How To Create a Brilliant Personal Brand on LinkedIn

Whether we are walking through town late at night, catching a train or queuing at the supermarket checkout, we make assumptions about people we don’t know: sometimes positive, sometimes negative.

When delivering my employability seminars, I often show a number of images of me. I ask the audience to shout out words they would associate with each picture. I never have to wait longer than a few seconds before people start throwing all kinds of descriptions at me.

A few years ago I presented a TV show that had a business element to it. The professional photos I had taken were black and white; I wore a power suit and was asked to look directly into the camera (without even a hint of a smile).


Well, they were professional shots, so I thought little about it and just used them on my LinkedIn profile.

A few months later, a fantastic company was looking to recruit. The hiring manager asked around for recommendations and a lovely lady, who had worked with me previously, very kindly recommend he contact me.

He searched me on LinkedIn, saw my image and felt like I was the last person he wanted to work with. He thought I looked hard nosed, arrogant and a little scary. It was only when our mutual contact persuaded him that I was none of those things that he eventually called.

We have since become good friends and luckily he told me how my LinkedIn image made him feel. After we had a giggle, I obviously changed it straight away.

I was extremely grateful for his feedback, but saddened to think about how many other people may not have contacted me because they felt the way he did.

I don’t believe those words define my personal brand; it was just a poorly chosen photograph. I had failed to recognise the way the photographer wanted to portray me, was not actually who I was. You may not like me, but you definitely won’t think I’m ‘scary’.

The reason I want to expose my mistake so publicly is to encourage people to think about their own LinkedIn image. I would advise you do the following:

1. Choose three words you want your personal brand to be. Describe the way you want employers and potential business partners to perceive you.
2. Choose a few images that you feel are suitable.
3. Choose three people who you believe will tell you the truth and place the images in front of them. Ask them to pretend they don’t know you and to list words that describe the person in the picture.

More Tips and Complete Undercoverrecruiter Article

5 LinkedIn Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business

By Stephanie Sammons

Are you looking for ways to expand your business with LinkedIn?

With a recent homepage redesign, profile and company page redesigns, new mobile apps and the introduction of notifications and endorsements, engagement on LinkedIn is growing.

Understanding a few simple strategies that can help you become a smarter and more effective marketer can really boost your results over time.

Here are 5 high-impact strategies to boost your marketing results on LinkedIn.

#1: Review and Reboot Your LinkedIn Profile… Frequently

Most recently, LinkedIn made some major changes both to personal profiles and company pages. For a comprehensive review of the most recent updates, visit this post to learn more about how to optimize your LinkedIn profile and company page.

In addition to making sure that you adjust to the changes in your profile layout and features, it’s a good idea to “reboot” your profile from time to time. I tend to reboot my profile every couple of months or so to keep it fresh, relevant and interesting.

Each time you update your profile, the update is shared to your network as long as you have this feature enabled in your settings.

Adjust your profile settings to show profile updates in your activity feed.

Is your LinkedIn profile picture outdated?

It may be time for a new one, especially if you’ve changed your look. Do you have a new hairstyle or color? Have you updated your wardrobe?

If it’s been a couple of years, your picture is most likely outdated. If you want to be recognizable in person at meetings, conferences and events with your LinkedIn connections, make sure your picture really does look like you today!

Keep your LinkedIn profile image current and update your headline with relevant keywords.

Refresh your LinkedIn headline

I’ve found that when I update my primary profile headline every few months, my profile views jump. Also, when you add new keyword phrases to your profile summary and new relevant skills it may help you show up in more LinkedIn searches due to the search value of these key areas on your profile.

You can review your LinkedIn profile stats provided in the sidebar of your homepage to keep an eye on the number of times your profile has been viewed, as well as how many times you appear in LinkedIn searches.

Remember you won’t be able to determine who’s viewed your profile without apremium account, but you can still access the number of views you are receiving.

Review your profile stats frequently from the sidebar of your homepage.

The more people who view your profile, the more likely a percentage of those visitors will click through to your website or blog and learn more about you!

Keeping your profiles fresh and active will not only enable you to grow your visibilitywithin the network, it will also allow you to potentially drive relevant traffic to your blog or website.

Remember, your profiles are the foundation of your presence on LinkedIn. Don’t let them get outdated and rusty!

