LinkedIn Job Search Can Help You Crack the Hidden Job Market

As you’ve searched for new work, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the hidden job market. These are the jobs that never make it to the online job boards or newspaper “Help Wanted” ads. They are also usually the best jobs, the ones people conducting executive-level job searches usually desire. Fortunately, you have the ability to crack the hidden job market. And you can start by conducting a LinkedIn job search.

Finding Work with LinkedIn

You probably know what LinkedIn is. You’re probably even a member. But if you’re like many, you don’t use your LinkedIn social media account to its full potential. When you’re looking to make a job change, LinkedIn is an invaluable tool.

This social media site, designed specifically for business use, can connect you instantly to some of the top officials at the businesses at which you most want to work. One of the top job search strategies, then, is to inform your network of LinkedIn contacts that you are looking for new work. Make sure to be specific about what skills you bring and the kind of jobs for which you are looking.

The LinkedIn Job Search

Then, scan your contacts list to find anyone you’re connected to who works at the companies at which you’d most like to find a job. Once you’ve compiled this list, send them a quick message asking them if they’re available for a lunch meeting or a short phone call to discuss the culture at the companies at which they work.

Make it clear that you are not asking these people for a job. You’re simply interested in discussing company culture with them.

By meeting with these workers, you can greatly increase your knowledge of individual companies. And once you do this, you can bring that knowledge to any job interviews you happen to nab. You can even showcase this knowledge when you are applying to specific jobs or sending letters of introduction to hiring managers and executives. Being informed about a company is one way to set yourself apart from the many other individuals hoping to land jobs at these firms, too.

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5 Ways to Market Your Brand on LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides plenty of marketing opportunities, but lets take a look at some of the lesser-known tools. Although not all are free, try making room in your budget for a few simple and effective marketing strategies.

Whether you’re looking to raise marketing awareness or drive sales, look for guidance from the LinkedIn team. Where else can you specify your target audience based on job title, industry, functional area and much more?

Try these five LinkedIn tools for better marketing.

1. LinkedIn Ads

Start off with self-serve LinkedIn ads. You can target your ad by geography, job function, industry, company size, seniority, age and gender, as well as company name, LinkedIn group and job title. There’e plenty of scope to define your audience.

Your ad will display either along the top, bottom or right-hand side of a member’s home or profile page, and can contain both text and an image. Link your ad to either your own website, your LinkedIn company page, your group or anywhere else you might want to send your visitor for further information. Or consider sending your visitor to your company Facebook page where you can possibly convert her into a Like.

In terms of cost, LinkedIn ads run very much the same as other text ad systems, on an auction or bid basis. You can pay either for CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions).

As with any advertising platform, consider LinkedIn’s advertising best practices.

2. LinkedIn Display Ads

Purchase display ads through the LinkedIn field sales team. They are IAB standard unit sizes.

The ad space to the right of everyone’s home and profile page is a prime piece of real estate for ad property. The space can be used in several ways, and is not just reserved static images. You can add video, a blog feed or even a Twitter feed.

Word-of-mouth advertising is incredibly powerful, so consider creating a recommendation ad: If anyone within your network has recommended your product or service, his recommendation would display as an ad on other people’s profiles within that person’s network. LinkedIn members can recommend the product directly from the ad.

Try these further ideas for display ads.

Display your company ad on your LinkedIn company page to help with brand awareness and online consistency.
Show your ad on every one of your employees’ profile pages. Turn each team member into a brand ambassador.
Advertise your LinkedIn group to a targeted audience via a display ad.

The cost of these ads is dependent on the audience you plan to target. LinkedIn will bill you on a CPM basis. Talk to a LinkedIn sales representative for further information.

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Job Search Technology for LinkedIn

LinkedIn is now growing at 7500 MPH. That’s Members Per Hour. Speed like that, is really powerful, but speed can also kill, so be careful.

Below we examine several pieces of job search technology that are applicable to LinkedIn.

1. Card Munch

Card Munch is an App that scans business cards through I phones and turns that business card into a contact and shows you that individual’s LinkedIn profile, their credentials, as well as the contacts that you have in common. The output creates a “rolodex” of business cards matched to LinkedIn profiles. One of the greatest features here is you now not only have a connections profile email address, but their primary business email.

2. LinkedIn Resume Builder and/or Visualize.me

The power of presentation is often not fully embraced in the job search process. A classic chronological resume or Linkedin profile often does not capture your story and message. Lots of career promotions, parallel roles/positions or concentrated company movement can get very confusing for a reader to interpret. The Linkedin resume builder and Visualize.me, both try to tackle this problem, but from very different angles.

