Cynosura

Using LinkedIn to find a job

Finding employment in our current economic crisis is no mean feat. Where to find a job fast is on the minds of some three million people in the UK at the moment.

I am often asked if there are any additional methods beyond the traditional adverts, agencies and networking approach. The answer is yes. Searching for employment has never, in some ways, ever been easier. Or at least finding a suitable job; the rest is down to you and the quality of your Curriculum Vitae (CV) and interview skills.

One of the growing new ways of searching for employment is through social media. Over the next three blogs I will discuss finding a job through LinkedIn, the professional businessperson’s social media site.

This blog looks at setting up a good LinkedIn profile and how it will help you to get recruited.

To start with, ignore most of the advice you have probably been given by friends and family. Your LinkedIn profile should not be your CV placed online, nor should it be a heady text of your needs, desires, visions and interests. If you really want to find a job then your profile should be as skilfully crafted as your CV.

Let’s start with the headings. In your ‘Professional Headline’ it is pointless putting the job title of your previous job. Instead you should indicate what it is that you do for a living. So instead of ‘Assistant Manager, Payroll and Benefits’ you might put ‘HR specialist in Payroll and Benefits’. This assumes, of course, that this is what you want to continue doing for a living.

The next section of job search importance for you to complete is the ‘Professional Experience and Goals’ section. There is a lot of poor advice floating around about what to put in this section. Some say that you should write it like a story in the first person. Others say that you should write about what you are looking for rather than what you have done. These two items of bad advice will not help you to get a job.

Instead write your entry in similar style to the profile at the top of your CV. This section should say what you are, along with your key skills. Make it rich with the things you want to do (i.e. probably the things you most enjoyed doing in your previous job) because by inference this will tell any potential employer what you want to do in your next job.

A typical entry for this section might read as follows:

‘An experienced Sales and Marketing Director within the pharmaceutical sector. Extensive exposure to worldwide markets, culturally sensitive and accomplished at researching, developing and implementing complex marketing strategies. An adept team leader used to handling morale issues and drawing out the best from the team whilst meeting demanding deadlines’.

Below that comes the specialities section. Most people either don’t know what to put in this section or they fill it with waffle. This is perhaps the most critical section of your whole profile. The golden rules are to keep it short, preferably use bullet points and it must be keyword rich.

In fact your whole profile should be keyword rich. That means that you should use the professional words you would expect to use in your everyday work. As a communicator, for me that means words such as, copywriting, proofreading, press releases, internal communications, external communications and so on. If your specialisation uses lots of acronyms then use them; software proficiency language such as Java, Perl, Python etc are very important. Project management skills such as Prince2 or legal jargon such as PQE 10 years are all important additions to your profile.

Going back to the specialities section, don’t overdo the specialities. If you put in lots of bullet points then you are hardly a specialist. As a general rule six bullet points should be the maximum. Your bullet points should reflect the types of keywords a recruiter might type in to their keyword search. Below is an example:

• New business startup & setup (& business rationalisation)
• E-commerce development
• Affiliate marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Website design
• Article marketing.

The fourth and last section to be covered in this blog is ‘Experience’. This is the section where you list all the jobs you have done in chronological order starting with your most recent.

Again, some golden rules.

Don’t cut and paste from your CV. LinkedIn is a public site which is open to anyone and everyone. There may be things in your CV which should not be broadcast to a wider audience.

You don’t have to put down every job you have done. If you put lots of jobs, does this mean that you have no staying power? Probably not but it could look like that. You needn’t go back more than fifteen years (i.e. to around 1997). If you have worked for just one employer for a long time then split this up into the individual jobs you have done whilst working for that employer.

Having laid down these golden rules, it is important to put something in the ‘Description’ part of this section. Ideally this will include a one or two sentence description of your job at that employer. For example:

‘Responsible for providing full time management, communication, administrative and logistical support to the CEO of this rapidly expanding international organic produce retailer’.

Underneath that put some bullet points giving your key achievements in the job. Again, don’t put too many bullet points. As a general rule the most recent job might have up to six bullet points, but as you move further in to the past the number of bullet points will decrease. Make sure that in these bullet points you make the text keyword rich with language that will draw a recruiter to look at your profile.

If you follow this advice then your profile should look professional, be rich in keywords and prove a handy additional tool in your work search. One final point, don’t forget to put a good quality photograph into your profile.

