Many are the ways to add value as an employer, but in this article, we want to explore how to bring out your skills, or better yet, how to make yourself even more visible as a job seeker.

The following tips also work well when you don’t necessarily want to let everyone know that you’re looking for new professional challenges.

Networks

For anything to really matter, you need to have a network to start spreading the word or information about your expertise. For years I’ve talked about how the networks will only increase the importance of looking for work and those who have “the correct network condition” are usually picked before the others.

Networks are increasingly referring to digital networks, especially in relation to job search. And when I talk about digital networking, it’s increasingly referring to your own network found on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, it’s incredibly easy to network with new people and when you do it in a smart way, the end result is usually good.

Your personal brand

Do you have a personal brand? Yes, we all have one and never before we had such a wide range of different tools available for its development. One of the easiest of these tools is once again: LinkedIn!

Of course, it all starts with your own profile and the fact that you trim it properly so that is shows your full potential. That is by no means enough, but with your own activity, you can achieve a lot there.

So what could you do on LinkedIn? From the “$1.80” Instagram strategy developed by marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuck, I could use a quote that works very well for this situation also:

“If you see someone in the comments who has a question and you know how to respond, answer. If you love the post and admire the looks of it, say so! If you have thoughts about the quote or the copy in their post, reply! If the image reminds you of another content creator, tag them. If you think a friend would benefit from seeing it, share it with them. Comment, like, engage, respond, share.”

Add to that the fact that you are going to produce your own content and take on the task of writing 2-3 well-thought-out publications every week and actively responding to comments, you will quickly notice how visits to your profile will start to grow significantly. Sooner or later your own online activity will lead to the situation where people starts to make interesting contacts.

If you’ve heard the term “Social Selling” and always wondered what it is, well, this is exactly part of it. In this case you’re not selling your company, product or service. Or, yes you are but the product is you. And those interesting contacts you start receiving, we could call “inbound leads”.

Connect with the Right people

As I said at the beginning, networking on LinkedIn is still really easy, maybe too easy. LinkedIn has not been terribly active in tackling the side effects, related to the fact that a lot of networking calls, coming from people you don’t really know. I also recommend networking with people you don’t know, but do it with some thought.

Instead of sending a connection request to everyone, you should think for a minute about who you are sending it to. I recommend you to make a small list of a few companies that you find interesting and then send a request to the key people working there, always with a short message, even if you don’t know the person.

In addition to that, I would actively network with recruiters and headhunters, but I wouldn’t immediately go to ask for a new job, I would just approach the matter by first making myself visible in their feed. Key here is to like, comment and add value to their posts, just like I explained already.

There is much more than LinkedIn

The time spent on job hunting is approximately 65% on LinkedIn, but there is so much more. People responsible for recruiting and decision-makers are strongly influenced by their emotions. Therefore, if you can start a new conversation with the HR manager for instance, even just on LinkedIn, it is good to think about how you can create a positive impression for a job interview.

In general, the more you bring yourself out and give the recruiter a chance to get to know you, the chances of getting ahead in the job search process will increase. Don’t forget to use also other social media channels, a short presentation of yourself, even better, a video presentation, previously published articles, etc. They are all great ways to tell a recruiter more about yourself.

Protip: Because you read so far, I will give you this as a gift. If you really want to stand out and find your dream job, start using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Let’s say that you have 1000 people on your LinkedIn Network, it can be hard to follow and interact with the people you want. And at the end of the day, it’s LinkedIn who decides what you’re going to see on your feed, based on your previous actions, of course.

But with Sales Navigator, you can, for example, create a list of companies or people you want to follow and on your Sales Navigator home feed, you just see their posts. This makes the whole thing so easy, and with Sales Navigator, you can also approach people with InMails that are not still in your network. And if you haven’t tried it yet, LinkedIn gives you 30 days free trial so you can try and see if it’s worth it. And I know it is if just used properly because it doesn’t do the trick by itself. ?

Teemu Ruuska

CEO

InHunt World

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