Tag: #linkedin

Online, Schmonline. Best practices for finding a job IRL! (5/5)

Curt ConklinLeave a comment

In my last post – which readers enjoyed to my delight – I offered pointers for leveraging online sources during your job search. LinkedIn is great but those submitted applications aren’t going anywhere unless a real person-to-person connection exists. Today I am going to offer best practices on how you can use THE REAL WORLD to build those relationships. Ok, lets go!

Number 1 – Own it! Your job is looking for a job. Take pride in your job and make sure everyone who cares about you knows you are good at it. This may not be easy. It is natural to want to hide your “unemployment.” It can be embarrassing, but you need to get over it. And you will. Do you know why? Because you are taking this sh*t seriously. The situation is as it is for reasons mostly out of your control, and those that were in your control have taught you a lesson. You are a better person today than you were a month ago. You are a better employee now than you were in your last job. You are a f*cking rockstar looking for a stage.

Number 2 – Stay disciplined. Disciplined people with good habits are better employees than those without. Heck, disciplined people with good habits are generally better people. Get out of bed early. Do your chores. Make your bed. This applies to your search too. Keep a notebook (I use a word doc). Write down every conversation you have, with whom, when, what was discussed, whether it was email or in person, and what are the follow ups. Return to this list every week and reach out with deliverables, reminders, and warm wishes. Be strategic and polite, but don’t fear sending a bump up. Even people who love you will forget occasionally. Discipline will keep you in their thoughts. And if you should accidentally over do it, they’ll let you know and you’ll be a little smarter.

Number 3 – Be prepared. As you meet new people, you will be sharing your story. But no one other than a recruiter or hiring manager wants to sift through your too-long resume. Have a list of 5-10 short bullets that sum up your story and can be inserted into every email that its appropriate. Next, print (and carry!) personal business cards. Sure, we don’t officially need them in the smart phone era, but a card placed in a new connection’s hand is a physical reminder of the conversation and may lead to a slot on their to-do list. Finally, understand that different audiences have different needs and prepare multiple versions of your resume. An internal recruiter may want to see that you are an expert in specific platforms, but his or her hiring manager will likely prefer that you can manage teams irrespective of platform.

Number 4 – Say yes. You never know where you will meet the person who is going to lead you to the next opportunity. But you do know that you won’t meet anyone while hiding. Learn to say yes to every invitation you receive. Go to that wine night at your gym, the social gathering at the kid’s school, or enroll in a boot camp (get fit and meet new people). Do you have old friends with whom you mean to connect but never do? Well, this is the time. Can you do one new thing a week? Great, now do lots more. Set a goal of five events each week where you can have a conversation and build your audience. This is your job. Are you good at your job? Yes. Yes, you are.

Number 5 – Seek connections with people you admire. Look within your network and find the people who work for firms you like, are good at building audience, or lead exemplary careers. Pay attention to them. Learn how they succeed, but also how you can get their attention. Reach out, tell your story, be vulnerable. Ask for help. I once read that a young JFK discovered that asking for favors achieved better support than doing favors. Get people you admire to invest in you. While you are doing this, don’t forget to look under rocks. Some of the most valuable relationships you build are with those in the same boat. Seek out other searchers. Share ideas and experiences. Show them love.

Number 6 – Use your time. It may feel like you lose a lot when you lose a job. It may feel like you don’t have much when you are unemployed. But you know what? You have been given something wonderful. Time. Now make the best of it. You have the luxury now to go to the gym more, lose weight, spend more time at your children’s school, read more books – a lot more books. If you aren’t using the extra time in ways that make you fantastically better, then you need to figure out why. Maybe you can use this extra time in therapy.

And finally, stay frickin’ positive. People are attracted to enthusiasm. Looking for work isn’t a pleasant job, but if you can find a way to love it, take advantage of the perks it offers, and use the opportunity to make yourself better, then the people who can help you will want you in their orbit. Remember, your job is audience – not applications. Applications almost never lead anywhere. Audience is filled with opportunity.

My best LinkedIn job-search secrets! (4/5)

Curt ConklinLeave a comment

I started my new career search in earnest seven months ago. I have learned that opportunities for senior managers are hard to find – even for terrific ones like me! But that’s not the only thing I have learned. Today, I am going to drop some of that wisdom with my best practices for using LinkedIn as a job search tool. Ready? OK, let’s go.

