Читать книгу LinkedIn For Dummies - Joel Elad - Страница 17

At some point in your life, you’ll probably have to look for a job. It might be today, it might be a year from now, or it may be ten years from now. The job search is, in itself, a full-time job, and studies show that as many as 85 percent of all jobs are found not through a job board such as Indeed or CareerBuilder, or a newspaper classified ad, but rather through a formal or informal network of contacts where the job isn’t even posted yet. LinkedIn makes it easy to do some of the following tedious job search tasks:

 Finding the right person at a target company, such as a hiring manager in a certain department, to discuss immediate and future job openings

 Getting a reference from a past boss or co-worker to use for a future job application

 Finding information about a company and position before the interview

 Enabling the right employers to find you and validate your experience and job potential before an interview

 Searching posted job listings on a job board such as the one on LinkedIn

The hidden power of LinkedIn is that it helps you find jobs you weren’t looking for or applying to directly. This is when you’re a passive job seeker, currently employed but interested in the right opportunity. As of this writing, hundreds of thousands of recruiters are members of LinkedIn, and they constantly use the search functions to go through the database and find skilled members who match their job search requirements. Instead of companies paying big money for resume books, they now have instant access to millions of qualified professionals, each of whom has a detailed profile with skills, experience, and recommendations already available.

This practice of finding passive job seekers is growing quickly on LinkedIn, mainly because of the following reasons:

 Companies can run detailed searches to find the perfect candidate with all the right keywords and skills in his profile, and they then contact the person to see whether he is interested.

 LinkedIn users demonstrate their capabilities by providing knowledge on the site, which gives companies insight into the passive job seeker’s capabilities. Not only does LinkedIn give users the opportunity to share updates and knowledge, but it also hosts an extensive network of groups on the site. Each group runs its own discussion board of conversations, where LinkedIn users can pose a question or start a conversation and other LinkedIn members can provide insight or link to relevant articles and continue the discussion.

 Companies can review a person’s profile to find and check references ahead of time and interview only people they feel would be a great match with their corporate culture.

 Employed individuals can quietly run their own searches at any time to see what’s available, and they can follow up online without taking off a day for an in-person or phone interview.

LinkedIn research shows that “people with more than 20 connections are 34 times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with fewer than 5 connections.” Therefore, your connections definitely influence your active or passive job search.