It’s that time of the year. Many students are finishing college and looking to enter the professional world. The appraisal season is on too, during which many professionals eye jumping ship. In either case, a cracking LinkedIn game can probably take you miles ahead in forging connections, getting leads, and who knows, getting your dream job.
While everyone has some idea of how to use LinkedIn, here are some tricks and often little-known features to up your professional game:
Turn on open to work
When looking for work, turn on your ‘Open to Work’ feature on LinkedIn to let potential recruiters know that you are there in the market. It is also a powerful feature for freelancers looking to get new clients.
To turn on this feature, go to your profile and click on the ‘Open to’ button in blue. Click on finding a new job in the drop-down menu. A pop-up will open asking for details such as job titles you’re interested in, location, employment, etc. Fill in these and save.
Decide what skills should show on top
When it comes to jobs, skills sell, and hence, you need to prioritise which should feature prominently on your profile. Hence, pin the skill you want to show on the top, and also re-order the rest to highlight your top skills.
Hide your identity while searching
Scouting for potential recruiters is an important step and LinkedIn is the go-to place to do that. However, often one doesn’t want the other person to know that you searched for them. If that’s the case with you, fret no more as LinkedIn’s private mode is just for you. For this, go to settings, select visibility, and click on private mode in the profile viewing options.
Guard your connections
Competition can be brutal out there, and you might not prefer others to know about and poach your connections. To prevent that, go to settings, select visibility, and switch on or off connection visibility, as you prefer.
Save your searches
Job hunting can be a tedious process where you might need to make the same searches daily, which over time can feel cumbersome. To avoid that, you can simply save your searches so that you don’t need to manually type it each time. Not just saving that, you can also opt for email reminders for any new results regarding your saved searches.
Add a bit of yourself
It’s always better to give your professional profile a personal touch and convey prominently that you mean business. One thing is ensuring your profile is 100% complete. Also, you can add audio prompts with the name pronunciation feature. It ensures your name isn’t mispronounced. For this, head to your profile, and click on edit. Go to ‘add name pronunciation’ to do that, which will allow anyone to know the correct pronunciation of your name by tapping on the speaker.
Ask others to write you a recommendation
It always helps if someone writes you a good recommendation. However, that hardly happens out of the blue, and often you need to request for it.
Hence, go to the recommendations section, and simply click on ‘ask for a recommendation’, after which you can choose a connection, and select the working relationship type that you have with that person, after which the other person will get a notification to write a recommendation.
Make use of alumni
It can be a good deal to connect with your former classmates and colleagues. It not only lets you know what they are doing these days but also can help you with new leads.
Make good use of LinkedIn groups
Most LinkedIn groups you might come across don’t appear that useful. However, they offer one benefit, which is that members of the same group can text one another. Hence, be a part of the groups that are of your interest, related to the job you’re looking for, or the kind of work you want to do, and make further connections with the members. Who knows you might come across a potential recruiter there.
