Why all Rowing Professionals Should Use LinkedIn

An earlier version of this article was published in 2020.?

Every rowing organization, professional and semi-professional working in the rowing community should have a LinkedIn profile. Here are the reasons why:

Career professionals (career coaches, HR professionals, hiring managers and professional recruiters) for the most part agree that LinkedIn is the best social media platform for finding, vetting and recruiting the best candidates. It is current and it is growing:

Three Reasons Why You Need a Powerful LinkedIn Profile

Do you Need a LinkedIn profile?

The Benefits of Using LinkedIn for Your Career

Let’s Face it, LinkedIn Might be the Best Social Network Right Now (behind Wall Street Journal paywall)

LinkedIn is the platform to market yourself professionally. There are very few high-level professionals out there who are not rocking a really solid and detailed LinkedIn profile.?

If you have a LinkedIn profile, you make it easier for rowing organizations to find you and potentially recruit you to coach. As a part of my service offering for rowing organizations, I recruit coaches for open opportunities all over the domestic United States. When I encounter a coach who is not on LinkedIn, it is hard to ascertain what their career intentions are. If you aspire to a full time career in rowing, you need to communicate that you are an active part of our professional community and open to hearing about new opportunities.?

When a big opportunity comes across my desk, I immediately go to LinkedIn. My clients are hiring me because they want me to find the best candidate legally available to work in the United States. For that reason, I tap into a very deep network (almost 1500 rowing professionals) of LinkedIn contacts.?

Even if you are a full time professional, and happily engaged with your current position, you should still have a LinkedIn presence. You can always publicly present as not looking for new opportunities (your current manager will probably appreciate that), but that will not preclude an experienced recruiter like me from calling you. Always, always, always, take the call when it comes and find out more. You can learn so much from those conversations: what the hiring environment in that organization is like, the pay scale, the organization's plans/motivations, and most importantly, get a snapshot of your own professional market value.?

Hiring managers are also using LinkedIn to vet their potential candidates. If the hiring manager has a current profile, then there is an excellent chance they are viewing yours (or noticing your lack of one).

Conversely, if you are a hiring manager (an administrator, head coach, board president, rowing director) you can be vetting your coaching candidates off of LinkedIn. Not only can you see their public resume, you can also see their contacts and potential references. In addition, if your profile looks solid and admirable, with lots of solid and reputable contacts,? you are more likely to have the best candidates want to come and work FOR YOU.

For coaches, LinkedIn is the only place we can really shine as a professional. You can post those shots of your crew on the medal stand on Instagram, but you wouldn’t post/flex there about your absolutely brilliant seat racing matrix. You CAN and should post about that on LinkedIn. Proud of your training plan for the month and all the erg PRs it catalyzed? Why not brag about it on LinkedIn? In a space filled with other professionals working in the same industry and are paying attention, why wouldn’t you want to flex there at least a little bit?

LinkedIn is the only place we can engage in professional knowledge-share without spamming our friends and family with ‘more rowing stuff.’ Case in point, I only ever post these articles here on LinkedIn. There are several groups to enable this:

The World Rowing Network - Huge worldwide group, mostly amateur athletes and coaches.

Rowing Professionals - Smaller group, but self explanatory.

Masters Rowing Network - For the international masters rowing community.

Of course you are sharing/discussing within your immediate circle of coaching friends, but LinkedIn is the only medium where you can share outside of that bubble. For example, coaches in the SW Junior Region have an email thread of how each program is handling quarantine protocols and timing their return to the water. Yes, an email chain just like 1995 all over again. If that same discussion was happening on LinkedIn, it might be shared out into other regions and for greater perspective and insight.

LinkedIn is the first social marketplace where professional hiring managers go for the first casual look for candidates and idea exchange. Market your coaching brand. Explore new opportunities. Post your own ideas, as well as learn about others. There currently is not a better place to have a professional dialogue on almost anything within our community.? Don’t be left out of the conversation, any conversation.