1. LinkedIn As a Shop Window

These days, employability is about visibility. And when you’re on the job search, being seen means being prominent on LinkedIn in terms of profile and activity. Think of it as an online shop window for your skills and like any successful retail outlet, it needs to look appealing, have a great product and already be busy with activity. The list of things you can do to optimise your profile is extensive – anyone who wants to know more, free feel to contact me directly. However, there are 3 must-do’s that can be considered a minimum standard for anyone who has already signed up for an account.

Complete your profile
If you are going to do one thing on LinkedIn to improve your marketability, then this is it. This may seem like a labourious thing to do, but as LinkedIn acts like a search engine with filters, its pretty obvious that profiles with gaps in key data fields will simply not appear on search results. Make sure you complete the Headline, Summary, Specialities, Experience and Education. And don’t be a camera shy – whilst the profile photo isn’t searchable, it makes your profile look more active and authentic – essential when you want to appeal to recruiters looking for talent.

Configure your account settings
It seems that our default response when considering privacy is to set the bar high. Whilst its normal to feel this way, it’s important to recognise that this sentiment is counterproductive if you are on the job search. Whether you like it or not, when you are looking for work you are a salesman for your skill-set and people need know you’re open for contact. Typically, this means configuring your settings so that you are able to receive messages and invitations from anyone who can view your profile.

Add connections
LinkedIn is about connections. The degree of connectedness you have increases the size of your digital footprint and makes you more easily found. There is an active debate on the merits of ‘quality over quantity’ but such arguments are moot if you are stuck in the single figures in terms of 1st degree connections. Work actively to build your network, especially if you are new to LinkedIn, and issue invitations to connect to your friends, colleagues and clients – don’t wait for invitations to come to you.

2. LinkedIn As a Classified Page

LinkedIn can also be seen as a Job Board, and thanks to comparatively expensive per slot advertising costs, the majority of LinkedIn adverts are directly managed by employers, rather than recruitment agents. For the Job Seeker, this means that the recruitment supply chain has just shortened and responding to such an advert gets you into direct contact with an employee of the company you want to work for. Searching for jobs on LinkedIn is easy – simply go to the Jobs tab, use the Advanced search to filter results and generate a list of opportunities that match your criteria.

3. LinkedIn As A Mass Messaging Tool

LinkedIn is getting more ‘social’. The use of the LinkedIn Status Update feature has undergone a revolution since the barnstorming arrival of the Twitter in 2007. This is a now a powerful tool not only in telling your contacts about your employment status, but plays a major role in ranking the profiles on LinkedIn’s search facility. The mechanics of how this works in not known, but a CIO.com interview with Parker Barrile, Director of Product Management, suggests that judicious use of status updates can have an major impact on your profile ranking. Note of caution; be careful on the etiquette when using this feature – the last thing you want to do is ‘overshare’ and become tedious with your ‘I want a job / I need a job’ updates.

5. LinkedIn As A Market Intelligence Tool

There is more to LinkedIn than technical tools to help you in the Job Search. We should remember that its basically a self updating database of millions of professionals; some of these people will work for companies you have an interest in. Contributions of a certain type can be used in clever ways to pick up intelligence on a particular market or a particular employer. Is it relevant to you that company X has just hired 3 people with a similar skill-set to you? Or that person Y has just been promoted to a senior role that might you might report into? Or that person B has just left company X?. Conducting a Company search on your target employer can reveal what their hiring posture is, and what degree on internal change the business is going through – hugely valuable information for a Job Seeker looking for a way in.

5. LinkedIn As A Private Eye

As Chatroulette has proven beyond any reasonable doubt, its generally a good idea to do some research on people you’re about to talk to. This is especially the case when those people are the HR Manager and the Departmental Head of the company you’ve just applied to join. Well when it comes to doing a little bit of professional snooping, there’s no better tool than LinkedIn. With use of the People Search function and a little intelligent guesswork, you can become the happy owner of biographical titbits on your future employers that can grease the way during small talk, and provide you with a head start in building rapport. You might as well have a look, because you can bet your last penny that any modern employer will be doing the same to you.

