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.
Like this post? Want more from Blogging 4 Jobs? Subscribe via RSS to get updated with all the latest content.

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.

More Tips and Complete Article

How Many Facebook or LinkedIn Friends Do You Really Need?

Haydn Shaughnessy

Anybody who has spent more than a minute sweating over their online social networks needs an answer to this question. In fact when I began thinking about it I came across some pretty sad literature of young people shamed by their lack ofFacebook friends.

Friends are important but I was thinking more about professional friends, colleagues, contacts. And asking myself: Is the emphasis on growing our network of connections blinding us to the value that people can bring to our careers?

If you are in a profession that requires distribution (journalism, marketing, sales) then the more contacts the merrier. When I look at my 800+ LinkedIn connections though, I start to feel uneasy. What is this thing called connections? The best definition I can come up with is contingency list – in case they might be useful.

A couple of years back I gave up my smartphone so that I could become more focused. This year I want to focus my list of connections down to those that matter, the ones I can help and who can help me, people who are good at paying forward and who have some wisdom to impart.

I got talking about these issues last week with Jason Womack who provides companies and individuals with advice on productivity improvement and is theauthor of Your Best Just Got Better.

Jason contends that, yes you really do need friends and they really should be influencers, so some of the concepts of online social media are useful for how we see our broader professional circle. But they should be your personal influencers. And we need to be quite clear about their role. Your social network is there to help you to make good decisions.

Read the rest of the Forbes article

How NOT to Contact Recruiters on LinkedIn

Lots of us in the recruiting world are very active on LinkedIn, doing what we can to be accessible to jobseekers. We love networking, meeting new people and finding great candidates to fill our openings. Many of us also like to give back to our networks, helping out in any way we can. While we may not be able to help with every jobsearch request that comes our way, many of us help jobseekers by passing along introduction requests, answering questions, sharing jobsearch tips, giving networking advice, volunteering our time to moderate networking groups, etc. LinkedIn is a great tool for helping others and I love to do my part.

That said, there are some requests that cross the line, in my opinion, and I think that jobseekers should be careful to leverage their network without taking advantage of it. Most have the purest intentions in mind and aren’t even aware that their request may not be received in the best light, so this list is written to help jobseekers make the best possible impression when networking with recruiters on LinkedIn. I hope it is helpful to you!
Here are ten of the mistakes I see most often:

1. Can you help me find a job?

This is the most common request in my LinkedIn inbox, but one where I’m least able to help. An agency recruiter or headhunter might be able to “shop” your resume around to a few of their clients, but at the end of the day, a recruiter is someone who finds candidates to fill jobs, not someone who finds jobs to employ candidates. This is a key mistake that many people make. Most recruiters are happy to share their advice for jobseekers, but a recruiter is not a professional “job finder”… Those really don’t exist!

2. Do you have any job openings that fit my profile?

Agency recruiters or headhunters might be a bit more open to this type of request, but before approaching an in-house / corporate recruiter with such an open-ended question, be sure to do a little legwork ahead of time. First off, remember that recruiters aren’t “job finders” (see #1 above). Secondly, companies often have dozens or even hundreds of openings at any given time. These openings are spread across a team of recruiters who only have real visibility to the openings they are personally handling. Thirdly, you are the best one to pinpoint positions that fit your interests, talents and career path. Be sure to first look online, find positions of interest, apply via the careers page and then approach a recruiter at that company with some specific positions of interest in mind. Most will do what they can to put you in touch with the appropriate decision-makers. Having done some homework on your end will not only speed up the process, it will also put less of a burden on the person you’re asking for help.

3. Can you review my resume and send me your edits / feedback / suggestions?

As much as we’d love to help, resume critiques would take up a full 40-hour workweek (or more!) if recruiters complied with every such request. Resume writing is a very time-intensive process that requires two-way discussion, in-depth knowledge of your past experience / career goals, extensive editing / rewriting, etc. Professional Resume Writers often charge big bucks for their services because it’s no easy task or quick process. Recruiters may be able to recommend a professional to you (or help you network to find a good one), but this type of request is something that recruiters simply don’t have the bandwidth to accommodate.

4. Can you please send me John Doe’s email address / phone number?

If a LinkedIn member wants their contact information to be public knowledge, they’ll be sure to post it on their profile (and many of them do, so be sure to check). If not, then it’s really not appropriate for their network contacts to give it out to others. (You wouldn’t want your network contacts giving out your email address and phone number, would you?) Instead, use the “Introduction Request” feature on LinkedIn. It’s a great feature that enables you to message your target contact without revealing either party’s email address. Most recruiters will gladly pass along introduction requests on your behalf and then your target contact can decide how he or she would like to follow up with you. (Or, if you prefer to go the direct route, you can do a little Google research, as explained in this previous blog post, and easily figure out that person’s email address.)

5. Do you know anyone at Acme Company?

Probably! A well-connected recruiter likely knows multiple contacts at your target company. Rather than asking that person to run a search of their network to find a list of all possible contacts at a company, you should instead run a LinkedIn search yourself and sort through the results. You can easily identify an appropriate target or two (recruiters, hiring managers, peers) and then send an introduction request. After all, no one knows better than you why you want to reach out, which departments fit your career goals and who the best contacts at that company might be.

Tips 6-10 and Complete Article

Avoid These 5 LinkedIn Dont’s

One of the primary benefits of joining LinkedIn as a social network is its focus on career-related connections. This can take off some of the pressure that may exist on other platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) to be witty, clever, or even somewhat controversial. You do, however, need to be professional as you make connections and build a profile that represents you online.

Over time, LinkedIn members have developed preferred ways to communicate with each other via the system’s features and functions. It’s a powerful resource – with potential for networking, career development, and job search success for online students and instructors alike – but as the platform has evolved, some techniques have become more effective than others.

