LinkedIn Seminar – 3 Things I Learned
By: Kendall Crepeau, MFF Intern
First, a big thank you!
Thank you to Krystal Hicks, Founder of JOBTALK, for hosting this free LinkedIn Seminar! In this seminar, Krystal goes into detail about how to optimize LinkedIn.com to its fullest extent, specifically for job hunters.
#1 – Get As Many Connections as Possible
Krystal capitalized on the importance of connections in this seminar. From her experience, she suggests connecting with anyone who sends you a connection, even if you don’t know them. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn doesn’t have personal pictures, your phone number, or nearly as many privacy concerns that Facebook does. Every connection will help you connect with hundreds of more people.
#2 – LinkedIn Premium is NOT necessary
The only time LinkedIn Premium is necessary is if you’re going hard on your job search for a couple of months. It is very expensive, there are ways to bypass premium features that you can look up, and it doesn’t provide that much more than the regular version. She just really recommended to stay away from that.
#3 – Learn How to Optimize Advanced Search
The most important feature that LinkedIn can offer in general is its advanced search. You can search by where someone went to school, currently works, worked in the past, their job title, and many more filters. This makes it easy to find exactly the person or the kind of person you want to find. You can use this to connect with an interviewer for a company you’re about to interview for. Make the connection prior to the interview, and that may increase your chances of getting the job.
How Helpful is LinkedIn Really?
All in all, I feel like LinkedIn can be a really useful resource for job hunters looking to make strong connections in the professional world. Personally, I feel like it could maybe be really helpful to me, but it concerns me that there are few people my age using it. It really makes it hard to start actively using it when nothing is engaging to me on the platform. However, as my peers and I become more involved with the workforce, I am sure I will see more people around my age using it.
