In our 18 years of recruiting and combined 50 years of IT hiring, we have seen LinkedIn rise as the industry leader among career sites. The professional development site boasts 450 million members in 200 countries and territories, and the 2016 acquisition by Microsoft provides LinkedIn with the resources to dominate, grow its membership base and provide innovative bells and whistles with wide-ranging benefits. Beyond being LinkedIn Talent Solution customers ourselves, we could not vouch for a better job search tool. Recently, when LinkedIn announced new ways for candidates, recruiters, and employers to connect, we decided to compile our list of new and existing tools that will supercharge your profile–and get you noticed by the right people.
Open Candidates
This new feature allows you to send a signal to recruiters that you’re interested without making it public. According to LinkedIn, “Open Candidate is a new feature that makes it easier to connect with your dream job by privately signaling to recruiters that you’re open to new job opportunities. You can specify the types of companies and roles you are most interested in and be easily found by the hundreds of thousands of recruiters who use LinkedIn to find great professional talent.” The feature is designed to prevent LinkedIn users associated with your current company from having visibility into your status. The Open Candidates can be turned On and Off at any time.
Kinda looking? Based on behavioral data, LinkedIn found that the line between active and passive candidate was blurred. In a LinkedIn blog published October 6, 2016, Head of Recruiting, John Jersin writes, “We recently surveyed tens of thousands of LinkedIn members about how they look for a job and were surprised to find that 90% of professionals were open to new opportunities if they were presented with the right role. Most of those professionals weren’t actively looking, but they were leaving the door open just enough to learn more.” In addition, the platform found that candidates who fell off during the application process were just as interested as those who hit submit. Those ‘fall-off’ candidates are being captured through heat map technology. Now, when you begin to fill out an application but stop short of submitting, the job poster will be able to identify you. As part of a trend toward seizing–err, nurturing–candidates, companies might follow-up to help you act on your intent.
2. Insight Into Company Hiring Trends
LinkedIn understands that candidates are looking for an expanded view into potential employers. In addition to listing job requirements, candidates are looking for:
- What connections (if any) do you have at the company?
- Does the company have a history of hiring people like you?
- Who will you work with if you get the job?
Now candidates can access this information in real-time when they view a job listing. Through the ‘Message’ feature at the bottom, candidates can contact their connections on the spot, too.
If you are a Premium subscriber, you can view data on hiring trends for companies (see below) as well as what kind of professionals are applying for a particular opening. Data only accounts for hiring activity through LinkedIn-related solutions and does not capture off-platform activity.
3. Highlighting Skills
If you can only muster the time to do one thing, it’s to take inventory of all your skills, including newly acquired skills. We can’t repeat this enough. Recruiters rely heavily on the skills you list to narrow down the search. In the screenshot below, you can see that recruiters will segment and filter skills on a granular level.
Including your full battery list of skills, languages, and technology stacks, helps you. Now would be the time to beef up that section. You want to be found and, trust us, recruiters want to find you.
Additional LinkedIn Tips
- Create a ‘vanity’ LinkedIn URL that helps brand you. For example, https://www.linkedin.com/in/JohnDoe_DevOps
See step-by-step directions - Make building out your network into a weekly habit. Play a game of adding 10 connections a week and endorsing your connections. Once you’ve hit this number week after week, increase your metrics. Try 25 new connections a week.
- Write testimonials for people in your network. Ask for testimonials. Make both a genuine gesture of you who are as a professional.
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