Studies show that LinkedIn has rapidly grown to be a key tool in recruitment, both for candidates and recruiters.  With 70 million users and over half a billion searches for specific skills and experience last year alone, you must embrace LinkedIn as part of your job search strategy.

Here you will find my vital rules of business for job seekers when using LinkedIn:

Do’s

1. Connect with your “real life” friends (after setting up your fabulous profile!) Use your email contacts and also search for colleagues and uni contacts.
2. Keep your profile up to date – a must if you are to keep your contacts engaged with your progress.  Send out genuine updates to let your connections know about your good news.
3. Ask for recommendations – use the tool to seek selective recommendations from people you have worked with in the past.  Naturally, ensure that you provide a few genuine recommendations in return.
4. Accept requests to connect from others.  You can’t expect others to connect to you and not connect back!
5. Join groups. An absolute must for any job seeker today’s market.  Not only will you keep up to date with developments in your field, and make more connections,  you can also share your views on a topic too.
6. Remove connections when required.  LinkedIn has a tool that permits you to disconnect from nuisance connections who don’t play by the rules and standards.

Dont’s

1. Become an “invitation spammer” wanting to connect with every person in and out of your network.  Be selective in who you connect with and write a personal message in your invite.
2. Become a “connection addict” and confuse building a big network with a strong network.  Ensure that you connect with people that you are genuinely interested in connecting with and have enough in common with so you can follow up with a phone conversation.
3. Pass on requests you are unsure about – your friends may ask you to pass things on to your network.  If you think it is purely a marketing message and you don’t support it, is better to go back and let them know you feel uncomfortable doing this rather than randomly sending it onto your network.

Job seekers are fortunate now to have LinkedIn so they can connect with people quickly.  Many recruiters are now using LinkedIn rather than advertising, so there are plenty of opportunities out there.  However a key part of using LinkedIn as a job search tool is to quickly follow up screen to real conversations.

I invite you to check out my Linked In profile and connect with me via the link at the top of my webpage.

Post a comment below to let me know if you have recently found a job using LinkedIn and share your success with my readers.  To receive automatic updates from me click on the RSS feed icon.