#2: Build a Deep and Wide Network

One of the best ways to get found on LinkedIn is to build up your network of connections. Certainly you will want to focus on having a quality network, but don’t be afraid to expand your connections.

LinkedIn does value both the depth and breadth of a member’s network, especially when showcasing search results. Every new connection you make is an opportunity toenhance your visibility.

Typically my rule of thumb is to review each invitation request received and make sure that the person has a completed LinkedIn profile with a picture.

Also make sure there is some relevant reason why it would make sense to connect.

• Do they live in my community?
• Do we belong to the same group(s)?
• Are they connected to someone I know?
• Do we or have we worked in the same industry?
• Do we share common hobbies, interests or causes?
• Have they read or spread my content?
• Have they included a personal note with the invitation?

I’m much more likely to connect with people if they provide a good reason why they would like to connect, rather than sending a generic invitation.

By the way, you should use these same suggestions when identifying and reaching out to others to connect with you! Personalize your invitations when possible and provide a compelling reason why someone should connect with you.

What you will find is that as you grow the quality and quantity of your LinkedIn connections, there will eventually be a tipping point. This means you won’t have to proactively seek out new connections all the time, because they will come to you. Doors will open and more opportunities will come your way if you are more open to growing your connections!

It’s also perfectly fine to remove a connection, especially if over time you find that there really isn’t a good reason to be connected with a particular individual. If you do so, the person whom you remove will not receive any kind of notification of this action.

Another simple and effective way to build your connections is to invite other group members to connect with you. Hopefully by now, you’ve joined some groups that are relevant to your industry, community, alma mater or even your targeted prospects. If so, LinkedIn allows you to send invitations to connect with other members within the group.

Connect with mutual LinkedIn group members who share common interests.

Be cautious not to send too many invitations to people whom you don’t know and may have never seen you before. For example, it makes sense to be consistently active within a group before reaching out to other members to connect.

To grow your network deep and wide, always be connecting! Connect with clients, prospects, partners, vendors, colleagues, community leaders, fellow alumni and anyone you meet face to face at networking events or conferences. Let those people you meet know that you’re going to be reaching out on LinkedIn to connect with them.

#3: Be Consistently Visible, Valuable and Timely

If you have a great LinkedIn profile and lots of connections, it’s not going to do you much good unless you become more active on the network. You can’t position yourself as a go-to resource unless you are visible, valuable and timely with your participation on LinkedIn.

Additionally, your most recent activity on LinkedIn now shows up toward the top of your profile. If you haven’t been sharing, commenting or interacting, nothing will show. Take advantage of this real estate and post a status update to your profile once or twice daily.

Your most recent status updates now show near the top of your LinkedIn profile.

The great news is, you don’t have to spend a significant amount of time to truly be visible and valuable on LinkedIn. By focusing on critical activities, you will be able tostay top of mind with your connections with ease.

What are critical activities on LinkedIn?

There are activities that have the potential to grab the most attention from your connections. These include media-rich status updates (links that showcase images) with compelling headlines; thought-provoking questions; comments on the status updates of your connections; and overall the sharing of reputable, relevant and interesting content with your network. You should engage in these critical activities on LinkedIn 2-3 times daily.

Need some ideas for what to share with your network? Tap into LinkedIn Today for popular and trending news topics, as well as the LinkedIn INfluencer program toshare and comment on insights from well-known thought leaders!

Although it’s impossible to keep up with every single update from your network of connections (and beyond), LinkedIn now provides some nifty tools to make sure your interactions are more timely and relevant.

Check out your Notifications at the top of your profile. This is a new feature that LinkedIn recently added to make it easy for you to review the most recent interactions from your network.

Now you can easily scroll through these notifications and respond accordingly, in a timely fashion. This feature makes LinkedIn more of a true online networking destination.

Notifications can be found at the top of your LinkedIn profile.

Another timely networking option for being visible and valuable is to filter the updates on your LinkedIn homepage by Shares. There you will find what’s trending in your network and you can jump right in to contribute to the conversation!

Filter your homepage updates by Shares and participate in trending conversations.

LinkedIn status updates are by far the most powerful opportunity to be visible and valuable with your network. Many of the inbound inquiries I receive in my business are a direct result of being consistently visible, valuable and timely through my LinkedIn status updates.