1. Complete profile
A recruiter will not waste time contacting you if they think you are a dormant account holder on LinkedIn and there is no surer indicator of this than an incomplete profile. Whether its the absence of a profile photo, incomplete work history or few connections, an incomplete profile sends one very clear message – you don’t use LinkedIn often enough for it to be a viable method of communication with you. The fact that this may or may not be true is irrelevant – you represent a risk of being a waste of time and that will be enough for the recruiter to skip to the next profile.

2. Job Title
Due to the limited boolean search capacity of LinkedIn, searching by Job Title is a far more common search technique than is the case with Online Job Boards or proprietary recruitment databases. What this means for job seekers is straightforward – not only do you need to have Job Titles in your work summary, but they should be aligned as closely as you can to industry standard nomenclature. Avoid using esoteric language or grandiose titles that don’t reflect the actualite – don’t let corporate narcissism or personal vanity damage your chances of appearing in search results relevant to you.

3. Location
As a formerly US centric networking tool, UK recruiters have been quick to learn to use the Location filter to generate only UK based profiles. This remains an essential part of the profile to get right. Without a country category or a postcode, you will end up being lost from searches as recruiters almost always recruit against geography and use the Location or promixity filter to do so. Furthermore, with geolocation likely to become the next big thing in social media (and social recruiting), it is essential that this is not overlooked as you complete your profile.

4. Company Name
The norms of recruitment have changed. The era of excessive privacy, cloak and dagger levels of subterfuge, and of headhunters behaving like MI5 agents is over. Not revealing the name of your employer on your LinkedIn profile might have been something you would do 10 years ago, but today it is anachronistic and counter productive from what you are hoping to achieve by being on LinkedIn. Company Name comes second only to Job Title as a search field for recruiters – you’re guaranteeing that you will be missing from searches if you do not add your company name where it should be.

1. Data Currency
CV’s get out of date, fast. As a static file it does a passable job of capturing a snapshot of your achievements, but it begins running out of currency the moment it leaves the safe confines of your desktop. You click send, it instantly becomes a historical document; the longer it’s out there, the more remote it becomes to your reality and the less relevance it has to you and your job search. Legacy CV’s – documents you sent several job searches ago – can sit on recruiter databases and online job boards for years after your original submission. These documents are so far out of date, they constitute misinformation on your professional status and are a significant threat to the message you are communicating to the employer market, never mind the negative connotation it delivers to your personal brand.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
Like all social networking sites, LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to amend your profile any time you are log into your account. Got a new qualification? Add it to the Education section. Got a new job? Simply Add A New Position. Looking for a job? Update your status to that effect. There are no files to upload, no documents to rewrite, no rogue files to chase down and delete. LinkedIn can be as near to a real time depiction of your current professional status as you need it to be, removing the need for anyone to ask the first question of any recruitment process – ‘are you looking for work?’

2. Data Accuracy
CV’s are marketing documents and they typically contain….embellishments on the truth. Lets face it, when you need a job, you’ll do what it takes to get one and that often means telling people about the time when you were the James Bond of company X or business Y. The more subtle may prefer the technique of claiming credit for stuff you never did. Sure, you knocked out a few spreadsheets, and they looked really good but doesn’t mean that you delivered the £100 million business critical project, buddy. Some even go right ahead and tell outright lies – dates, job titles, employers, responsibilities or whatever else comes to mind. I should know. I’ve hired a few of those guys.

Why do people feel free to lie on the CV?

