LinkedIn Confidential for Career Professionals

by Christine Gertz

Many career professionals have heard of Facebook and social networking, but some are unaware of the business networking side of social media, specifically the business networking site, LinkedIn, http://www.linkedin.com. Other career advisors may have received an invitation and pressed the delete key. Here are six reasons for career advisors and counselors to accept the invitation to join.

1. Create a profile. First, joining any network, either face-to-face or online, is a voluntary decision that all users make, after you have considered the costs of your time and privacy prior to joining, in relation to the benefits of networking. If you decide to create a profile—for some of the reasons that I will outline below—there are privacy settings, as well as personal decisions about LinkedIn usage, that you can make to guide your use of LinkedIn. You will be required to fill in your name and contact information, including some geographical information, and enter in your current employer.

It is then optional to add previous employers, though you may decide to add that information later so you can search for former colleagues who may be on LinkedIn, or to look for alumni in the schools you may have attended.

To set or change your public profile on LinkedIn, what people can see about you via LinkedIn, click on Account & Settings in the top right hand corner of your “Home” page, and select Public Profilefrom the Profile Settings. If you want everyone to see you, set as Full view, and select which types of information—such as your photo or your current positions—can be accessed. If you don’t want anyone to see your profile, select none. The second option means that you can still interact on LinkedIn, but that you don’t want people outside of your accepted connections to see any of your information.

Immediate use: You can’t interact with people on LinkedIn unless you have a profile. Without a profile, you can access some of the public areas, such as the LinkedIn blog and the public areas of LinkedIn Answers, so it is a good idea to surf around in those areas prior to joining to decide if this service is worth your time. You may decide that just skimming the Answers section is enough for your current needs.

2. Forming a network. The principle reason to join LinkedIn is to join its international business network. LinkedIn’s motto is “Relationships Matter”, and there are plenty of tools that will allow you to build relationships both on and off-line.

When forming a network, you will encounter one decision fairly early: should you import your email contacts from your Outlook or browser mail accounts to see if they are on LinkedIn? Since you are just starting out, I suggest you say no, and manually enter in a few people who you would like to invite or do a search to see if they are already on LinkedIn. You can change your mind about importing contacts later. As you build up contacts or supply additional personal information, LinkedIn will make suggestions of people who are on LinkedIn that you may know.

Once you join LinkedIn, you will decide what type of networker you will be: closed or open. A closed network means that you only accept the invitations of people who you know personally, face-to-face, or through another trusted network. An open networker, sometimes identified in their profile as a LION (LinkedIn Open Networking Community), will connect with anyone who asks, and invite anyone to join their network—provided that they don’t abuse the LinkedIn terms of service. For more about this aspect of the LinkedIn community, read Jason Alba’s blog post, I’m a LION—hear me roar!, http://imonlinkedinnowwhat.com/2008/07/31/im-a-lion-hear-me-roar/

Immediate use. The larger your network, the more people you will get to answer your questions when you post them in the Answers sections, and the more people you can find for doing reference checks or researching company information.

3. Recommendations. You can write and receive recommendations from people on the LinkedIn network who you have worked with in the past, including when you were a student. When you write a recommendation, the person who you are recommending is allowed to vet your recommendation before accepting it, and can even send it back to you for a revision. You can also decide to hide or share recommendations even after you have accepted the recommendation.

Immediate use: If you are using LinkedIn to find more clients, recommendations are the “juice” that powers the LinkedIn services directory. There is an option in the service directory, found under company search, to search for a career coach or a recruiter, so self-employed career professionals may want to solicit recommendations, but this decision will depend on your business rules.

4. Answers. Answers is a forum for LinkedIn users to ask questions and get feedback. Questions can range from, what are you doing right now, to how do I negotiate a salary offer? I personally have asked questions about interviewing trends, posting jobs via text message, and about team building activities, and gotten a wide range of interesting responses. You can also designate good and best answers to your questions, which then become affiliated with the respondent’s profile, boosting their esteem as sources on LinkedIn.

Immediate use: Sometimes clients ask questions that we just don’t have the answers to, or we may have no one in our personal network who can answer that question. The Answers forum is a place to get that information and to store it for later use, since LinkedIn keeps all of your questions in a My Q&A file, that only you can access.

5. Joining or creating a group. Facebook users form groups, either professional or for fun, and LinkedIn also allows for the formation of professional groups, or “metagroups”, within LinkedIn. You can join alumni associations, green business networking groups, technology-oriented groups, even book clubs.

Immediate use: If you belong to a professional organization that doesn’t have a member’s directory or who can no longer afford to print one, you can create a group for the professional association—provided that you have permission to do so—and invite members to join, giving them additional professional visibility. You will have to decide if your group is open to all, or if you need to vet new members—for example, checking to see if they are a current member—before accepting them into your group.

6. Applications. Applications are connections to other online services, such as Slideshare, Google Presentations, polls, even Amazon Reading lists. Once you add an application, you can upload the information to your LinkedIn profile.

Immediate use: If you have slides stored on Google Presentations or Slideshare that you have used for a conference presentation, you can add them to your profile so other LinkedIn users can see what services you can offer, or what your knowledge base is. Personally, I’m not too keen on sharing my reading lists, but if you have a recommended list of interview books, for example, that you think clients should be aware of, this is one additional tool that you can add to your profile by importing the information from an existing Amazon booklist.

These six initial suggestions are only skimming the surface of the services and tools that are available with a LinkedIn account. For a private practitioner or a career advisor who would like to make information available in a more professional setting than Facebook, LinkedIn offers the tools and privacy controls to expand your professional network and conduct research.

For more about LinkedIn, you can read about the company history on their About page, http://press.linkedin.com/ about, as well as an April 2006 article on LinkedIn’s business model and relationships to other online networking services, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-04-09/how-linkedin-broke-through

For more ways to use LinkedIn, you can read Guy Kawasaki’s blog post, Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn, https://guykawasaki.com/10-ways-to-use/, or read Jason Alba’s book, I’m on LinkedIn—Now What?? available from HappyAbout, http://happyabout.com, or read the book blog, http://imonlinkedinnowwhat.com/.

Christine Gertz is the Library and Information Specialist at CAPS, University of Alberta. She has written and presented on the uses for technology in career and student services. Her note-taking blog is available at www.co-agitating.blogspot.com/ and she is a very bad blogger.