Guide to LinkedIn

In 2021, the U of A Career Centre surveyed alumni about their career progression after graduation in 2016. These respondents had roughly five years of experience in employment, additional education and had experienced assorted career disruptions. One of the questions on the survey asked about job search methods that had led to either an interview or a job offer, not job search methods in general, but ones that met our success condition. The following are the top five most successful job search methods:

  1. Job postings on employer websites (47%)
  2. Contacted organizations or people I have previously worked with or volunteered with (25%)
  3. LinkedIn Job Posting (20%)
  4. Talked to people that I know well, such as friends and family, and let them know that I was looking for work (20%)
  5. Enrolled in post-secondary education (15%)

Though LinkedIn was mentioned as the number 3 method in the top five, LinkedIn can assist with all of these methods.

  1. When finding job postings on specific employer websites, you don’t know the name of all of the employers that could hire you and Indeed and LinkedIn can’t scrape all job postings, only the postings that are accessible and readable by their bots. You can use LinkedIn Company Search to look for the name of a company that you know and then look at the “Pages people also viewed” to find additional, related organizations. 
  2. You can maintain contacts or refresh contacts with organizations that you previously worked for or volunteered at by going through your own personal contacts on your email or phone, but what if a person has moved on to another organization? If they have moved on in their career to a new job, back to school, or are taking a break for personal reasons, LinkedIn offers you an avenue to re-establish contact.
  3. Respondents to the survey said that “LinkedIn Job Postings” led to an interview or job offer, not networking on LinkedIn or applying with a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn Job Postings is similar to other , such as Indeed. This means that job postings that are accessible to the bots the aggregator sends out to search for job postings to index are readable by the bots and not protected by a password (bots can’t enter passwords). Similar to Indeed, LinkedIn Job Postings will also accept job postings submitted by employers to the LinkedIn Jobs Platform. You only need a logon name and password to see the job postings, but not a full profile.
  4. Family and friends should be accessible, but maybe you were overwhelmed by responsibilities and haven’t maintained good connections? What if you aren’t that close with certain family members and friends and you would prefer to make the first contact through social media? LinkedIn is one option. You can use LinkedIn to make sure that friends and family have some knowledge about your industry by checking their profiles, rather than trusting a relative who says, “they do something with computers.” 
  5. Though a significant minority of respondents said that they enrolled in post-secondary education to find opportunities, it is also true that many respondents may have started their education knowing that the program they graduated from in 2016 was not enough to pursue the career they wanted. For example, becoming a physician or a lawyer requires additional education, so their initial four-year or graduate education was a gateway to their desired career. You can use the College and University, as well as the Alumni, search filters in LinkedIn to look for additional information, such as current students and alumni of your target program and conduct research on faculty members (if they have a LinkedIn profile).

All of these methods do not require a fully developed LinkedIn profile, only a login name and password to access LinkedIn.

You may find you need a developed LinkedIn profile if you:

  • Decide to apply to job postings that have an Apply on LinkedIn option. In that case, consider a resume and cover letter advising appointment to discuss how to target your resume and write according to the business style of resume writing.
    • Your LinkedIn profile should not be vastly different from your resume, and creating a targeted LinkedIn profile, based on your goals, improves your chances of attracting an employer to your LinkedIn profile.
    • For people who look at your resume or meet you in person before seeing your LinkedIn profile, you want your profile to align with your networking goals. For example, if you are a biological sciences student looking for career options in wildlife conservation, you want to emphasize your education and experience with wildlife conservation, not a profile that exclusively highlights your side hustle in wedding photography.
  • If you are using your LinkedIn profile for networking or relocation, create a profile that establishes why you are reaching out to people on LinkedIn to facilitate those goals. 
    • For example, use your About section to explain why you are looking to information interview civil engineers and architects about your career options as a first-year engineering student who is thinking about their engineering education and potential graduate school programs.
    • If you want to relocate, create as many connections as possible in your target region before you relocate. This improves your LinkedIn Search results for jobs and networking connections in those regions.

Building a LinkedIn Profile for Employment

There are several reasons to create a fully developed LinkedIn profile, and the strategies for developing those profiles are different. A LinkedIn profile to apply to opportunities on LinkedIn should look more like a resume with an About section crafted like a cover letter. In this case, don’t create a LinkedIn profile that is general or generic to your field: learn how to target your profile.

  1. Learn how to create a targeted resume and cover letter
  2. Apply those principles to the content and wording of your LinkedIn profile. You can look at our LinkedIn Profile Rapid Review Checklist for advice and links to technical assistance on LinkedIn for things like writing your Headline and how to adjust your LinkedIn URL.
  3. Look at profiles in your industry for guidance. A LinkedIn profile for a personal trainer will look different from a Java programmer’s profile.
  4. Ask for one-on-one advice on your profile from an advisor who can consider your occupational goals and interests.

LinkedIn is a dynamic platform with more than one purpose as a company. In addition to hosting resumes and making those documents accessible to recruiters, LinkedIn also markets itself as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, an event management and marketing platform, and an educational platform. LinkedIn also sells its data to, or may have its data scraped by, a variety of third parties to generate additional revenue, and may use your data to train Large Language Models (LLM). LinkedIn will change its service based on its goals as a company with different audiences, not only for the benefit of job seekers.

 

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