Tips 4,5, and Complete Social Media Examiner Article

Insider Tips: How to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job

LinkedIn has become an integral recruiting tool for employers of all sizes, and job seekers need to know how to best use the tool to aid their hunt.

While having a profile is a step in the right direction, it’s not enough to make a candidate stand out or look attractive to employers.

Nicole Williams, Linkedin's career expert-connection director and author of Girl on Top, gives the inside scoop on the best ways to use the social network to get a job.

According to Williams, LinkedIn has executives from all 2012 Fortune 500 companies as members. “There are 85 of the Fortune 100 companies using LinkedIn to find potential hires.”

Long gone are the days when companies posted a job on LinkedIn and then sifted through submitted resumes. Hiring managers are being proactive and looking through LinkedIn profiles to fill open positions. Because of this shift, Williams recommends that every part of a job seeker’s profile is complete.

“You don’t want to undermine yourself by not being identified as a potential hire so you have to make sure your profile is filled out completely and you’re adding skills,” she says.

Users that only list their last or current job in the experience field could look inexperienced, despite being in the workforce for many years.  

Skills are also important to keep up to date and detailed. Not only do employers want a marketing executive, they want one with social media experience. The more information candidates display on their profile the higher their chance of getting noticed by recruiters, according to Williams.

“If you have more than one position listed on your profile it’s 12X more likely to be viewed. People are looking for experience.”

In addition to a complete profile, Williams recommends users be active on the site to get noticed by recruiters: share professional content such as an interesting article about something in the industry or information about an upcoming event. “By sharing industry-based information, you demonstrate industry knowledge and it keeps you top of mind.”

According to Williams, professionals who share articles or content with their LinkedIn network at least once a week are nearly 10X more likely to be contacted by a recruiter for new opportunities than people who don’t make offerings.

More Tips and Complete Fox Business Article

Want a Job? Here Are Six LinkedIn Tips To Finding One

Scott Gillum


LinkedIn’s stock opened at $45 a year and a half ago. It now sells for $120 per share. Unlike Facebook, one of the primary reasons it has done so well is that LinkedIn found its “killer app” early on and built a business model around it.

For recruiters, LinkedIn is the largest (now 200 million members) and most current database of business professionals in the world. For job seekers, it’s a portal into new opportunities, connections and references.

To learn more about its capabilities as a recruiting tool, we posted an open account supervisor position for our D.C. office on LinkedIn. The resumes have been coming directly to me for the past month. The applicants are unfiltered by a recruiter or the HR department, so that means I felt the direct shot of the power of LinkedIn. As the hiring manager, I learned a good deal about using the online tool and how job candidates can better marketing themselves for posted positions.

Because of the volume generated by LinkedIn, hiring managers have the luxury of trying to find exactly what they are looking for without having to dig too hard to find it. We quickly scan the email summary and the attachments. As a result, candidates need to pay close attention to these six areas:

1. Actually read the job description – Hiring managers and HR personnel spend a great deal of time defining the requirements of open positions. Take the time to adapt your resume to highlight those areas that best match what companies are looking for. Don’t make them connect the dots, because they won’t. They’ve already moved on to the next candidate.
2. Customize your cover letter – Tell us why you’re the right candidate for the position in the cover letter, especially if you can’t link it on your resume. Make a compelling case as to why we should spend additional time looking at your resume and background. A generic cover letter is a waste of time and a sure way to take yourself out of the race.
3. Know that we will check you out – If we find someone we like, we’ll spend time checking that person’s LinkedIn profile (beyond the summary below that appears in our inbox), the current and former employers, as well as the candidate’s social profile. For example, a resume that caught my attention was eliminated from the process because I couldn’t find the candidate’s last two employers on the Web. The learning? Companies go out of business or are acquired all the time, so make sure your resume reflects or notes that change. Know that we will “Google” you.
4. Tips 4-6 and Complete Forbes Article

The 13 Sneakiest LinkedIn SEO Tips to Boost Your Profile’s Views

By Richard Foshee


LinkedIn is really even more of a popularity contest than Twitter, but I’m the only one with enough sense to realize it. On a very basic level, if you don’t have any LinkedIn connections, you’re not going to be found. The vast majority of searches on the burgeoning social media network for professionals are done through a filter of personal connections. Optimizing your network and the SEO aspects of your profile can take your profile views go from 0 to 1,000.