LinkedIn’s resume builder is essentially a formatting tool that attempts to capture your profile then, re-tag and structure it into a quality well formatted resume. The tool certainly grabs the content, but its ability to understand the content and properly structure it is limited. This problem is heavily exasbarated if you have customized your LinekdIn profile. If your profile is brief and straightforward, the application has much greater utility and does save re-keying time. That said, while LinkedIn allows very limiting structural creativity within an individual’s profile, aresume building tool can actually provide a myriad of opportunities for more creative layouts, descriptions of roles and accomplishments.

Visualize.me takes the process further by attempting to take your LinkedIn profile and turn it into a timeline Infographic. Conceptually this is really powerful and helpful. If your data is straight forward, it provides a great visual representation of your experience, education, skills, interests, and recommendations. The key to the tool is to then invest 30 minutes cleaning up your Infographic information and the application also allows for plenty of presentation options around color, font, theme etc.. Like LinkedIn’s resume builder, the more straight forward your chronological job history, the better the tool performs.

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Social Media 101 For Professional Associations

By Neal Schaffer

I frequently get invited to speak on social media forprofessional associations, and when I do it often seems as if the clocks in the room have been turned back 10 years since before the advent of social media. Although there are always some savvy users of social media in the room when I present, the associations themselves are usually using the same antiquated medium to promote themselves, both internally and externally: a pre-historic website and email newsletter blasts.

I always say that social media is about the convergence of information and communication. Isn’t this the mission of every professional association: To inform their members and communicate regularly to increase the networking (and business) opportunities for their members? Then why don’t more professional associations embrace and strategically leverage all that social media has to offer, and in doing so also help increase association membership while retaining existing members?

The answer to this is that, based on my own experience, most associations are 1) either managed by executives who themselves aren’t frequent users of social media and/or haven’t implemented social in their own business or 2) outsource their marketing and other management affairs to companies or firms that who do not understand social media themselves.

For a 101 primer on some easy ways that professional associations can maximize their social presence, here’s a list of 6 checklist items for your association to confirm your current state vis a vis social media:

1. Create and Encourage Engagement in a Robust LinkedIn Group

With a closed LinkedIn Group that is moderated and only open to association members, you can achieve what you do at your in-person events 24/7 online and without local boundaries. Many associations have LinkedIn Groups but haven’t really encouraged engagement inside them. It is the perfect place to share information, generate discussions, and even share job openings that your company might have. If there is any social media website made for associations, it is undoubtedly LinkedIn. Take advantage of it and leverage it as an important supplement for everything that your association does at your in-person events.

2. Sharing Your Information with the World through Blogging

Sharing information encourages current members to keep informed as well as helps introduce your association to potential new members through the power of your content. Instead of taking a walled garden approach to protecting your content to only be accessible to members, strategically summarize your internal information for the outside world to showcase your leadership within your industry and encourage others to join. Blogging has the additional benefit of aiding your professional association’s website to ensure greater search engine optimization (SEO) benefits as well.

Tips 3 - 5 and complete Business2Community.com Article

Top 5 Tips To Generate Leads On LinkedIn

by Sumoni Gupta

Before you start reading this post, I would like to ask you a question. Which all sites do you use frequently for social networking?

Your instant reply would be Facebook and Twitter. Though they have the potential to get you some income we can’t neglect other social networking websites like LinkedIn etc. I know LinkedIn is not as exciting like Facebook or Twitter but it isn’t that bad. When I started my blogging career, I focussed on almost 10 Networking sites which also included Rediff, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn etc but now I have started neglecting it. With my second site to be launched soon I have again started to put in some efforts back on linkedIn again.

I have also discovered that it is not only a powerful networking tool but it can also help you in generating some leads or sales. With almost 150+ Million members (almost all are Bussiness Owners, Senior Management etc etc.). It has the perfect readymade audience that I was looking for my new site which would be about selling some SEO services. After going through the linkedIn again, I have come to a point that generating leads is not a big task on LinkedIn. So here are some personal tips by me on how to generate leads on linkedIn.

1. Give a Oomph Factor to your profile Your profile would decide your linkedIn presence, and if your profile is not upto date then you are missing out on something big. So its time to change it and make it par with others. Add your experience in your LinkedIn profile. Provide an in-depth write up about your professional history and your services that you offer so that other LinkedIn Members would get to know your services better and order you somehing directly. A professional looking picture of you is suggested. Don’t add some other pics like Taj Mahal or Twin towers.

2. Create a LinkedIn Feeds The best part about LinkedIn is that it gives Individuals and Companies a chance to demonstrate their expertise by replying to questions in their field in LinkedIn answer Area. To grab the attention, answer in categories like your current employers or previous employers or your geographic location. To make it even more easier for you, you can create a RSS feed for your answers and use it with any of your Favourite RSS Feeder tools like Feedburner.

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