Significance of LinkedIn in Job Hunting

LinkedIn is the largest professional networking website having 756 million members in 200 countries worldwide. It has actually been around longer than Facebook & Twitter. It helps you to create and manage your online professional brand, which means nearly an unlimited supply of network connections and job opportunities. LinkedIn can perform near miracles for your career development. Hiring managers and employers both use LinkedIn to source candidates for employment. As a candidate you can use LinkedIn to research companies at the same time you will also appear in the search done by different recruiters. Here your presence on LinkedIn plays a significant role.

If you are a job seeker, you can let recruiters and your network on LinkedIn know you are open to new job opportunities.  LinkedIn will help your profile show up in search results when recruiters look for suitable job candidates.

In the current scenario, most of the recruiters check the LinkedIn profiles of candidates who apply to their openings. That’s why it’s highly important for job seekers to manage their profiles well.

Five major advantages of LinkedIn for jobseekers:

1. You can create your professional brand: There are certain ways of creating a professional brand i.e. building your own websites, writing professional blogs etc. but creating a LinkedIn profile is much easier. It takes hardly 30 minutes to set up a LinkedIn account. Once you set up an account on LinkedIn find out what makes you marketable? It’s important to upload a professional profile picture (since profiles without proper pictures are not considered genuine). Write a powerful summary. Emphasizing your personal strengths and domain-based skills, this helps recruiters and your network to understand you as a professional.
2. Follow companies and their employees: LinkedIn can be used as an important tool for researching organizations and people working for those organizations. It’s a good practice plan and decide some organizations you want to work for and sending a connection request to the people working for those organizations with a short personalized message. It’s also important to follow companies’ official pages to stay updated.
3. Connect with LinkedIn groups: Connecting with groups with similar interest and help you expand your network. Groups allow you to take part in the discussion where you have the brilliant opportunity to exhibit your skills and knowledge about a particular topic. Groups also assist you to connect with key people of the popular industries. 
4. Write articles about specialize area of your knowledge: If you can write well, it’s a great opportunity to write and post your articles on LinkedIn about your area of interest. It boosts your presence, showcases your knowledge and portrait your image of an intellectual person in your network. If you can’t write so well, find stories relevant to your field and post them with your brief comment.
5. It can help you tap into industry news: Following the official pages of industries of your choice, while scrolling your timeline on LinkedIn you can stay updated about news and events in a particular industry. It’s a good practice to take important notes of your target industries. This will assist you at the time of preparation for the job interview.

Conclusion: There are almost endless benefits of LinkedIn. From a jobseeker’s perspective, LinkedIn is an effective tool to get ahead in the job search. So, ultimately you can build and maintain your network, search for jobs, and build your professional reputation through LinkedIn. In short, having a LinkedIn profile will help you a great deal in landing your dream job.