Job Search and LinkedIn – Is Your Profile Visible?

Your profile is like an on-line resume. If you’ve not taken the time to develop an in-depth profile on LinkedIn, you might be invisible to the searches that recruiters, human resource professionals, and hiring managers are conducting searching for people JUST LIKE YOU.

I recently dedicated one of our weekly Internet Radio Shows to this subject. Studies show that over 95% of all recruiters, human resources professionals, and hiring managers are using LinkedIn as a PRIMARY tool for finding and sourcing top talent.

All our past Radio Show Broadcasts are available in our FREE Audio Library.

1. Is your profile powerful enough to stand out on LinkedIn and grab someone’s attention in a search, let alone even fall into the search parameters? Are you beige – do you fade into the background? Are you making your job search much more difficult by being invisible?
2. Let’s do a check-up on your LinkedIn Profile:
3. Do you include all your significant projects from prior jobs?
4. Do you include all your major quantifiable results and outcomes?
5. Is every leadership role, committee chair, group membership listed?
6. Have you identified all your skills and competencies and then backed them up with concrete examples in your LinkedIn Profile?
7. Have you loaded short PowerPoint Presentations through the Slideshare Application to convey your successes and accomplishments?

If you’re interested in the complete checklist for determining if your LinkedIn Profile is complete and capable of being found in a search to fill an open position, you can download our 8-Point Success Matrix for your Job Search LinkedIn Profile. This is a self-assessment scorecard for job search networking that will immediately indicate whether your LinkedIn Porfile is effective for job search and being visible to recruiters, HR managers, and Hiring Managers.

MOST IMPORTANT for your job search on LinkedIn: You’ve got to make it very easy for people to contact you by including your email address and phone number. As an executive recruiter, if you make me hunt on-line for how to contact you – I’ll just give up and move on to the next candidate.

Check out my profile or Brad’s profile. Join our LinkedIn Group for Job Search and check out the profiles of other great candidates that have already gone through this exercise.

Review our book titled “This is NOT the position I Accepted” – there’s a wealth of great information about leveraging yourself on-line and becoming visible. Our Home-Study Job Search Kit has audio programs, templates, the workbook, and a variety of tools to help you begin to improve your visibility in searches by hiring managers searching for people JUST LIKE YOU.

All these tools that LinkedIn makes available as part of your profile help you to become visible in the searches that recruiters, human resource professionals, and hiring managers conduct to source and find candidates. STOP being invisible – STAND OUT on LinkedIn for your job search.

Barry

Do You Stand Out on LinkedIn in Your Job Search?

Studies in recruiting and hiring indicate that over 95% of all recruiters, human resource professionals and hiring managers are using LinkedIn to search for top talent. Are you visible in their searches for candidates? Or are you beige – fading into the woodwork and invisible to recruiters and hiring managers? This episode of our weekly Internet Radio Show on Job Search and Hiring Top Talent dug deep into how you can easily become visible on LinkedIn to improve your job search to generate an abundance of job leads and referrals.

Put On Your Sales Hat in Your Job Search

I just conducted one of our regular weekly Internet Radio Talk Shows. You can download the new audio broadcast from our website in our FREE Audio Library.

In this program we discussed the following topics and took questions from our audience regarding their job search issues about “Putting On Their Sales Hat”:

Plan Their Work

1. Networking Plan
2. Target Plan
3. Group Participation Plan
4. Research – hot industry’s/goggling hiring managers

Numbers Count!

1. Well-Prepared to being their sales efforts
2. Documents lined up
3. Details/Research/Comparative Information – armed with right info
4. Rehearsed and polished

The Interview/Presentation

1. Quick Rapport/First Impressions
2. Solution Selling – what’s your pain (should know this in advance – top 4 typical problems/issues for that role
3. Enthusiasm/Energy – show your passion

Follow-up after the interview

1. Thank You Notes
2. Sending relevant information
3. Networking
4. Finding backdoors

We’ve got a wealth of tools on our website to help you Put on Your Sales Hat. Check out our Candidate Product Library – where we’ve taken this concept and built a structured workbook, templates, and audio programs.

Take a look at our Job Search Service Catalog where we’ve developed a series of coaching and assessment tools to determine if you’re effectively applying the concepts and methodology behind “Putting On Your Sales Hat”.

Finally, join our LinkedIn Discussion Group which provides a vibrant forum for posing questions and getting answers from other candidates conducting a job search and how their applying each of the key steps of our Career Success Methodology.

Barry

photo credit JL McVay

Put On Your Sales Hat To Get A Job

Understanding the 4 key best practices all top notch sales professionals use to attain success. Apply these sales best practices to your job search to cut your transition time in half. Ever wonder why some candidates can complete their job search in half the normal time, have an abundance of great job leads and referrals, and quickly find an outstanding opportunity? The reason why some candidates “succeed” in their job search and some “fail” miserably is that the most successful job search candidates apply the 4 key best practice of sales to their job search. These top caliber candidates “Put On Their Sales Hat” in their job searches.