1. Use Anchor Text in Links

Every LinkedIn profile can list as many as 3 links. The default options include “Company Website” and “Blog,” and these just aren’t very SEO-friendly. You can customize the anchor text in your URLs by selecting the “Other” option. Use a keyword-rich title, such as “My Inbound Marketing Blog.”

2. Finish Your Profile

This one is almost a no-brainer, but far too many of us haven’t taken the time to fully complete our LinkedIn profiles. Ask for recommendations (and give recommendations back), fill out every single section, and use LinkedIn’s help to guide your profile to completion.

3. Keyword-Optimize Your Job Titles

We’re definitely not recommending you describe your last position as “Management,” when it was more administrative. However, fudging your job titles slightly to include a few keywords is just smart. Instead of “Blog Manager,” bait search engines by clarifying “Inbound Marketing Strategy Blog Manager.”

4. Maximize Your Group Membership

Joining and participating in relevant groups won’t just expand your network, but it can improve your profile’s SEO. Since the group names appear on your profile, search engines have no choice but to crawl the titles and learn more about who you are and what you do. Not only will industry-relevant groups improve the keywords on your profile, but local groups like “Nashville Marketing Professionals” can help with geo-targeted SEO.

5. Aggressively Expand Your Network

If your LinkedIn network is one-fourth the size of your Facebook connections, it might be time to search your email contacts. Plus, it’s the perfect platform for connecting with colleagues but still maintaining a semblance of work-life separation on social media. Entrepreneur Rick Stomphorst writes: “[LinkedIn search results] elevate results for connections within a network (i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd level connections, groups). Therefore…you need to be connected to as many people as possible.”

6. Optimize Your Job Descriptions

Lindsay Hunt recommends that “your job descriptions on LinkedIn should be creative, truthful, descriptive and succinct.” Instead of writing out full paragraphs, use a wide variety of relevant keywords in bullet-pointed lists. Formatting your descriptions will also increase your profile’s scannability.

7. Claim Your Vanity URL

The fundamental SEO benefits of claiming your vanity URL may be minimal, but it’s just good business. Connecting your LinkedIn profile to your name will allow you to be found easier by real-life connections. It will also let you add your custom URL to business cards.

Tips 8-13 and Complete CIO Article

How to Use LinkedIn's Alumni Tool to Network, Job Hunt

By Kristin Burnham


LinkedIn debuted LinkedIn Classmates in October 2011, designing the tool to give you insights into your college or university's alumni and help you connect with them. It surfaced high-level information about fellow alumni, such as the most popular companies they work for, the fields they're working, where they live and more.

This week, LinkedIn launched an update of the tool, releasing a handful of new features renamed it LinkedIn Alumni.

"Gathered from the profiles of more than 200 million members, LinkedIn's Alumni tool helps you explore alumni career paths from more than 22,000 colleges and universities worldwide—and build relationships that can help you along the way," says Christina Allen, director of product management at LinkedIn.


Here's a look at the new LinkedIn Alumni tool, plus how you can use it to connect on a more personal level and grow your network.

LinkedIn's New Alumni Tool

If you're looking for a job at a specific company, in a particular industry or in a certain location—or are just curious about where your college friends are now working—the LinkedIn Alumni tool makes finding those people easy.

Navigate to www.linkedin.com/alumni to start. Your college or university will automatically be selected.

At the top of your Alumni page you'll see three subheads: "Where they live," "Where they work," and "What they do." Click the arrow to the right to view additional categories, which include "Where they studied," "What they're skilled at" and "How you are connected."

All the graphs are interactive: Click any of the blue bars to drill down and refine your search. Clicking "Greater New York City Area," for example, will display the names of alumni living in New York City below the graph, and update the top lists detailing the companies they they work for and the fields in which that specific group of alumni work.

[LinkedIn Revamps Profile Pages: Tour the New Features]

You can also explore the alumni of other colleges and universities by searching for one under "Change school" in the top-right. You can also narrow searches by refining the attendance dates, found at the top.

