It's no secret that recruiters and hiring managers have begun mining social networking sites for qualified job applicants. A recent study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 17 percent more HR professionals use sites like LinkedIn to recruit candidates than they did in 2006.
Fortune 100 companies use this social networking service to recruit a wide variety of professional candidates. The fact is, over 60 million people have created accounts on LinkedIn. Executives from every Fortune 400 Company are represented and a quarter of LinkedIn members are senior executives. The management consulting firm, Accenture, plans to fill nearly 20,000 vacancies through LinkedIn in the year 2010.
So what's the best way to exploit LinkedIn to leverage you job search? A few tips:
Don't just post your resume and photo to your LinkedIn profile, exercise a little SEO and take advantage of LinkedIn's power to connect by adding key words to your profile that describe what you do. Words like Brand Marketing, Media Manager, or Sales Professional can help draw HR managers to your profile.
Join an alumni or an industry-specific group to widen you sphere of professional connections. Who knows, the HR professional looking for candidates may just belong to the same group.
Answer a question posed by visitors on LinkedIn's Answers Tab. It's a great way to show your knowledge about a particular subject. Look for topics a potential employer might be interested in.
Fill in the "What are you working on?" field at the top of your profile. Let it be widely known that you'll be attending a seminar or conference, that you're writing a book, or a column on a specific area in you professional field.
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Alex A. Kecskes has written hundreds of published articles on health/fitness, "green" issues, TV/film entertainment, restaurant reviews and many other topics. As a former Andy/Belding/One Show ad agency copywriter, he also writes web content, ads, brochures, sales letters, mailers and scripts for national B2B and B2C clients.
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