Interviewing Mistake

I was recently speaking with a CEO client who shared this interviewing faux pa. I think candidates often believe we either make this stuff up or “I would never do that.” That maybe true, but are you making some other mistake and like this candidate never finding out about it.

My client was meeting a candidate in New York. The candidate arrives a few minutes late. “No big deal,” says the client. The candidate was a little frustrated for being late. He apologizes and explains there was a major accident and traffic was shut down. He shakes my clients hand and immediately says, “You might want to wash your hands, I could have Swine flu.”

End of interview.

By the way, this was a professional sales person at the manager level with at least 10 years of experience.

This is just one of many examples we have encountered in our collective 50 years as recruiters.

So here is my question for you, “What should this candidate have done?” It seems obvious to me, but apparently it isn’t to all candidates.

Would like your thoughts and comments.

For more information on interviewing tips and mistakes check out our free resources. We offer audio files from our talk radio show, articles and our most downloaded item “Winning the Phone Interview.”

Do you stand out in your job search on LinkedIn?

I recently wrote a blog post for our Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Blog titled “A Baker’s Dozen of Techniques for quickly finding top talent on LinkedIn” When you review this list of the best practices of how employers and recruiters use LinkedIn to find top talent, are you guilty of not using all the tools LinkedIn provides for personal branding, networking, differentiating yourself from the competition?

Next Steps: Listen to our Home Study Job Search Course and work through the exercises to learn how to network on line and leverage LinkedIn, explore the FREE audio recordings of our Internet Radio Talk Show on using LinkedIn in your job search, or join our LinkedIn Discussion Group and focus on the topics related to using LinkedIn to “stand out”.

Tell us about a few of the stories of how you’ve landed a job or received a great job lead based on one of the Baker’s Dozen of Best Practices?

Barry

photo credit by Jill Murray

7 Steps to end Job Search Voyeurism

In my last post on Job Search Voyerism, I mentioned that I would explore each of the 7 Steps in more depth. In future posts, we’ll jump into even more detail about each of these steps.

Step 1: Join the LinkedIn Group for Job Search which my Partner, Brad Remillard and I facilitate. Click here to join this vibrant and active group.

Step 2: You have my permission to “lurk” or “kibbitz” for two weeks. After that, you must promise to become active in the group. There are approximately 1500 members in this group who network with each other in their job search, share ideas and strategies about jobs, interviewing, networking, salary negotiations, and much more. Many members of the group also pose questions for help, such as asking who knows someone in a particular company, how to overcome a negative in the interview, or how to prepare for a homework assignment.

Step 3: Start to comment on job search articles and sites in the news tab that other group members have shared. Start to comment on the discussions that other group members have started. Start your own discussion point, ask a question, and make a request for help on some element of your job search.

Step 4: Follow Brad and Barry on Twitter. Check out the variety of tweets, useful job search articles, and comments we make about postings by candidates. Start tweeting about your job search.

Step 5:Sign up to receive our Career and Job Search Blog in whatever feeder you use to read blogs. I highly recommend Google Reader. Make sure to post comments on the blog articles Brad and I write.

Step 6: Now that you’ve joined our LinkedIn Discussion Group on Job Search and you’ve practiced and gotten the hang of being an active community/group member, start joining other groups that fit your function expertise (ie marketing or financial management), industry specialization, and alumni group. Become active members of these groups.

Step 7: Now that you’ve subscribed to our Career and Job Search Blog, you understand how to read blog postings in a feed reader like Google Reader, and you’ve started commenting directly on blog postings, start subscribing to a few blogs that are in your functional expertise, industry specialization, alumni group, and in the area of job search, job hunt, interviewing – basically anything to do with finding a job. Become an active contributor on those blogs.

These are just a few small steps in beginning to create a personal brand for yourself, improving your job leads and referrals, strengthening your job search networking, and starting to make your voice heard to “differentiate” yourself.

As a bonus tip, download a few of our recorded Internet Radio Show Broadcasts in which we talk about being active in your job search in social media, like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Tell us what you’re doing right now in your job search that is similar or comparable to the steps laid out in this post. How are you making your voice heard?

Barry

photo credit lintmachine

How To Engage Recruiters In Your Job Search – Radio Show

Engaging recruiters is an important component of one’s job search. As recruiters with over 50 years collective experience we discuss the best way to ensure recruiters respond to you. It is more than just sending in resumes and hoping you get the call. This show discusses concrete things you can start doing now to build a relationship with recruiters. In addition, there are many types of recruiters and a lot of different reasons to engage some but not others. In less than one hour you can find out how best engage the right recruiter for your career.