How to use LinkedIn Alumni to find a graduate program: If you're thinking about pursuing an MBA or other graduate degree, LinkedIn's Alumni tool can help you find a good fit.
Use the Alumni tool to see which schools place graduates in careers most aligned with your professional goals, Allen suggests. "Search for a school, select the field of study most relevant to you, and you'll get a top 25 list of companies that have hired graduates from the selected school," she says.

More Tips and Complete CIO Article

7 Things You Need to Know About LinkedIn Search

by Stacy Donovan Zapar


You’ve built your LinkedIn profile, updated your work experience and education and you’re all set to launch your job search, land new clients and/or grow your business. But how do you stand out from LinkedIn’s 200 Million other members? How do you make sure that people and opportunities can actually find you? It all comes down to knowing more about the search algorithm and optimizing your LinkedIn profile accordingly. Here are seven things you need to know about LinkedIn Search…

1. LinkedIn’s Search Algorithm likes connections and profile completeness.

When people search LinkedIn, the results are, by default, sorted by “Relevance” – which is code for “LinkedIn’s Proprietary Search Algorithm.” (Hat tip to Andy Headworth of Sirona Consulting for summing it up so beautifully.) “Relevance” sorts by the following criteria:

• 1st level connections with profiles that are 100% complete (or close to it) and have the most in-common connections / shared groups, ranked in descending order

• 1st level connections with the fewest in-common connections / shared groups, ranked in descending order by profile completeness

• 2nd level connections ranked in descending order by profile completeness

• 3nd level connections ranked in descending order by profile completeness

• Shared group members (outside of your network), ranked in descending order by profile completeness

• Everyone else (those outside your network), ranked in descending order by profile completeness

So what does this mean to you and me? Because this is the default for search results and the vast majority of people aren’t even aware that they can change it, it’s extra important to a) be a 1st degree connection to as many people as possible (i.e., grow that network!) and b) have a profile that’s 100% complete. This means including a profile picture, a professional headline, your last two jobs, etc. LinkedIn will walk you through the process and let you know once your profile is 100% complete. Anything less than 100% completeness is not only hurting you from a search ranking perspective, it’s also less-than-impressive to anyone who happens to read your profile.

2. Keywords in certain sections rank higher.

A LinkedIn profile has many different sections, but LinkedIn’s Search Algorithm likes some of them better than others. Keywords in your Name, Headline, Company Name, Job Title and Skills rank higher in the search results. This is why it’s so important to have a 100% complete profile. If these key fields are blank or filled with generic terms, then you fall to the bottom of the search rankings. Think about which search terms are most important and relevant for your business / career and then search LinkedIn for those keywords. If you don’t show up on the first page of results, update these key sections (Headline, Job Title, Skills) to include those relevant terms and then search again. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you shoot up the ranks! (Side note: LinkedIn allows you to choose up to 50 Skills. If you’ve selected anything less than 50, you’re putting yourself at a distinct disadvantage. Why give your competition a free head-start in the race?)

3. Using all fields/options available to you will give you an extra advantage.

Like Skills, you can join up to 50 groups (not counting subgroups!), so take advantage of every opportunity offered to you and use all 50 spots. You have 120 characters available to you for your headline. Use as many of them as possible to create a descriptive, interesting and keyword-rich headline that attracts lots of targets to view your profile. You have 2000 characters for your summary… use them! There are 1000 characters available for your interests… the list goes on. Make full use of the fields and sections available to you to paint a detailed picture, reinforce your brand and make your profile really work for you!

4. Keywords in the “Advice for Contacting So-And-So” section don’t rank at all.

Sorry, but placing keywords in your contact section does nothing since this section is excluded from LinkedIn Search. Use this space to tell people the best way to reach you (hint: definitely include a phone number and/or email address if you REALLY want to be contacted… why hide? You don’t leave it off of your resume or business card, do you?) and place those keywords elsewhere in your profile.

