Use LinkedIn to Convert Job-Hunting into a Sales Process

The cover story of this week’s Fortune magazine, July 1, 2013, is all about LinkedIn. Part of the story involved how it could help job-seekers find new jobs. Since it was a bit high-level, I’ll use this post to describe how job-seekers can take full advantage of what LinkedIn has to offer.

Job-Hunting is a Sales and Marketing Process

In a post last week I cautioned job-seekers that applying for jobs and hoping to get an interview is a low probability event. Instead, I suggested that getting a job should be viewed as a sales process that involves converting leads (the job posting) into prospects, and prospects into presentations. (Here’s a link to a networking webcast I did for LinkedIn members last week on how to do this.) Good sales people know that during the presentation their job is to uncover their client’s needs and offer a solution. This is also the real purpose of the interview. Too many candidates think it’s just about answering the interviewer’s questions. While doing the prospecting and presenting are both critical, there’s another aspect of finding a job that must take place first: developing your marketing material. From a job-seeker’s perspective this means making sure your LinkedIn profile is easy to find and quickly captures a recruiter's attention.

Insider Secrets on How Recruiters Use LinkedIn to Search for Candidates

Few job-seekers understand how recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates. There’s much more involved that just looking at candidates who respond to job postings, although this is part of it (about 25-30%). The rest of the time is spent looking for profiles that match their open job needs, networking to obtain referrals and cold calling passive candidates. In all cases the quality and readability of the person’s profile is of utmost importance. Knowing how this process works will help you format your profile to both be found and to be read.

How Recruiters Use LinkedIn to Find Candidates

LinkedIn provides recruiters a very powerful search engine to match candidates on multiple criteria that best fit the job description. Recruiters typically narrow the list to about 50-100 people before reviewing the profiles in any detail. In the initial search list, recruiters see a very short version of the prospect’s profile. The recruiter will scan each of these summaries for a few seconds to decide if it should be looked at in more depth. For those selected for the deeper review, recruiters are presented with a non-graphical version of the person’s profile. Recruiters will spend about 30 seconds to a minute reviewing this. Then they’ll either call the person for clarification, or look at the full online profile.

I just went through the process using a job I filled many years ago as a test case. The purpose of this was to see what candidates could do to improve their odds of being found and called. I started with about 500 profiles and narrowed the search down to the best 20. I then looked at each of these for about 1-2 minutes each and found six that were worth calling. That’s all the time I needed to determine if the person was in the ballpark, or not. If it was a current search, I would have called these people and have had a short preliminary discussion. Based on this test, following are some ideas I believe will help you improve your LinkedIn profile.

Tips for Job-seekers - How to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile

• A candidate has very little time to get noticed, so your LinkedIn profile, especially the summary section, needs to grab the reader’s attention.
• Use the line under your name to brand yourself. This is prime real estate and especially important for younger people, or for anyone who doesn’t have a meaningful and attention-grabbing job title. For example, “Keeping the Toughest Managers Organized” is a lot more likely to get noticed than “Office Manager – Ace Supply”
• Make sure any upward progression or promotions are clearly visibly. Also make sure well-know companies are easily seen. Both add credibility to your profile and increase the chance you’ll be noticed.
• Include links to your groups, blogs, personal website and maybe even a two-minute YouTube summary. On the website show pictures and videos of your portfolio, projects and samples of your work. I looked at about five of these, and two were exceptional.
• Highlight any awards or honors you’ve received including the names of the groups. Recruiters search on these terms.
• While you need to list your skills in order to be found, I didn’t look at this list at all to decide if I should contact the person.
• Have written recommendations from people who are likely to give you references. Have them include specific details of your best work, not just glowing statements without validation. This doesn’t matter much in the first phase, but as a recruiter I would have read each one of these before deciding about conducting a formal phone screen interview.

Accelerate Your Prospecting Efforts

LinkedIn is constantly adding new features for candidates and recruiters. Most job-seekers don’t take full advantage of what LinkedIn offers, but applying basic marketing concepts and knowing how recruiters find candidates can help them better craft their message. Perhaps the bigger message from all of this though is the idea that while being easily found is important, more important is the idea that job-hunting is a selling process. And most sales people aren’t waiting for their customers to call based on an ad they put in the yellow pages. Instead they’re out hunting for prospects, networking and making cold calls, finding out who needs their products and services, and then making contact. A robust LinkedIn profile is an important part of this, but only the first part.

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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the creator of Performance-based Hiring and the author of the Amazon Top 10 business best-seller, Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007). His new book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, (Workbench, 2013) has just been published. Feel free to join Lou's new LinkedIn group or 'like' us on Facebook to discuss all types of hiring issues.