10 Essential Facts
Career Professionals Need to Know About LinkedIn Now!
Joshua Waldman, Author “Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies”

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About Joshua Waldman
Joshua Waldman, author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, has offered LinkedIn profile writing services for the last two years. Waldman is the founder of the CareerEnlightenment.com blog, which won the About.com 2013 Reader’s Choice Award for best career blog. When he hires new writers, Waldman asks them to go through his customized training program, now available to the public as “The LinkedIn Profile Writing Masterclass.” [careerenlightenment.com/lipw]

Your Clients Want LinkedIn Services but Don’t Know What to Ask for

complaints to you, and your job is to put those symptoms together to form a diagnosis and treatment. There are a few facts in this situation that you may have seen as so obvious that you did not give them much attention. In that case, you might give him aspirin for the pain, protein supplements for the weight loss, and a recommendation for more rest for his fatigue issues. But you wouldn’t be healing the patient until you found the actual disease, the actual cause of his symptoms. Based on your expertise, you know the patient’s symptoms may indicate that he has steatohepatitis, or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. A few facts about this situation. First, the patient doesn’t really know what is causing his ailment. He’s only able to identify his pain and other odd symptoms. Second, your role as doctor might be to initially treat the symptoms. But ultimately, to help the patient, you need to find a diagnosis, identify the cause, and a treatment, i.e. identify a path to health. In the class I teach at WorkSource Portland Metro, [socialmediatraining.us] more than 50 percent of our attendees are 55+ job seekers. When asked, many of them will respond with their symptoms. For example, “I’ve sent out hundreds of résumés and got only one call back, but after the interview, I was told the job went to an

At the risk of sounding patronizing, I will use an analogy to describe something I often see in career practices. Bear with me. Imagine you are a doctor in an emergency room. A patient comes in and complains of several symptoms. He says he’s fatigued, keeps inexplicably losing weight, and has pain in his upper right abdomen. He brings his

internal candidate” or “I have a LinkedIn profile, but it doesn’t work.” My trainers are able to identify the actual cause, which is often poor online positioning and a lack of durable online networking skills. The attendee doesn’t come in saying, “I think I look terrible on LinkedIn and send offensive spammy InMails.” If they did, our job would be so much easier! No. They just know things aren’t the way they used to be and they’re frustrated at not getting the results they used to get with the tools they used to use. So the first thing they do is increase the old things they used to do. Right! I need a better résumé; clearly that’s what the problem is. I need to apply to more jobs using job boards; clearly it’s a numbers game. In a recent conversation with a director at the Oregon Employment Department, I heard that most unemployment beneficiaries call asking for their money, but don’t know to ask for access to our social media job search class, which is freely available to applicants. The staff are not trained to ask qualifying questions to see whether our social media class might be a fit. They are just treating symptoms. “How many jobs did you apply for today?” They prescribe a résumé class, or a networking event, even when that job seeker happens to be in an industry

where 99 percent of the hiring happens through social media. Then the job seeker might try LinkedIn for a few minutes, and say, “This doesn’t work.” A common illness I see is “fill-in-my-profile-as-fast-aspossible-it is,” in which the patient, uncomfortable with social media, fills out the profile quickly, with little thought to personal positioning or the point of view of the audience. You can identify sufferers of this illness from their cropped profile photo and job-title-only headline. “LinkedIn doesn’t work,” they complain, as they walk into your emergency room. I am convinced that as career professionals, it’s our ethical obligation to say, “No, it works, but you’re not using it right. Let me help you figure it out.” This is what it will look like to you. Client comes in. They order a résumé. You deliver the résumé. Bye. But if pried open a little bit, you’ll see that they are getting a résumé because that’s what they think they need. But you know they also need a professionally written LinkedIn profile. That’s money you’re leaving on the table!

The Lesson

The lesson here is to remember to ask your clients the right questions and try to identify what is really going on in the big picture of their job search. Their success or failure to secure work has something to do with how they are showing up online. Your job is to tell them what their illness is. Lucky for you, that cure is likely to be LinkedIn services. Do you offer them yet?

Staying up to date with LinkedIn isn’t as hard as you think

“I have résumés to write and clients to take care of. I don’t have time to monitor all of LinkedIn’s retired or new features.” It can be really frustrating. I know. I’ve made it my fulltime job to stay up-to-date with social media as it relates to job search. If you decide to offer LinkedIn writing services, it is your job to know what is going on. But don’t let that stop you from offering these services, because staying up to date is easy. My charge to you is to just be open to that fact that this platform changes. Be okay with that. Smile. I remember teaching a room of 50 academic advisors at the University of Illinois. I was going to show them LinkedIn’s new Skills research page, where you can see which skills are popular and how they’re trending. So I went to the URL I had bookmarked and got a 404 error. That morning, LinkedIn had retired that page and that function. I was embarrassed at first. Then I was humbled. And in front of the entire room, I admitted that this feature doesn’t exist anymore, so let’s move on. It happens.

Many career professionals I talk to avoid LinkedIn because it changes so frequently, and that makes them uncomfortable.

It’s okay. No one can ever be a true expert with these things. But with a few minutes a week, you can be more informed than most people.

…and that’s all that’s required of you to call yourself a professional.

Easy ways to stay up-to-date with LinkedIn’s changes
• • • • • Read the LinkedIn blog a few minutes each week: http://blog.linkedin.com/ Subscribe to LinkedIn’s product updates newsletter: http://lnkd.in/productupdates Join the Friends of LinkedIn Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1905643 Join the LinkHumans newsletter. It’s fantastic: http://linkhumans.com/subscribe Use LinkedIn regularly. Not only is LinkedIn a great marketing tool to get more clients, but it will help you get familiar with the processes you might eventually have to teach. Listen to their investor calls each quarter: http://investors.linkedin.com/ Participate in industry groups. If you’re a résumé writer, join and monitor résumé writing groups. If you’re a career coach, join and monitor career coaching groups. People talk about the changes you need to know about.

