LinkedIn Features That Can Advance Your Job Search

LinkedIn continues to evolve and the site regularly adds new features and tools to help you better find people, content, and opportunities.  But as a job seeker, how can you leverage these upgrades to advance your job search?

To further explore this topic I approached Tara Orchard, a Career/Business Performance and Social Networking Coach to help overview 2 of LinkedIn’s features and together we compiled tips on how these new tools can be leveraged by savvy job seekers during their job search.

1. ‘How You Rank’ in Who’s Viewed Your Profile

In May 2014, LinkedIn introduced a new “How You Rank” tool where you can see how your profile views measure against your connections.   This feature can be located within ‘Who’s Viewed Your Profile’ and breaks down your percentage rating amongst your contacts for the current week.  It looks something like this:

 Tara’s Tips:

•  Think of ‘How You Rank’ as your LinkedIn Klout score in that it offers you a glimpse into where you rank in terms of ‘popularity’ and ‘social influence’ among your network. This can help you gauge whether you are having an influence and being noticed.

• As a job seeker it can be beneficial to raise your profile views and ‘How You Rank’ offers you an opportunity to measure and track your efforts. A goal for an active job seeker may be to target ranking in the 75th percentile or higher (top 25%).

• The other benefit of this feature is that it allows you to see who within your network is most influential (or at least active). As a job seeker, understanding who within your network is active can help you determine who you might want to engage with a little more.

Additional Tips from Adrienne:

• One way to increase your profile visibility is join and be active in groups. Keep in mind you want to both start and comment on other discussions across several groups.  By interacting with a highly viewed person’s content (for example, liking and commenting on their discussions or shares) you can increase your own visibility.

•  LinkedIn provides customized suggestions in this feature area to help you increase your personal profile views.  A few adjustments that you may not have considered are nicely presented so you can positively boost your profile’s visibility.

•  Use the ‘How You Rank’ tool to analyze the profiles of connections ranking higher than you and discover what these people are doing, saying, or sharing to raise their visibility.  Adjust your own profile and activities to drive up your personal views; the more visible you are and the more engaged you get with the site the better chances you have of being found by hiring authorities.

2. Publishing Platform

Although originally created for major LinkedIn Influencers, this new feature has now been released to all site users.   According to LinkedIn, when you publish one of these new ‘long-form posts’:

1. Your original content becomes part of your professional profile.
2. It is shared with your connections and followers.
3. Members not in your network can now follow you from your posts to receive updates every time you publish.
4. Your posts are searchable both on and off of LinkedIn.

To create a post, click on the pencil symbol in your update area, on the home page of the site:

Once published you can find your posts at the top of your profile page, underneath your photo and header.  People who visit your page will automatically see your most recent 3 posts:

Tara’s Job Seeker Tips:

• The publishing platform provides an opportunity to raise visibility by writing and publishing content such as a blog or article relevant to a person’s career (or business). The benefit is allowing job seekers to showcase relevant knowledge and ideas to their network and potentially to people outside of their network.

•  The publishing platform can serve as a tool to generate leads or follow-up on leads by pushing relevant content directly towards potential employers before first contact or after you begin the network and interview process.

• The potential downside of the platform includes the need to spend time writing content that is relevant, interesting, and well crafted.  If the content is not well considered and written it could have a negative impact. I wrote my first LinkedIn long-post on this topic, “Writing and the Risk of Public Criticism”.

Additional Tips from Adrienne:

• Besides having your posts added to your profile, there are two other ways to use this content to raise your visibility and credibility:

1. Send article links directly to people you know who would find the content relevant and use it to start a conversation (and highlight your relevant knowledge or ideas).
2. Push your LinkedIn articles directly into groups to begin new discussions or add value to current discussions.

• Immediate benefits for job seekers include a massive platform for sharing information aligned with expertise and brand.  Get employers noticing and following you while raising your visibility with increased search engine optimization.

• There are no limits to the amount of posts you can create and share, but remember to keep content polished and professional.  Your audience on LinkedIn is very wide and includes a wealth of top resources (recruiters and employers alike).

For more top tips on LinkedIn, connect with me on the site: www.linkedin.com/in/adriennetom