How can you make the best of your LinkedIn account? Here are a few tips as you proceed with your next profile update:

1. Don’t just send the default invitation to connect. “I’d like to add you to my professional network” is the standard text you’ll find when you decide to send an invitation to another LinkedIn user. Leaving this as-is doesn’t say much about who you are and why you want to connect. And it’s easy to add a sentence or two to personalize a message for each recipient. Public relations expert Sakita Holley provides six scenarios (e.g., former boss, prospective employer) and invitation examples.
2. Don’t connect as a “friend” if you’re not a friend. Unless … this is the only way you have to make the connection and you can explain why you want to connect per item #1 above. Can you find an email address for the person online? Are you members of the same LinkedIn Groups? Social media consultant Jeff Bullas notes that connecting as a friend “is a major pet peeve for many professionals on LinkedIn.” Exhaust the other available options before selecting “friend” when you send out an invitation.
3. Don’t describe yourself with overused or effusive terms. “Creative” and “motivated” are just two professional buzzwords recently identified by LinkedIn. Used on their own, they don’t really convey much about your qualifications and potential. Are they in your profile headline? Jeff Haden recommends an alternative approach: consider how you introduce yourself to someone you meet in person. Would you say: “I’m a passionate, innovative, dynamic provider of services”? Probably not. In a way, your LinkedIn profile is speaking for you – how are you being introduced?

Dont's 4,5, and Complete Article

Break Your Job Search Slump with LinkedIn

I was recently interviewed about LinkedIn and Social Recruiting in the Australian version of Men’s Health and as most of our readers live outside Oz (including myself) I thought I’d republish a little bit of the article here. Please note that I only endorse my blog and LinkedIn, the other tips are from Men’s Health.

Nick Broughall writes:

Cyber Adviser

Career guidance counsellors are rife – and most of them charge like medieval knights. If you’d rather keep your cash for pleasure, hit the groundbreaking blog The Undercover Recruiter to reboot your working life.

Typical of its more conventional content are tips on getting headhunted and nailing job interviews. But founder Jorgen Sundberg, a social media trainer and consultant specialising in recruiting and branding, also leads the site with guidance on using Facebook and Twitter.

“You can even use Pinterest as a snapshot of your personal brand, so a recruiter can get a good, quick insight into who you are and what you can do”, says Sundberg. (Free; theundercoverrecruiter.com)

Smooth Operator

If you want to shift your career from idle to overdrive, you have to get organised. A cloud-based project management tool like Wunderkit makes the process simple, syncing between your PC and iPhone app seamlessly.

But to make the software work for you, you’re going to need a system to track your progress. “List twenty companies you want to work for then systematically trawl through LinkedIn and Twitter to map out the people who can hire you”, says Sundberg. “Start relationships with them somewhere online with a view to meeting up.” From there, simply tick off your goals in Wunderkit’s task management app and wait for the job offers to pour in.

Sharp-Dressed Man

First impressions count. So rocking up to a job interview in some ill-fitting suit that makes you look like Sir Les Patterson is a no-no. Enter InStitchu, an online store where you can order suits and shirts tailored to your exact measurements.

At a fraction of the cost of traditional tailors, InStitchu puts a touch of Clooney in your clobber. “A well-fitting suit makes you feel more confident and demonstrates that you mean business”, says InStitchu co-founder Robin McGowan.

When building your office wardrobe start out with navy and charcoal suits. “Both are hugely versatile and will work with almost any shirt and tie combination”, adds McGowan.

More Tips and Complete Article

10 Tips For Effectively Using Your LinkedIn Status Update

By Andy Robinson


One of the features of LinkedIn that tends to be underutilized is the “LinkedIn Status Update” (also called your “Network Update”) in your LinkedIn Profile. Your status update “block” is a white box located just below your picture on your “View My Profile” page. If you don’t see such a block, then you’ve not posted a status update.

From your LinkedIn home page or your “Edit My Profile” page, you can change your status update as frequently as you desire. EVERY time you update your status, the home page of ALL of your network connections is “pinged” with your status update. Status updates are also distributed to your network via email when LinkedIn sends you your weekly “Network Update.” Your latest status update is always displayed on your LinkedIn profile.

Your status updated is limited to 140 characters – just like Twitter – so keep that in mind, particularly when cutting and pasting information into your status update “window.”

Updating your LinkedIn status is a great way to communicate to your network on a frequent and ongoing basis. I update my status at least once each day with different types of information. 10 tips for effectively using your status update to distribute useful information are presented below:

1. Insert the title and a “shortened” URL link to one of your recent blog articles. Bit.ly is a great resource for shortening URL’s.

2. Insert the title and a “shortened” URL to a blog article you read and really liked. Particularly one that is timely, informative and relates to your “brand” or area of specialty in some way.

3. A link to a newsworthy web posting or news item. Include the title and a shortened URL. Alignment with you brand “voice” or area of specialty makes it more powerful. I like to focus on POSITIVE news as opposed to negative news.

4. A great “quote of the day.” A great source of quotes of to search the #quote “hashtag” on Twitter. Since Twitter updates are limited to 140 characters, you’ll find quotes that fit the LinkedIn status update window.

5. A brief piece of advice relevant to your brand or area of specialty.

Tips 6-10 and Complete Careerealism Article

101 Linkedin Tips

101 LinkedIn Tips, Tricks and Strategies For Success (via www.thesalesexperts.com)

101 LinkedIn Tips If you want to build your business and your career then these 101 LinkedIn tips must be part of the mix! With more than 170 million professionals worldwide and 3 million in London alone LinkedIn is the best place to start! Recent design changes have hidden many of the features that…

---