Next time, we will look at how your profile helps LinkedIn find a career opportunity for you.

Serving notice is a lingering death

In these times of economic stress it seems like almost every company, and a lot of public sector organisations, are making people redundant.

The process is pretty horrid for all concerned. Of course we all give our thoughts to the employee who has been made redundant, but it is no easy thing for most managers or HR professionals to have to do, and it is hard for those who are left behind.

That is why having to serve notice is all the more difficult. The statutory notice period is one week for each complete year the employee has been continuously employed with them, up to a maximum of twelve weeks.

Now that really can be a lingering death.

Even the most conscientious employee will find it difficult to concentrate on the job. If the process leading up to the redundancy has been contentious or acrimonious then some employees could be apathetic, obstructive or even destructive in their remaining weeks. The workplace could be filled with poor productivity, petty arguments, poor timekeeping and absences.

Ultimately the organisation will suffer through low productivity and falling morale.

For those who remain there will be feelings of guilt and, even worse, pity for the person who is leaving. Unfortunately it can also be a time where the sharp witted and even sharper tongued can revel in hurtful jokes. For some it may be a time to whisper in corners or ‘get even’ for slights that have festered way beyond their time.

The effect can be corrosive on those who remain and can break down team bonds as views differ on the person about to leave.

For the person about to leave, the situation is arguably the worst. They are forced to sit there listening to the gossip, fending off the ‘kind’ words and counting the days to the end of life as they have known it. Each day becomes a chore. Each hug another reminder of their situation. One person described it as the worst form of rejection; a sense of worthlessness and a lead weight on their self confidence.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

The company or organisation could choose to give the employee gardening leave; that means they have the time to find a new job whilst still technically employed. The survivors of the redundancy period can settle down into a new ‘normal’ without having to worry about the feelings of those leaving. The company can rebuild productivity as well as morale by moving forward with those who remain.

Beware generalisations

Generalisations are fine up to a point. They play a role in helping us to communicate broad ideas and concepts when precision is not needed.

For example, ‘At peak periods aircraft land at Heathrow every ninety seconds’. This generalisation doesn’t tell us when those peak periods are, nor does it spell out that there can be huge variations in timings across those peak periods. As a general rule, though, it helps us to get a picture in our minds of the volume of traffic going in to Heathrow.

How we then perceive that individually is another matter. An air traffic controller working at O’Hare International airport in Chicago, which has the second largest number of movements annually, would not find that especially high (Heathrow ranks 13th in such annual movements). Someone working at Bournemouth Airport would find the figure quite staggering (they manage around one every three minutes). Someone who knows nothing about the travel industry might wonder at how it was possible to land an aircraft and get it off the runway in such a short period of time before the next one arrives.

Nevertheless, such a generalisation helps us to interpret a lot of things about Heathrow from our perspectives.

Generalisations are often linked to statistics; ‘the average manager gets paid this amount’, ‘the speed of cars on that stretch of motorway is this’, ‘the hotel trade has a staff turnover of around 60% annually’ etc.

When generalisations become linked to groups of people then they can start to be dangerous. ‘All bankers are corrupt’, ‘all business owners are greedy’, ‘all politicians are in it for themselves’ all display one thing in common; a negative generalisation of a group of people. Of course you could have, ‘all nurses are angels’, all pilots are clever’, ‘all social workers are caring’.

In both sets of cases the generalisation is wrong. Not all bankers are corrupt nor business owners greedy; nevertheless the generalisation targets a group and encourages a negative perception which leads to distrust, suspicion and, in some cases, violence. Equally, not all nurses are angels, pilots that clever or social workers caring; and yet it encourages us to think favourably of such groups, to trust them and to act kindly towards them.

It is such generalisations that the media love to play to such effect. A good generalisation followed by a request for examples of ‘where you have been fiddled by a banker’ (for example) provides a rich seam of stories that allow the media to reinforce the generalisation and turn it into a scoop. Almost every example used by the media will be negative because positive stories don’t sell newspapers; they don’t play on your prejudices.

So next time you hear or read a generalisation just give it some thought before you get stuck in with your own lurid examples to back up the story. One day that generalisation could be about you and your kind.

Meanwhile, did you spot the deliberate omission in this blog? If you did then you will have spotted how prejudices can creep in to any story