Best Practice 1) Only apply for positions within firms where you have a first level connection. As easy as it is, searching for open positions that match your title and salary needs will not work. Instead, start with your first level connections and look for openings in their companies OR find companies you like and see if you have there a first level-connection – or a second level connection that can be promoted to first level.

Note: For LinkedIn beginners, here are some definitions. A first level connection is a direct contact, such as a friend or colleague. They are your main supporters. You may not know a second level connection, but your first level connection does—ask for introductions to expand your network. A hiring manager has an open position they need to fill and makes the final decision. An internal recruiter works with the hiring manager and decides who gets interviewed. These are the gatekeepers. An external recruiter … that is a subject for a whole other post!

Best Practice 1.1) At the risk of redundancy, don’t waste time submitting applications if you don’t have a first level connection. I’m not kidding! Assume that no one is going to look at your application (see my last couple posts for an explanation). Submitting applications blindly makes internal recruiters’ jobs harder, wastes your time, and – most importantly – will whittle away at your morale. I want to make sure you never think that someone looked at your application and decided you weren’t good enough. That’s not what happened. No one looked at your application. You are still awesome.

Best Practice 2) Convert your first level connections from allies into champions. Engage them with InMails (do these still exist?), messages, emails and – best of all – phone calls and face to face meetings. Discuss the company and open position. Polish and practice your case. Convince them you are a fit. Once they are 100% team YOU, ask them to forward your resume to the internal recruiter. Only then should you hit the APPLY button. Remember, if you get hired, your champion may get a referral bonus! People like bonuses.

Protip: When applying through LinkedIn, you may need to upload a resume. This process can sometimes distort the resume format, requiring manual correction of each field, particularly in the work history section. To simplify this, use a plain text version of your resume for easy copy and paste.

Best Practice 3) Post on LinkedIn. You can write about whatever you want but I recommend writing about your job search. My favorite Einstein quote (and I am not looking it up to make sure I get it right) is “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t know it well enough.” You will get better at job searching when you can write about it in a logical and meaningful way. But again, you can write about whatever you want if the reminder that you are searching for a job is clear.

Note: You can post on LinkedIn as either a post or an article. Posts are short, have word limits, and eventually disappear. Articles are lengthy, include a title and header image, and remain on your profile. Use posts for quick thoughts, and articles for detailed content.

Best Practice 4) Post regularly. LinkedIn is quick to tell you that people are more likely to read your posts when they show up weekly. I’m not that good. I try to post every other week … ish. But I have found that having a common theme that I can return to makes it easy to write and engaging to read (hopefully?). This is my fourth post on the things I have learned about job searching during a career pivot. I’d be thrilled if you already knew that!

Best Practice 5) Post with the #OpenToWork hashtag. For whatever reason, #OpenToWork posts generate more impressions, and will elicit better responses from your network than ones without this tag. Add other tags too. Lots.

Best Practice 6) Ignore most of the responses you get from people you don’t know. There are a lot of resume-rewrite trolls out there, and they will send a nice note to everyone who uses the #OpenToWork tag. They don’t add value. There is always a downside. It’s small. Let’s move on.

Best Practice 7) When you post, be humble and demonstrate vulnerability. These things resonate with people who care about you. It may be hard to do this at first, but you will find that vulnerability is power. Let me say that again – VULNERABILITY IS POWER. Everyone has been there and when people see you turning lemons into lemonade, they get a sense of how you would handle difficult work situations.

Best Practice 8) Stay frickin’ positive! If you have read my last few posts, the inclusion of this best practice here will not be a surprise. Looking for work is a hard job, but it is your job. Do it to a level to which you can be proud and never take it personally.

Wrapping up, remember that the goal is audience, not applications. Audience leads to opportunities, ideas, and introductions. Your job is not to apply for a million jobs. Your job is to tell your story to everyone who is receptive to hearing it. This distinction will make you more successful and your path clearer. Do it for 3-5 hours every day. Don’t get upset when you don’t hear back. Make your bed. Love your kids. Smell good. Be your best you.

Next post – best practices OUTSIDE of LinkedIn! Stay tuned.

