When seeking career advancement or a new job, you are likely confronting a lot of competition. What are you doing to stand out from the crowd? Depending on the position, many recruiters and employers are using the Internet as a preliminary background check, looking for publicly available information. Today, most people, especially professionals, are aware of this and will work on reputation management and building a positive social media footprint. However, LinkedIn is striving to provide you with tools beyond profile building.
For professionals, LinkedIn is more of a just another social media platform, like Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn helps you build your network of industry contacts, from junior managers to experts. However, LinkedIn is working to become more than just a networking website. Yet, few use LinkedIn to its full potential. Ask ten of your colleagues about their opinions of the business-oriented social networking service, and their answers are linking similar to, “I’m on LinkedIn, but I have no idea what it is really good for.” Does that sound familiar?
Regardless, consider that the Pew Research Center reports that LinkedIn usage is highest among the college educated, more that 60 percent of users hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Additionally, high earners dominate the network, 45 percent are earning $75,000 a year or more. When you are looking to improve your career path, these are the specific types of people you need to have a professional connection. Don’t you agree?
The big question is how can you use LinkedIn beyond building a large number of connections? There are many generic articles online about creating a top-notch profile. You need more than that to boost your professional career. LinkedIn is developing tools that will help you advance your professional development strategy, more easily contact and communicate with connections, and find your next job without sending up red flags to your current employer.
1. Conversation Starters
Just announced in December, LinkedIn’s Conversation Starters is a is a new tool providing help to users give a boost to their professional careers. Since LinkedIn’s prime focus is assisting you in creating and building relationships, Conversation Starters will make messaging easier when wanting to reconnect, ask for advice, or when networking for job opportunities. The messaging tool will provide you prompts using your contact’s professional activity, your shared experiences, and your shared connections. The goal is to empower you to personalize your messages and make reaching out less intimidating.
2. Salary Comparison
On the surface, LinkedIn’s new Salary Comparison tool gives you insight into your salary compared to others locally, nationally, and around the world. However, the Salary Comparison tool goes deeper, providing you with professional development recommendations. It compares and contrasts factors such as years of education level, years experience, industry, company size, and location to salary, bonus, and equity data. This vital information will give you a road map to boost your professional career. Launched in the U.S., Canada, and U.K., in November 2016, LinkedIn plans a global rollout sometime in 2017.
3. Open Candidates
LinkedIn’s Open Candidates feature, rolled out in October 2016, provides an easy method for connecting with a potential new employer via private signaling to recruiters. Would that be of benefit in your situation? There are more than 6 million job opportunities listed on LinkedIn. This new tool allows you to target opportunities fitting your needs and ambitions, including the types of companies and positions, and automatically sifting through the many recruiters using LinkedIn to find talent. Best of all, you can privately indicate to recruiters without worrying that your boss will find out. LinkedIn blocks Open Candidates signals from those recruiters working at or affiliated with your company.
What haven’t we covered yet that is important to you? If you would like to talk about the new LinkedIn tools to boost your professional career, check out this blog post, or contact us.
Social media is an extremely important part of your job search. Scrub your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram profiles of anything that might be deemed offensive or divisive. This includes removing any photos or posts that may not be appropriately professional and making sure that you have recent, appropriate profile pictures across all your social media accounts. For more tips on cleaning up your social presence, check out our video.
