Our LinkedIn Job Search Discussion Group

Are you a learner or a dunce when it comes to discovering how to improve your job search and reduce the time it takes to find a new opportunity. Do you explore every blog, tweet, and discussion group capable of offering new ideas and injecting renewed energy into your job search?

Learner or a Dunce in Your Job Search

Or do you feel you know everything there is about doing an effective job search. Is your attitude “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. The funny thing is that in my 25 years of executive search, I’ve discovered more 55 year olds than have a passion for learning than 25 year olds. Learning, growing, expanding beyond your immediate knowledge or bubble is not age dependent. It’s a life long attitude about personal growth and learning (this could be a entire blog post just by itself).

Job Search Discussion Group

Brad and I facilitate a vibrant community on LinkedIn that is rapidly growing toward being one of the most active job search discussion groups on LinkedIn and the Internet.

Some of the topics of discussion include:

Job Search Networking

Marketing yourself

Job Search Personal Branding

Salary Negotiation

Thank You Letters and Follow-up with Hiring Managers

How to Prepare for an Interview

Acing the Phone Interview

Classic frustrations, errors, and mistakes most candidates make in their job search

How to get a recruiter to call you back

Join the Discussion Group

We also make special offers to this LinkedIn Group, including participation in job search teleconferences, special white papers, examples, and first look at new templates we develop, such as the 8-Point Success Matrix for Assessing the Effectiveness of Your LinkedIn Profile.

Join us today and jump right in by throwing out a question to the group, posting a comment on another discussion point, or adding a news link about a site, article, or blog posting you reviewed and thought would add value to the group.

Here’s the link to join our discussion Group on LinkedIn: IMPACT Hiring Solutions Job Search Discussion Group

There are number of really good discussion groups on LinkedIn regarding job search. You should be on all of them, including ours. If just one idea you can glean from the groups helps you take an entire month off your job search, the investment of time would have more than paid for itself.

Participating in on-line job search discussion groups gives you an opportunity to benchmark your own job search activities and success, bounce ideas off of other peers, learn about ideas that others have tried and you’ve never considered, and obtain leads and ideas of how to uncover those hidden jobs within companies for whom you would love to join.

Are you learner or a dunce when it comes to improving your job search?

Barry

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 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

Using Social Media in Your Job Search

Using social media sites such as Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook to find customers, new employees or a job is new to most people. Today’s show is all about how you can leverage these sites to get what you are looking for. My partner Barry Deutsch and I discuss all the reasons to begin using these sites but most importantly how to use these sites to accomplish your objectives.

Social media sites are all the rage but few know how to use them to drive business, sales or sourcing for people or a job. Most become overwhelmed and just give up. We will show you how to start, which sites are best suited for your needs, how to engage people and the real purpose of these sites. Social media may be right for some and a waste of time for others. Find out which category you fall into to most effectively leverage your job search.

You can listen to or download our Career and Job Search Radio Show in our FREE Audio Library.