There is no substitution for a network of active professional and that is the truth.
Kevin Bacon’s Six degrees of separation, which draws from the theory of “Six degrees of separation”, states that any person can be connected to any other person through 6 or less than 6 connections.
That gives us the reach, but what needs to be understood that it is still a level playing field and each one has the same reach. Today’s world has cut throat competition. There are thousands like you who want to be in the same position you are or are aspiring to be in. Hence the recruiter has a lot of candidates to look at.
How do you stand out from the crowd?
How do you bring yourself to the notice of employers?
As Debra Caires says "You" are a business. You have invested years in sharpening and learning new skills. You are now your own business and your resume is your sales pitch.
And this sales pitch has about 1-2 minutes before it is relegated to the garbage bin. Due to this limited attention that it will be getting it is absolutely necessary to have a sales pitch (read Resume) which will leave an impression.
A sales pitch consists of among other things the hard cold fact of “What do you bring to the table? How will your skills help the other person / business achieve his own goals?”
What you can and cannot do needs to be put across to a potential employee
I believe that this can be done by following these simple tips –
1. Get a customized URL – This way whenever anyone decides to Google for your name it is ensured that your LinkedIn profile is the one which will show up in the results.
2. List out all your skills in the inverted pyramid fashion – Put the skills you are most familiar with first followed by the others. This is how the recruiters believe people list out their skills. Users however do not realize this.
3. Have a professional photo – Although it might not seem like a lot the profile picture is sort of a pre-first impression. As such it should be decent. Extravagant / Nonprofessional photos might scare potential employers away.
4. Add Multimedia to your LinkedIn profile – LinkedIn supports all types of Multimedia including but not limited to audio, video, presentation, documents. The only catch is that the documents need to be published on a third party preapproved provider.
5. Get recommendations from people you have worked with.
6. Put in snippets of testimonials (with permission) into the LinkedIn profile.
7. Fine Tune your headline to reflect what you currently do / aspire to do.
8. The summary of your LinkedIn profile should reflect your work and why you think you did a good job and back it up wherever possible with figures (percentages etc)
Sources :
http://socialmediatoday.com/node/1700131
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2013/04/17/how-to-market-yourself-on-linkedin
Image Courtesy: http://www.someecards.com/usercards/viewcard/MjAxMi1mYzMwNmYxOWVkZTNlMTg3
Hello Ashwin.
ReplyDeleteI got to say, you sure packed a whole lot of information about LinkedIn into your blog post. I think you did quite a good job at explaining what LinkedIn is, and then you had a smooth transition over to how to improve your LinkedIn profile. you are exactly correct in that we only have a few minutes to pitch yourself, so we need to be convincing in that short time span. I do have one small critique about your blog poss though. after reading over each of your posts they do seem a bit long. I applaud you for making each one so informative, but I think you might be better served trying to condense your posts a bit.