Things 5-7 and Complete Blogging4Jobs article

Article by Stacy Donovan Zapar

Stacy Donovan Zapar is a 15-year recruiting veteran and CEO of Tenfold Social, providing social media training for recruiters, jobseekers and business professionals. She is the Most Connected Woman on LinkedIn, where she has 35,000+ first-level connections making her the #8 most connected person in the world. She served as Technical Editor for Wiley’s LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day and will be speaking at TalentNet Live at SXSW. Feel free to connect with Stacy on LinkedIn and follow her on Twitter.
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LinkedIn Groups: Social Recruiting Success Principles

By Tony Restell

In this social recruiting series, we’ve focused on how you can make social media channels a more integral part of your recruiting strategy. In our last post we looked at general principles for undertaking social recruiting on LinkedIn. Here we’ll be focusing in on how you can leverage LinkedIn Groups specifically as a key component of your social recruiting efforts.

LinkedIn Groups allow like minded members to congregate in one place and share content of mutual interest, answer one another’s questions and network – publicly or privately. As such, they have the potential to be fertile ground for recruiters wanting to connect with future hires. But many are also plagued by spammers and so devoid of interaction. Your challenges will therefore be to:

• Decide whether to form your own group(s) or purely become a member of existing groups
• Work out which groups are worth joining
• Devise a plan for how you will engage in those groups
• Ensure your personal profile drives the desired behaviour when members click through to check it

Should you create your own LinkedIn Group?

Creating your own group brings significant benefits. For a recruiter, principal amongst these are:
- The ability to put forward a timely, consistent and effective message to your group network. The trouble I have found with a lot of LinkedIn Groups is that they have fundamentally been created to serve the aims of the group owners, rather than acting in the best interests of the broader group membership. Examples of this would include:

- Group moderators being able to add discussions and comment on questions instantly; whilst members are subjected to lengthy delays in their new discussions or comments being approved. You can lose a lot of time responding in groups, only to find your responses appear only some time later – or never at all if you are pointing members to an external resource that answers their question

- Group moderators ensuring that their own discussions – rather than those initiated by other members – remain the most active within the group (through selective moderation of comments), so that the coveted place in “Still Active Discussions” within the group digest email alert that goes out to members reinforces the credentials of the group owners rather than someone from another company.

- The credibility that is bestowed on your brand (personal or corporate) from running a growing and well moderated group. Certainly for smaller businesses – or those trying to strengthen their position in a niche – this can be a very worthwhile reason for proceeding. Seasoned LinkedIn Group members will know that many groups are poorly run and spam-ridden, so a well run group really stands out and reflects well on the group owner. A spin off benefit is that there’s also a flow of invitation requests that come over time as you interact with group members, so your regular LinkedIn network is also strengthened.

- The ability to engage your LinkedIn Group members by email. Whilst group owners cannot control (other than through selective moderation) what appears in the weekly / daily group digest emails, there are two valuable email touch points:

- Firstly, at the point of joining, new members are sent a welcome message from the group owner, customisable so that you can provide links to your website, brochure, social media profiles, etc. This is automatically emailed out and appears to have a very high deliverability rate.

- Secondly, once each week the group moderator is allowed to send an email broadcast to group members – providing the opportunity to seek group feedback on a particular issue, flag a forthcoming event, point members to other online resources, etc. This helps to maintain engagement and provides a form of email subscription that many recruiters might otherwise not have at their disposal.

- The search engine benefits that can come from group discussions. Depending on the settings you choose for your group (covered below), it may be open to being indexed by search engines such as Google. Our own experiences have been that LinkedIn group content ranks highly on Google and so provides a means of garnering search engine traffic that is of itself quite valuable.

These upsides can be particularly attractive for recruiters who do not have the ability to quickly do these things on their own corporate website, or insufficient traffic there to make such initiatives worthwhile. However, there are some significant downsides to this approach which mean it’ll not be for everyone. For an in depth assessment of these and other pointers on how to run your own group see the following LinkedIn Groups article.

Which groups should you join?

Let’s start with the assumption that we want to engage with – and influence – professionals who are potentially good hires for our business, or who are likely to be connected to others who may well be.
This leads us to the conclusion that our primary goals of LinkedIn group membership are to i) reach out to an audience of relevant or relevantly connected professionals with content that adds value and ii) directly approach candidates to initiate career discussions.

The first of these activities will see us share content and answer questions that enrich the group. They will see us build credibility with the group members and result in our content and answers being shared outside of the group to a wider network of prospective hires (through LinkedIn updates). The key success factor here (asides from us being able to add value) is to choose groups that have a relevant and engaged membership.

