photo will help boost them. According to LinkedIn data, Millennials change their profile photos more frequently than any other age group—which means they’re also the most viewed demo on the site.

3 Tips Tailored for People Looking to Boost Their Brand

3. Maximize character counts. Your LinkedIn profile is chock full of mini sections that can double as areas where you can claim professional bragging rights.

Take your Summary description, which offers up to 2,000 characters. So trade that boring, one-sentence description for one that touts your big professional accomplishments—with plenty of keywords baked in.

The Description box beneath each job within the Experience section also holds up to 2,000 characters—prime space for sharing a case study, customer testimonial or other big wins you scored at each job, says Viveka von Rosen, author of “LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day.”

And remember that it’s not just text you can add—LinkedIn lets you upload documents, photos, links, videos and presentations to your Summary and Experience sections.

Did you help produce a commercial at your first job? Pen a big whitepaper at your last one? Have a personal website you’re proud of? Attach them so would-be clients can see real examples of the impact you made.

Tips Tailored for Hiring Managers in Search of Superstars …

3. Check recent activity. Once you’re ready for a profile deep dive, don’t just stay on a candidate’s profile page. Get a sense for what they’re interested in, what trends they watch, and which well-known business people they follow by checking out their activity feed, suggests von Rosen.

You get to this page by clicking on the drop down menu next to the “Send a message /InMail” button, then choosing the “View recent activity” option.

If the candidate hasn’t set their settings to private, you should be able to see what types of content they’ve shared and liked. Looking for an innovator? Perhaps the one who hangs on Richard Branson’s every word is the right fit for the job.

See all 9 tips and the complete article