Find opps & apply easily with LinkedIn – the rest is up to you (2/5)

Curt ConklinLeave a comment

As I am learning first-hand, the market for senior managers is tough right now. But am also learning what search tools work and don’t. In this post I will talk about the ways LinkedIn makes identifying and applying for positions easy – even though landing an interview is as tough as it ever was.

Note: The following is based on only my own experience. I have not verified my explanations with anyone at LinkedIn. I’m a blogger, not a journalist. We are held to very low standards. ;’ )

LinkedIn is great for helping find open positions. There are literally thousands of job postings for any search. Furthermore, if you want a job in a specific area, at a certain level, or within a salary range – there is a filter for that. And LinkedIn knows that the same job may have different titles at different companies. I am looking for chief of staff roles, and am shown senior program manager, transformation officer, and strategist roles.

LinkedIn also allows job searchers to see how they compare for a position. Click the “Am I a good fit?” button and learn if your skills match those required for the role. Then LinkedIn will guide you to add them. It will even suggest solutions when your industry isn’t a perfect match. Once you make the changes, click the button again and – boom – you have what it takes! And I expect that this is the same algorithm used by hiring managers. If LinkedIn says you are a good fit, the company will be told the same – at least from a skills and industry perspective.

LinkedIn even makes it easy to write a professional sounding resume. Take a stab at what you want to say and then ask their AI to rewrite it. This smart tool will make your resume succinct, polish the language, and eliminate any chance of typos – hopefully putting out of business the resume building trolls who comb the site looking for searching suckers.

Finally, LinkedIn makes it incredibly easy to apply for jobs. After clicking the apply now button, you will upload your actual (PDF or Word) resume and make sure everything imports correctly. Once that’s done, all you have to do is agree to terms and conditions and answer some required demographic questions. If that’s too much work, look for the positions offering “easy apply” where you the application process is just clicking one button. Can you imagine the inboxes of those hiring managers? oi!

If any of this sounds complicated, reach out and I will step you through. Maybe I’ll even make a tutorial video. With a little know-how and some practice, you can apply for a dozen positions a week, 50 a month, literally hundreds in the course of a year.

But how effective is this? In my next few posts, I will talk about the challenges associated with LinkedIn’s application process and how you can work it to your advantage.

Not written with AI!

My #1 tip for finding the next great job (1/5)

Curt Conklin1 Comment

Read my #1 tip for finding the next great job! This time without AI

Last week I created a post about staying positive during your job search. Upon completion, LinkedIn suggested I rewrite it with AI. The result was polished, positive, and a little bland, and I went ahead and published it. Since then, I have read several boring posts on LinkedIn that had a similar polished, positive, banal AI tone. I do not like to be boring, so today, I am publishing the original version without AI, and in the dreaded second person voice. Sorry, not sorry. …

My best advice for job seekers

When the world is collapsing around you, when it seems that nothing is in your control, stop. There are things in your control. They may seem meaningless and small but find them. Control them. Master them.

Being out of work and looking for a senior level job can feel like a world collapsing. Former colleagues don’t have openings and are too busy for a meeting. Dozens of LinkedIn applications have elicited zero responses. Even your best friends seem uninterested in making introductions. Fear piles up, insecurity grows, and the danger of paralysis is at hand.

But there are still things in your control. What you eat, how you exercise, your journaling, your family, your living surroundings, and even your closet. Take a hold of all these things and make them the best they can be.

And the most important thing – also the most powerful tool in your job-seeking toolbelt – is your attitude. Keep it positive! Looking for work is hard, and luck may find others first, but none of it is personal. LinkedIn has its challenges, but it’s not their fault. It’s not the hiring managers’ fault. And yes, there is unconscious bias, but that is your cross to bear. None of these things reflect on you. Remember that.

You have value and finding the person who wants to hear it *and* has the open opportunity is going to be a lot of work, but you will do it. Wake up every day, make your bed, love your kids, go to the gym, eat healthy, reach out to five friendly people, and be the best f*cking job seeker you can be. Control what you can, and the rest will follow.

I finished my last project in May. I am currently looking for a project or FTE work. If you have ideas for me, or just want to talk to a positive person who has been through the wringer and came out clean, please reach out!

Original AI post here: https://lnkd.in/gM4BRQYG