5 LinkedIn Job Search Tips You Haven’t Heard Yet

Insightful ways to improve your profile and grow your LinkedIn job search network.

This is a guest post by Nisa Chitakasem. If you’d also like to guest post here on JobMob, follow these guest post guidelines.

As LinkedIn is the biggest professional social network in the world and is a proven tool for building business, changing careers and landing a new job, you may feel like you’ve already heard everything there is to hear about the social media site.

We’ve seen all the tips before, right? Fill in your profile, use a professional headshot as your photo, personalize your invitations to connect, etc.

But there are a few lesser-known LinkedIn job search tips that can be just as effective as the ones we all know about.

Here are 5 of the more unusual pointers:

1) Take advantage of the less popular profile apps

As popular as LinkedIn applications such as Amazon Reading List and My Travel are, there are some other profile apps, that don’t deserve to be overlooked, especially by the job seeker. One of these is SlideShare Presentations.

What do slideshows have to job searches?

For a start, complementing your CV or LinkedIn profile with a multimedia presentation that illustrates your skills, what you’re passionate about, what you’ve done and what you want to do is going to make you stand out from the rest of the job hunting crowd.

2) Don't invite connections on impulse

As soon as you see someone you know or someone who’s big in your current or desired sector join LinkedIn, you might be tempted to send them a connection request straight away. Relax—you don’t have to immediately jump in there.

If you know the person, research what they’re up to, to see how their life as changed since you last spoke to them.

If you don’t know them, find out more about who they are—they may not be as relevant to your job search as you imagine them to be. If the person’s profile is public, you can even send them a comment or a question to feel them out in advance of sending that request out.

3) Connect with friends from other social networks

Search on LinkedIn for people you’re already known on Twitter or Facebook. Some people might prefer to keep LinkedIn completely separate from more informal social networks, but if you maintain this policy, you may be missing out on building your professional relationship with existing Facebook friends or Twitter followers.

These are people you already know online—look at their LinkedIn profiles and see if they’re worth connecting with there as well.

4) Connect with people who took interest in your profile

It’s easy to get so caught up in viewing other people’s profiles that you forget that people are also viewing your profile.

Check which members have viewed your profile and take a look at theirs to see if they’re worth connecting with—and if they can help you out with finding a job.

5) Make new LinkedIn contacts from your old offline contacts

LinkedIn tells you when people you know join up. I only found this out by chance, so perhaps it’s not a well-known feature.

Scroll down to the end of your home page and click on the links under ‘Just Joined LinkedIn’ to see which of your former colleagues or classmates has signed up. LinkedIn will only know to tell you about these people if you’ve listed the companies and schools you met them at in your profile and they, of course, do the same.

About the Author
Nisa Chitakasem, co-founder of career consultancy Position Ignition and co-author of the 125 LinkedIn Job Search Tips eBook.

READ NEXT: Success Story: How I Used Twitter and LinkedIn to Find a Job During the Recession.

Subscribe to JobMob via RSS or email and follow me on Twitter for more ideas on using LinkedIn and Twitter in your job search.