The temptation is there because there’s a good chance that you won’t be contradicted until after you’ve been offered the job. Due diligence in the recruitment process generally takes place after the fact – remember the ‘offer conditional upon satisfactory references’ line? As crazy as it sounds, this is how we do it – interview, offer, then check whether the guy is crazy or not. References were invented precisely because employers wanted a system to assure themselves that the Richard Branson they’ve just offered the job to is just precisely who he says he is. It’s just never been a very good system.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
Of course, there is nothing stopping you from lying on your LinkedIn profile; however, it would be one of the most unwise and career limiting mistakes you could make. The information you put out there is public, it is open to challenge, and the people you are connected with are the very people who know you best – your work colleagues. Lying on LinkedIn affects them by their association with you and you’ll either see a mass departure of your soon-to-be ex connections or a complete lack of recommendations from the very people from whom you need it most. What’s more, the visibility of your connections allows a preliminary reference to be easily taken by any employer foolish enough to contemplate hiring you – without your knowledge or say so. Anybody still think this is a good idea?

3. Data Presentation
How many times do career coaches/advisors/your wife tell you to distinguish yourself from the hordes of CV sending maniacs by increasing your font size and inserting a few nice tables? And you know what? they do have a point – it is good to be different. Career expert Alison Doyle always gives great tips on CV writing. But being different brings its own set of problems, principally by making it a serious pain-in-the-ass for recruiters and hiring managers to compare candidates on a like-for-like basis. Having different looking CV’s means that recruiters are actually going to have to go to the trouble of reading them. This is why the application form was invented, basically an attempt to standardise the presentation of applicant data to increase human and computer efficiency. Some institutions like, anything to do with Her Majesty’s Government don’t actually accept job applications in any other way. But of course, every employer has a different application form, passing on the pain to the applicants who have to go through the rigmarole of completing different sets of forms for every single job they apply for – its difficult to think of a bigger waste of time for an already time stressed job seeker.

Why can’t there just be one standard template for presenting your professional experience….?

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
Regardless of the content you input or applications you add, the basic template for every one of LinkedIn 40 million plus users remains the same. Recruiters have long since become familiar with the information architecture of LinkedIn profiles and their ability to conduct comparative assessments has consequently become much more efficient. LinkedIn makes it easier for recruiters and hiring managers to make decisions – this is a good thing for everyone involved in the recruitment process, leading to quicker decisions, fewer dead ends and less time wasted.

4. Data Protection
We already know you lose control over your CV when you submit to somebody or somewhere else. What we haven’t talked about is how you’ve also lose control over the content within the document. Your carefully crafted two page masterpiece? Oh, you mean the one that’s about to be mangled by the incompatible technology stack of the job board you’ve sent it to? Or perhaps you mean the one that’s about to be deliberately altered by the recruiter who thinks its not quite fit for his particular purpose? If you think you have only have one version of your CV out there in cyberspace, then think again. If you’ve ever applied to an online advert, or uploaded one to a job board, the chances are you have many, many more.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
LinkedIn is a network of password protected profiles, where the owner has sole authority to create, edit, manage and delete information on his or her account. It is not a file that can be doctored or reproduced, nor is there a requirement for it be compatible with this reader or that database. Furthermore, any duplicate accounts can be easily located and removed by the owner. The security of the data on a LinkedIn profile is one of the primary reasons why it is so popular as a recruiting tool – it serves as a method of validating information found on CV’s. It has become the single most authentic representation of an individuals professional experience; its only a natural extension of the logic to see it replace the CV entirely once we get comfortable with information that is managed this way.

5. Data Disintermediation
Data disinterwhat? Yeah, that’s right. Data disintermediation. Or cutting out the middle man if you prefer English to recruiterspeak. It is not a stretch to say that the flaws inherent within the CV is one the central reasons why recruitment agents – and filing cabinets – actually exist. As CV aggregators, the recruiters grew an industry to fulfill an essential service for job seekers and employers alike – storing and managing CV information. So long as the CV was currency of the job market, the recruiters had a real value added role to play, playing match maker between those who had the labour and those who held the vacancies.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
LinkedIn has enabled job seekers and employers to reach each other directly, without the need for intermediaries or the documents they monopolise. Recruiters have lost control of the information on which the industry is based, not because they’ve lost control over CV’s, but because CV’s themselves have been superceded by another way of presenting records of professional achievement. The implication is obvious – if job seekers and employers find each other through the information they exchange on LinkedIn, the need to produce a document replicating much of that information will increasingly be seen as inane.