Tuning Linkedin

Recently I ran into a really terrific video focusing on how a recruiter should use LinkedIn. This video is a blog post on http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/. The author is Glen Cathey who at least at the time this video was made was VP of Recruiting for KForce, and this is very clearly intended for KForce’srecruiting staff. This video is a whole five minutes long, so without overthinking it, this is great for job seekers as well.

So what is the magic? What does Mr.Cathey teach his troops?

There are (of course) several points to extract:

• When we have worked on tuning our profiles so we can be found, we have been somewhat mystified  by the order of who is actually returned—why am I on page two when yesterday I was on page one?. A minor part of his presentation explains it. The default is a combination of “key word” and “connections”. He doesn’t go into the full equation and he tells us how to change it, but it starts with the combination that LinkedIn labels “Relevance”.
•  He tells his workers how to develop complex searches, which translates to us as needing to tune our profiles beyond a single word.

So what do we take out of this as job seekers? The most important thing is understanding the recruiter’s point of view and not just when we build our profile in LinkedIn. In this context, LinkedIn represents any resume database and if we are to be found any of them, then we need to make it easy.

NFJS is committed to custom resume’s for every job applied for, and this is probably the most elegant argument I have seen as to why. Recruiting databases, whether it be LinkedIn or some custom DB created internally, Microsoft or GE or Apple provide recruiters the capability of identifying a pretty specific set of skills. If we are going to find the job we want and our tool is online applications, then we need to thread that needle.