Have You Looked at Your Social Media Lately? In Particular, LinkedIn

To maximize your success with LinkedIn, taking full advantage of its features is critical. Image: photosince/Shutterstock.com

Don’t have social media? Unless you are working undercover, are being stalked, or have some other legitimate reason for not being on social media, it’s time to get on board with at least a LinkedIn account. You can get a free account and populate the basics with your picture, your work experience, and your education. I would advocate for putting together a more robust profile, but these are the basics.

If you do use social media, you should audit it. Your social media account can impact your career, both for good—and bad. Here are 5 things to ensure your social media does not negatively affect your career / job search:

1.     Establish What’s Already Out There: Locate and document your profiles. Log out of your Google accounts. Clear your browser cache. Then, Google your name. Start with just your name but narrow it down by including your location or your job title. Are the results positive, negative, or neutral?

2.     Assess Each Profile: Is there information that could potentially be harmful to your job search? Look for (and delete!) inappropriate photos, posts bad- mouthing coworkers/employers, bad grammar, political comments/views, etc. Also double-check your privacy settings

3.     Identify Any Gaps: Are there any industry-specific or job-specific accounts you need? For example, a developer should have an account on GitHub. A photographer needs an Instagram account. For a writer, consider a Tumblr or Medium account.

4.     Assess Your Total Social Media Presence: Ensure consistency across all your social media profiles. Consider using the same professional photo on all your social media accounts so it’s easy for a prospective employer to identify it as your profile. Make sure your name, job titles, and dates match those on your resume.

5.     Evaluate Your LinkedIn Presence: Spend some time making sure your LinkedIn profile represents you well. Is your LinkedIn Headline effective? Make sure your LinkedIn profile is “complete” and you’ve claimed your custom URL. You should also have a minimum of 300 connections.

LinkedIn is updating and adding features all of the time. LinkedIn is the key social media and networking tool for professionals around the globe. More than 220M LinkedIn users are from the United States so it is a terrific tool for networking, being recruited, and job search. Recruiters, especially in the private sector, routinely se LinkedIn to identify potential candidates.

To maximize your success with LinkedIn, taking full advantage of its features is critical. Here are some of the new features available on LinkedIn:

·      A new focus on skills. As skills based hiring gains in popularity, LinkedIn is onboard. Profiles with a minimum of 5 skills are 27 times more likely to be recruited (of course your skills need to match the job). You can add skills to your headline as well as to your About section.

·      New ways to identify key words. The “build a resume” feature will show you the skills needed for particular positions.

·      Show your interest to recruiters. By using your target company’s About page, you can set up an alert to notify internal recruiters that you’re interested.

·      Is your name hard to pronounce? LinkedIn as a feature where you can record your name’s pronunciation which can help others connect and address you properly.

·      The Open to Work feature can be used privately or widely shared; you can also set up alerts to get notified of openings for which you might qualify.

·      Have more than one LinkedIn account? You can merge them into one.

·      The ability to schedule posts. The best way to get noticed on LinkedIn is to be active—this means posting and commenting. LinkedIn now allows you to schedule posts for publication up to 90 days in advance.

·      While this does not count as a new feature, you should still take advantage of the opportunity to customize your LinkedIn URL; once you do so, you can add your LinkedIn URL to your resume.

If you’re not using LinkedIn to facilitate your job search, you’re missing opportunities. LinkedIn tends to rollout new features over a period of time so if you cannot find the above on your account, give it time.

Nancy H. Segal is a federal job search expert. Following her own senior-level federal HR career, she founded Solutions for the Workplace LLC to provide a HR management perspective to astute applicants to U.S. government positions.

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