You’ll find the statistics to determine whether a group’s demographics are relevant to you using the Group Statistics link within each group (under the More… menu drop-down). But you’ll also find here a chart showing discussion and comment trends within the group. You want to find groups where there is a healthy amount of commenting taking place, meaning group members are reading and responding to content and questions submitted by group members (and therefore facilitating this reaching their wider network). The polar opposite is true of many many groups, where the group moderators have allowed spammers to take over the group and so automated mass-posting of dubious content is the only activity to be seen.

The second reason for being a group member is that it allows you to take advantage of a little-publicised upside of group membership – the ability to contact almost all group members privately and for free. Through judicious choice of the groups one becomes a member of, this can potentially open up vast portions of one’s target candidate audience to direct approaches – without the need for a paid subscription. There are tips and tricks to doing this effectively – and for these I direct you to the following LinkedIn tips article.

For most recruiters, the right balance of group membership is probably going to involve a number of job seeking groups (eg. Ask Me About Careers At…) and a variety of niche professional groups where you can raise your profile – and engage – with highly relevant professionals, often before the point at which they’re considering a career move.

Devising a plan to engage in groups

Once you have joined some relevant and engaged groups, the key is then to add value to those groups by sharing valuable content; commenting in a constructive manner on content shared by others; and answering questions to help other group members.
The latter two require finding time to monitor group activity and respond in person. The former though can be largely automated as part of your daily routine using the buffer tool. Further insights on doing this effectively can be found on the Bullhorn Blog.

More Advice and Complete Article

Let’s Play Six-Degrees-of-Getting-a-Job

By G Peters


Did you ever play that game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? You know the one based loosely on the notion of six degrees of separation that says any two people in the world are, on average, about six acquaintances apart.

Like I know a woman from the gym who was walking in New York and talking rudely about old Kevin, when she stopped at a stoplight and who turned around? Kyra Sedgwick — Mrs. Kevin Bacon. Bam, three-degrees of Kevin Bacon separation.

The Kevin Bacon part came about (thanks to our friends at Wikipedia) after a 1994 interview in which he told Premiere magazine that he had worked with everyone in Hollywood. First there was a news thread, and then some college students made it into a game (I’m sure there was drinking involved).

The reason I bring up the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is because of a post on the New York Times website titled, “In Hiring, a Friend in Need Is a Prospect, Indeed.” Those NYT headline writers think they’re so witty.

The story suggests that in this ultra-tough hiring climate, we’re back to the great American “know-who” network wherein it’s who you know that gets you the interview.

The article suggests that hiring managers are skipping job-search sites like Monster.com in favor of their own network of employee suggestions. The NYT said that at Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, “Employee recommendations now account for 45 percent of nonentry-level placements at the firm, up from 28 percent in 2010. The company’s goal is 50 percent.”

This should come as little if any shock to anyone looking for a job. In my search I’ve tried to game the system by putting keywords in my cover letter and resume in the hope that the resume-reviewing software would somehow spit out my application from the reams of out-of-work applicants.

And I’ve taken the straight-forward approach and written from the heart, with about the same success. Slim and none. This is where the know-who network comes in.

In “Mending Wall,“ American poet Robert Frost tells us “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Borrowing from Frost, I’d say good social media makes good neighbors — or good friends, or acquaintances, or simply allows you to reconnect with that guy you sat behind in third-hour biology back in the day. More specifically, LinkedIn makes for good neighbors.

LinkedIn not chain link: My best luck in landing interviews is to play the LinkedIn network for all it’s worth. I’d say more than 50 percent of the interviews I’ve gone on are the result of reaching out to someone I know on LinkedIn.

The key is to build up your network. If you see a listing for XYZ company, the best thing you can do is plug it into the search function of LinkedIn to see: 1) who you might know there; 2) who might be a secondary or tertiary connection to somebody there; 3) former employees.

Be A Good Neighbor: Good fences make good neighbors and that means don’t over-assume. LinkedIn tends to overextend a little on its connections, so be sure to ask your buddy if they really know the contact, or if it’s a LinkedIn anomaly.

Be polite about asking for an introduction or to have someone reach out on your behalf. This is a favor, and your friend is risking their reputation.

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