By Cathy Quaranta
The September 1, 2015 DACS General Meeting had a good mix of members and ‘future member’ guests in the audience, interested in the topic. Perfect timing: the Fall hiring season is here.
Tom Zarecki kicked off the meeting with some DACS news – he mentioned the new Online Business and Social Media Workshops, noting that tonight’s presentation would be about one of the new social media tools – LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the more powerful, positive and impactful social media programs to help people find jobs. LinkedIn has ‘Connections’ like Facebook has ‘Friends’.
Tom introduced the featured speaker – Donald Wittman – a local computer guy who worked in IT, now has his own consulting company, and teaches a five hour Boot Camp to help people find a new job.
Don brought handouts with some of his LinkedIn tips, tricks, and strategy details – perfect for note-taking and then using the Profile Checklist at home. Thank-you Don!
There are three kinds of job searches. The ‘Push’ strategy includes sending your resume, responding to job postings, working with Executive Searchers, Headhunters or Recruiters. Second is Networking, to find out about openings and needs at other companies. Tonight Don concentrated on the ‘Pull’ strategy, which has people coming to you – it works best right now on LinkedIn. The goal is to provide a LinkedIn profile that headhunters and companies can search to find what they need in you.
Don described LinkedIn with some numbers – there are 380 million LinkedIn users, a good photo increases your views by 11X, listing Skills increases views by 13X, search firms have researchers who use LinkedIn exclusively to shorten the hiring cycle. 90% of recruiters use LinkedIn, 64% use LinkedIn exclusively, but 80% of people use only 5 keywords. Recruiters can’t find you unless your profile is ‘Pull-able’ – i.e. found in a search. They use only the top 20-25 profiles that meet their requirements.
There are two main types of LinkedIn subscribers – Recruiters and Job Seekers. Interesting note #1 – LinkedIn’s income is from searching. Recruiters pay 64% of LinkedIn’s income for three levels of subscriptions – about $80 for the HR Lite subscription, $800 for the full HR version, and some use one of the personal subscriptions. LinkedIn Job Seekers can join for free or upgrade to $29 or $99 subscriptions to conduct more searches and use other features.
Interesting note #2 – LinkedIn search results displays are a numbers game.
LinkedIn uses a combination of methods to display (‘rank’) the people found in the searches. Don explained what we need to do to be in the top 20-25 people found. You need to consider the following:
- Be in the highest ‘All Star’ LinkedIn strength (Don has 27 million connections -1st,2nd, 3rd and group. Some are 10,000 Super Connectors.
- Participation/activity on LinkedIn raises your profile rankings.
- Matching keywords in different sections have different values. (Details for finding the appropriate keywords are below.) You need about 200 points to be found at the top of the list. Title keywords are 7 points, Experience tagline keywords are worth 5 points for the previous job tagline and then 3 points for each of the 3 previous position taglines. Summary, Interests and Skills sections keywords are worth 2 points each.
- Give and receive endorsements and recommendations.
- Use a standard ‘Location’ setting. ‘Greater New York City Area’ is much more likely to be searched for than ‘Danbury’.
- Joining LinkedIn groups has two benefits – it improves your number of connections, and being more closely connected to the ‘searcher’ puts you higher on their lists of search results.
- Adding LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) to your profile demonstrates that you are interested in social networking, especially important for marketing people.
- Adding ‘HR’, ‘Hiring Manager’, etc to your Interests section can help.
- A good Summary section is your marketing pitch.
Identification of Keywords – take the description of a job you want, strip out the company information, then copy & paste it into a word cloud like wordle.net to find your keywords prioritized for you. Take the top seven and start to make ‘Keyword Pairs’ so you have exact matches. For example, ‘Computer’ might be one of your top keywords because the job posting had ‘Computer Software’ and ‘Computer Hardware, so you need to use both keyword pairs in many sections of your LinkedIn profile to be ‘found’ at the top of a search list.
There was a wide range of LinkedIn user experience and questions throughout the presentation. Don kept it light.
Don teaches the Boot Camps on the last Saturday of the month at the Innovation Centers in Danbury, Hartford and Stamford. Eighty percent of the people who have taken Don’s Boot Camp were hired in three months. For more information you can contact Don at Wittman Technology – don@wittmantechnology.com