Have you added a link to your LinkedIn profile to the header of your resume yet? I see many resume headers showcasing a person’s name, address, phone number and email, and neglecting to include a bridge to their biggest branding asset, their LinkedIn profile.
When a recruiter or a potential employer opens your resume, all they have to do is click on the link – and they will be taken to your beautiful profile featuring your:
- work portfolio (samples of your work);
- your articles;
- your recommendations;
- a great picture of you.
By the way, is your profile URL customized or full of strange numbers and letters that do nothing to market you? Read “Claim Your Territory: Customize Your LinkedIn Profile URL” to learn all about customizing your profile URL.
---Linked Intellect--- 
What are your thoughts about buying advertising on LinkedIn on an individual basis to target an update or blog post to specific audience? The goal would be to find someone looking for my skills and either haven’t made a job opening or haven’t described an opening that matches my offering.
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Thank you for your question! Buying advertisement to target a specific audience is a smart idea. However, I would caution you against spending too much money before you covered all your bases with free techniques for improving your digital presence and attracting the kind of employers you are interested in.
• Your ultimate goal is to make your profile so strong, relevant and appealing that the employers you are interested in will come to you. Make your profile results oriented, create an outstanding portfolio of your work in your profile (more on this below), get educated about SEO – invest your time and effort in this inbound marketing, and you will see results. Decide what companies you want to attract and demonstrate to them that you are the person they want to hire by showcasing what you bring to the table in a powerful way. A couple of small things that make a big impact follow.
• For your headline, rather than saying “Engineer”, say something that immediately demonstrates your brand, something like “Experienced Mechanical Engineer | Team Leader | Project Manager | Project Turnaround Expert”
• Upload materials to a portfolio of your work in your LinkedIn profile. This is a great way to demonstrate what you bring to the table (as opposed to simply talking about it). Not too many people use this LinkedIn feature, but these who do truly stand out. For example, include a document showing approach to policy writing or a white paper writing, a presentation highlighting approach to Business Process Improvement or proposal writing, a spreadsheet demonstrating work with macros – anything that would let you showcase your work.
This will increase the number of visitors to your profile and hopefully of potentials leads. Only if these approaches fail, would I invest in paid targeted advertisement. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mariafafard/, I will take a look at your profile and provide more recommendations.
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I’m blocked from connecting after recalling the default invitation in order to send a more meaningful message.
I am not seeking advice on my profile but I would welcome an opportunity to discuss observations about the environment at LinkedIn and in particular where it is failing to engage employers or hiring managers.
My observation is that employers and hiring managers in particular are not very active on LinkedIn. They are passively posting predetermined job openings and waiting for responses. Alternatively, they are occasionally and briefly searching for matches of key words taken from their openings. I don’t see much evidence that they are casually browsing profiles of people such as checking profiles of people whose comments on discussions seem interesting — not even comments posted to their own company posts.
I had hoped by now LinkedIn would be taking more initiative to foster more active engagement by hiring managers to get to know the population of candidates through participation in discussions or joining networks so that they can get to know candidates as people and then recognize that there may be something to offer that doesn’t fit their rigid filters for their job openings.
I liked the idea suggested by Zappos that allows people to participate actively with employers before discussing job opportunities. This sounds like something LinkedIn should foster.
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