Stop being a job search voyeur – let your voice be heard

Many candidates join groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, Yahoo and on a variety of other platforms  to languish in “lurker” land. What’s the use of joining a group unless you’re willing to actively participate? Is not one of the major reasons for joining groups on-line or off-line  to network in your job search?

One of the most powerful methods of networking for job hunting is to become known to other group members through your posting of job search-related articles, sharing of informational links/sites (a major element of active Twitter networking), that might help other job seekers, and commenting on the posts by others. Learn about networking in our 5-Step Career Success Methodology.

Through your active “voice”, others in the group get to know you, trust you, and start to go out of their way to help you when you become a valued member of their community.

Not becoming active in sharing your “voice” in these groups you join is the equivalent of “being beige” – fading into the woodwork. See the blog post I wrote titled “Networking Failure –  Stop Being Beige”.

For those who are a little shy, reserved, and introverted, what better method exists to let your voice be heard?  You don’t have to engage in physical groups, you don’t have to formulate a response on the spot (you can think about it, analyze, and carefully craft your on-line message). and you don’t have to portray yourself as an extrovert in a live setting.

Allow me to offer a starting point for beginning the journey of letting your voice be heard on-line to improve your job search networking:

Here are Seven Steps you Can Take to end job search voyeurism:

Step 1: Join our LinkedIn Group for Job Search

Step 2: “Lurk” or “kibbitz” and then get active

Step 3: Start to comment on job search articles

Step 4: Follow Brad and Barry on Twitter

Step 5: Subscribe to our Career and Job Search Blog

Step 6: Join other LinkedIn Groups and become active

Step 7: Subscribe to other blogs and comment frequently

In my next blog post, we’ll explore each of these Seven Steps to ending Job Search Voyeurism.

Barry

photo credit by Stewart

Your Job Search Questions and Answers

On Friday from 9 – 10 AM PDT we often conduct free “Candidate Open Forums.” These are conference calls open to all of our candidates, in which we discuss topics and answer questions directly from you – our candidates. Unfortunately, we are limited to 50 people on the line at one time, so often we can’t get to all of the questions submitted ahead of time via email.

We believe these are important, so from time to time in this blog we will discuss the topics and questions we, 1) don’t get to during the conference call, 2) are asked over and over again (so these are probably on your mind too), and 3) just consider important for you to know.

Remember, we are retained executive recruiters so the answers and thoughts come strictly from that perspective.

1) Chronological vs. functional resume? Easy answer –  NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, use a functional resume. In my almost 30 years of recruiting I have never had any recruiter or hiring manager support the functional resume. I have also been on many panels where all of the panelists agree to NEVER use a functional resume. Functional resumes just scream out,”Try to figure out what I’m trying to hide.” See our free audio file on resumes.

2) How do we overcome negatives such as age, turnover, time between jobs, etc? We believe you address them head on. If you have a negative, avoiding it doesn’t make it go away. We have a blog entry “Preemptive Strike” which you should also consider reading. If you have a negative item, you should bring it up straight away, discuss it openly and then whatever happens, happens. Don’t assume, “They didn’t bring it up so it must not be a problem.” They didn’t bring it up because they already settled it in their mind. You need to preempt any preconceived ideas before they come into play.

3) What is the best method and frequency for following up on a resume? For us, as recruiters, we prefer via email or one of the social media forums, Linkedin or Twitter. Recruiters have reduced staff just like many other companies, while the number of calls from candidates has skyrocketed. It isn’t possible to call every person. Email allows us to reply late at night, on weekends, or even while waiting in the lobby of a client. I can’t do that with phone calls. Regarding frequency, if in fact you are dead on perfect,  then after two weeks send a follow-up email.

4) With so many top level executives in the market, how do you differentiate yourself from the pack? This is the 64,000 dollar question. We believe the best answer is to have a very compelling resume which is targeted specifically to the position. A generic, one size fits all resume will not differentiate you. That is what “generic” means. In today’s market our clients and therefore recruiters, are seeking very specific backgrounds. We are not looking for the proverbial, “Jack of all trades,” we are looking for the, “King or Queen for a specific role.”

5) Is negotiating with the employer different today due to the economic situation, and if so how? There is a difference given today’s market. For example, most companies will not relocate today especially in a large market area. Also, companies tend to be closed to severance agreements. If you aren’t working, they figure there is no reason to give an agreement and they are in control. You have to pick your issues and know where to compromise. This is all part of the pre-planning process for a job search. What issues will you compromise on and which ones should you dig in your heels?

This is enough for now, check back regularly for more Q&A.

We realize not everyone will agree with these answers and that is healthy. So if you don’t agree, or wish to comment, we encourage you to do so. Just click the link below.

We offer a wealth of free resources to anyone in a job search. To see what is available to help you simply CLICK HERE.