How Best to Use LinkedIn – from HR People Looking For You

Pam Stoker found LinkedIn.com, the popular professional networking site, five years ago, when she was laid off from an outplacement-services firm in Connecticut. Stoker, now the assistant director of graduate career services at TCU’s Neeley School of Business, has nearly 2,500 contacts on LinkedIn and indirect links to 10 million people – a quarter of the site’s membership.

“I love connecting people with other people and other opportunities that they might not have access to,” she said.

LinkedIn “” which is free for users who want to post their virtual résumés; invite in colleagues, friends and acquaintances; and join online groups such as alumni associations and professional associations “” has 39 million users.

Experts say it’s a good idea for job seekers to understand how recruiters use LinkedIn. Human resources pros and employers increasingly use it and other networking sites as a stealthy way to find job candidates, streamline recruiting, and, in some cases, bypass buying advertising.

Here are tips from experts on making the most of the site.

Profile-engineering

Load your profile with keywords relevant to your industry, work you’ve done and jobs you’re looking for.

That can include industries you’ve worked in; professional degrees, associations and certifications; job description buzzwords; and even locations you’ve worked. Stoker added music interests to her profile when she was looking for a job five years ago, and that led to some new links. “Suddenly, there was a connection,” she said.

Patrick O’Malley, a Boston consultant and self-styled “LinkedIn rock star” who has trained groups such as the American Marketing Association on using the site, even recommends including common misspellings of your name in your profile’s summary, several fields into your profile. O’Malley’s includes at least seven misspellings of his first and last names.

“It does take up some space, but if some recruiter sees that, they’re not going to think, ‘What a dolt,’”‚” O’Malley said. “They’re going to think, ‘This guy’s smart.’”‚”

O’Malley also said some recruiters may use key words such as “looking” and “seeking” when searching for job seekers, so he advises job hunters to include those words high in their profiles.

LinkedIn experts also advise job seekers to pose and answer questions and include relevant training and reading material as a way to demonstrate expertise. “Just asking questions on LinkedIn, you’re more likely to get a job,” O’Malley said.

Paul Webber, 43, of Arlington, who lost his job in the mortgage industry last month, has been refreshing his network: online, over lunch and at meetings of a new alumni support group at the University of Texas at Arlington.

He’s hoping for a repeat of 2006, when a recruiter offered him a job after spotting his profile on LinkedIn. Webber, who has a master’s degree in quantitative finance, has been answering questions on LinkedIn and recommending reading, including a book on credit derivatives and The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron.

Webber, who also teaches finance at UT-Arlington, views LinkedIn only as “my start point” in the job search.

“It’s time for me to buckle down,” he said.

Join groups

LinkedIn users know that they can significantly expand their reach by joining groups, which has triggered debate among users and the site over the potential for so-called serial invitations.

LinkedIn users, of course, know that the site takes issue with inviting people you don’t know and “trust.”

“Let’s say you’re connected to someone that you met once at a conference and don’t ever really intend doing business with them,” said Krista Canfield, a LinkedIn spokeswoman. “Your network update feed, which shows who’s connecting to who in your network, what questions your connections are asking, etc., will include this person’s updates now too. If you’re connected to 20 or 100 connections like that, then that’s even more useless update feeds that you’ll receive.”

By contrast, she said, “if the 100 people you’re connected to are old co-workers, former employees, potential clients, etc., then that feed is a gold mine. “‚… If an old co-worker switches jobs and lands at a company that you’d love to work with, well then now you know that you have an inside edge at that potential client/partner.”

Others don’t necessarily see it that way.

“I think the idea is to not be sending random notes to people,” said Elena Radeva, a UT-Arlington employment supervisor and M.B.A. graduate, who is working on her Ph.D. and researching how companies use social-networking sites to choose employees.

Radeva said she doesn’t see anything wrong using LinkedIn to reach out to casual professional acquaintances. She and other experts recommend personalizing invitations to remind acquaintances of the link.

O’Malley said he sees no value to vast personal LinkedIn networks that contain large numbers of connections the user doesn’t know.

“There are people who have thousands of connections, and to me, that’s a waste of time,” says O’Malley, who has 1,200 first-level connections and estimates that he would know 800 of them if he ran into them on the street. “The rest have been to my classes, read my blog, been to my seminars.”

Recruiters on LinkedIn

Some recruiters use LinkedIn to troll for candidates. Others have established beachheads on the site.

Three weeks ago, Radeva announced in her LinkedIn status update that UT-Arlington was looking for a bilingual financial-aid coordinator. Two years’ financial-aid experience preferred, annual salary of $30,000-plus.

Finding Spanish speakers with the experience has been difficult, said Radeva, who had two people contact her off of her post, one through the UTA Alumni Association.

“People are either employed or are looking for a salary that’s higher than that,” she said.

Radeva is slated to give a training seminar on using LinkedIn to the UT-Arlington HR department next month. “It’s going to work much better for us the more we start using it,” she said.

Dennis Smith, a Dallas-area headhunter who founded wirelessjobs.com last July to recruit employees into the telecom industry, created a Wireless Jobs group on LinkedIn a year ago. The group has 17,000 members, transcending geographical boundaries, which Smith said has allowed him to find potential candidates for jobs overseas.

Smith said LinkedIn and other niche sites that are popping up can potentially transform recruiting.

“I have probably thousands of contacts with people, and I may not have met them any other way,” he said. “Geography is no factor.”

Smith sees a larger percentage of recruiting resources heading toward social networks and job boards, although, “for the most part, the big companies are going to be doing it all.”

Radeva thinks the shift toward use of free recruiting resources will be more dramatic among “small companies that don’t have a recruiting budget.”

Drawing the line

The potential for recruiters to draw even subtle perceptions of job candidates based on what they see on candidates’ online profiles has triggered an avalanche of advice from career experts and recruiters and caused angst in the HR community over potential legal exposure.

Smith advises recruiters against trolling too deeply into candidates’ profiles, and he wonders how much of that goes on in any case.

“Personally, my advice to recruiters is to [use networking sites to] make the connection and leave it there,” he said. “I’m not going to spend two hours on Facebook going back and looking at every party they went to.”

Getting the most from LinkedIn

Complete a detailed professional profile loaded with relevant keywords, even if you’ve got a job.

Use a professional e-mail address and picture.

Invite others to join your network.

Join groups to expand your connections, even “to say something about yourself,” says TCU career adviser Pam Stoker, who joined a “green” group.

Spell-check

Request recommendations

Post questions, and answer others’ questions

Include international exposure, even if it was a backpacking trip, Stoker says.

String out planned changes to your profile over several days, not just one, to keep your name at the top of connections’ daily updates, Stoker says.

Blacklisted from LinkedIn because too many invitees said they didn’t know you? First time, send an e-mail to customer service and ask for forgiveness, Boston consultant Patrick O’Malley said. Second time: Launch a second profile.

By Scott Nishimura
April 27, 2009
source: star-telegram.com