LinkedIn Jobs Bonanza For Those In The Know
By Tony Restell
There's a little known secret about LinkedIn jobs. One you have to be aware of if you're to extract maximum value from your presence on LinkedIn. Yet if you're like 99% of the jobseekers I talk to, you're probably unaware of what this is.
That's why I'm writing this article. In the next minutes, you'll have taken actions that ensure you stand to benefit from the LinkedIn jobs bonanza and appear on key recruiter radars...
What Do You Mean By The "LinkedIn Jobs Bonanza"?
Quite simply, there's a huge volume of hiring taking place via the LinkedIn platform, with corporates building their in-house recruitment teams to take advantage of LinkedIn jobs and the LinkedIn network. This is more or less directly at the expense of the recruitment agency industry.
(Note: for first time readers, I'm not one of those who believe the recruiting industry will be gobbled up by LinkedIn. See my articles LinkedIn: Recruiter Shortcomings Exposed and Job Boards vs. Social Media for a frank rebuttal of that notion. But I do acknowledge that significant volumes of recruiting have moved onto the LinkedIn platform and that you may well be missing out on the resulting bonanza).
This is a bonanza for you because historically recruitment agencies built up their own proprietary databases of quality candidates. Those they'd met or placed before would become part of a candidate pool that recruiters would then approach with future openings. If you weren't on their radar, you might never be called.
LinkedIn has changed all that, because the LinkedIn platform has given recruiters the means to research and contact candidates directly. So today there are recruiters drawing up shortlists of candidates to approach based not on their past interactions with their network of candidates, but based on the search results that LinkedIn throws up for them. This is a whole new chance for you to break into the closed circle of fast-track candidates.
So How Can I Benefit From The LinkedIn Jobs Bonanza?
The secret you need to know about LinkedIn jobs is that they're not the main source of hires on LinkedIn. Talk to recruiters who source via the LinkedIn platform and you'll discover that most of the candidates they are interviewing have not come through advertising their job vacancies. Rather, they have come from the recruiter proactively searching for candidates on the LinkedIn platform and approaching them to consider being interviewed for a role.
What this means for you is that if you're busily applying to roles you've found in LinkedIn jobs you may be missing out on the real bonanza. If you're not being approached directly by recruiters on the LinkedIn platform, you definitely are.
If the real action is being seen by candidates who are being found on LinkedIn, the question you have to ask yourself is "what can I do to maximise my chances of appearing on the radars of recruiters in my specialist area?"
This is where you can stand out by putting yourself in the shoes of a recruiter. If they were searching for candidates for the types of roles you aspire to securing, what might be some of the search terms they might use? Some brainstorming on your part might throw up some useful recruiter search terms to incorporate in your profile. But why go with your gut instincts when there's a better option?
What I'd like you to do now is to search for half a dozen jobs that are exactly what you're looking for in terms of your next career move. Feel free to use your favourite jobs board - or why not give our job search engine below a quick try? As you find roles, open them up in new tabs, so you have several open at once...
Now, what you need to do is to scroll to the "Key Requirements" / "Desired Candidate Profile" part of each job listing. You'll start to see specific experience / qualification criteria being listed. If you were looking for a telecom consulting role, you might start to see 3G, mobile data, smartphone technologies, mobile app development and so on appearing within the job adverts as required experience.
The starting point for any recruiter searching on LinkedIn will be to take the job description the business has crafted and to search for the key requirements of the role on LinkedIn profiles. In this example, the recruiter is going to search for 3G, mobile data... etc. on LinkedIn profiles. Now guess what - if those key requirement skills are missing from your profile, you aren't going to turn up as a search match. Those requirements recruiters are working on you may never get to know about - and so the LinkedIn jobs bonanza passes you by.
By way of conclusion, what I'm advocating here is not keyword stuffing your profile in such a way that it reads poorly - or like you've blatantly been seeking to boost your profile's ranking. There's no point recruiters finding your profile, if when they get to your profile they're turned off by what they find! Rather, I'm suggesting you should identify key requirements keywords within your chosen career field and then weave these seamlessly into your profile (where it's appropriate to do so of course). In your LinkedIn stats you should see an increase in your appearances in search results; and in your inbox, an increasing flow of correspondence from recruiters!
Image source: Coletivo Mambembe
Author: Tony Restell
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