• •

LinkedIn wants you to become a thought leader
In the early days of LinkedIn, people on average spent less than five minutes on the platform. In contrast, during that same time period, people spent more than 90 minutes on Facebook. When LinkedIn went public, their first challenge was to change the platform to encourage more user time on the website. Several recent initiatives have helped lengthen this time: • • • • Improvements in Groups Recruitment of world-class thought leaders who post valuable content you can follow and read The acquisition of Pulse, which curates relevant news based on your profile and network Finally, the introduction of Long Form Publishing [http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail /a_id/47445/~/long-form-posts-onlinkedin---overview]

Here’s an example of fellow résumé writer Martin Weizman writing a long form post: http://linkd.in/1tBg3BZ This is what the post would look like on your profile:

If you don’t have access yet, you can apply here: http://specialedition.linkedin.com/publishing/ Here’s how you know if you have this turned on. Do you have the little pencil icon in your status update bar?

Your posts will show up on the home feed of every person in your network. The more you post articles like this, the more your network members will engage with you over LinkedIn. Building your thought leadership this way helps both you and them.

Action Tips
1. First, read through some of these best practices articles on LinkedIn Publishing 2. Join the LinkedIn for Writers official Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=6628 332 3. Write your first article and use Fiverr.com or another online source to hire an editor before publishing it 4. Ask your network for feedback. I’ve seen some of these posts go viral!

LinkedIn’s constant change in features makes sense when you know where their revenue sources come from

It’s also about being able to explain to clients why LinkedIn makes these decisions, and at an advanced level, being able to anticipate them. Many people don’t realize that LinkedIn makes most of its money by selling recruiting solutions. LinkedIn’s recruiting solution allows recruiters to find candidates based on keywords, years of experience, current job title, current location, and other factors. Recruiters can put candidates through a recruiting pipeline. It’s easier for recruiters to find the right people when more people fill out their profiles. Did you notice the huge improvements over the last year in the ease of filling out profiles? It’s easier for recruiters to identify personality and expertise when candidates post status updates and articles. Have you noticed how much the home page has improved with more posts and commenting? LinkedIn recently purchased Rapportive, a Gmail plugin that shows you a person’s LinkedIn profile right in your email, and makes it easy to connect with them. The more connections you have, the easier it is for recruiters to find the right people. Just look at this list of LinkedIn’s acquisitions. Notice how many of them support their recruiting product: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn - Acquisitions

Source: http://press.linkedin.com/about

Part of being a career professional who offers LinkedIn services is staying up-to-date on those services.

I suggest that it’s through this lens you should now be looking at LinkedIn. It’s through this lens you can explain to clients why LinkedIn disabled the Skills research platform, why they turned off Events, and why they did away with Answers. None of these features helped recruiters, and they all cost money to maintain. In my opinion, these are good things. Jeff Weiner said in one of his videos that LinkedIn’s goal is to bridge this gap between qualified talent who can’t find work, and recruiters who can’t find the right talent.

Food for thought

The next time you hear someone complaining about yet another change on LinkedIn, you can reassure them by reminding them that LinkedIn is making these choices for very specific strategic reasons, which ultimately will help our clients connect with future employment.

LinkedIn is probably the best way for private career professionals to find new clients

number of things you can do to attract clients is unending. Sure, the best marketing is doing a good job with clients. In an ideal world, they are happy with your work and refer more clients to you. But the most successful career professionals I’ve seen use LinkedIn about 80 percent of the time to market their services. (Not sell, but market – they are different things.) When I asked some of my clients how they found me, about half said through Google Search, the other half said by using LinkedIn. To rank on Google for “Résumé Writer” or “Career Coach” is difficult for several reasons. First, we’re in a fairly crowded marketplace. Only 10 search results are listed on a search engine results page (SERP). Second, even if you rank, you’ve not yet developed trust with the visitor before asking them for the sale or even to opt in to your newsletter. The bounce rate on these ranking websites is actually quite high. But LinkedIn allows you to build upon relationships and connections, allows you to establish expertise and authority without pushing the hard sell. (Don’t be one of those people who InMail all of their contacts asking them to buy stuff!) Not only will your profile show up on search results of people who are 1st and 2nd degree connected to you,

Marketing shmarketing! Most of us got into this business because we just want to help clients figure things out, get jobs, and be successful. Marketing is a job unto itself. With email campaigns, websites, webinars, auto-responders and paid ads, the

but also, you’ll be able to reach out to potential clients in groups, InMails and Companies. There’s something I heard from a salesperson friend recently. She said that these days about 80 percent of her sales happen before she’s even spoken with the prospect on the phone. What she means is that by the time a lead gets in touch with the company, they’ve already looked at online reviews, online profiles, scam reports, and other information available online. Marketing and online marketing, therefore, have become an essential part of most sales processes.

Action Steps
Not only should you have a healthy number of recommendations from clients, and work samples on your profile, but you should also be pro-actively contacting new potential leads.
One of my favorite LinkedIn marketing experts is Christine Hueber: http://www.christinehueber.com/ You can read her newsletter for tips on marketing your services on LinkedIn.

You’re LinkedIn profile picture does more for attracting or repelling new clients than you think

In several eye-tracking studies over the last few years, it’s been shown that the profile photo is the most important part of your profile. It’s seen first. It’s looked at the longest, and it’s the #1 determining trust factor in your profile. Don’t make the classic cropping mistake, like cropping your headshot from a bad sweater contest photo. Most cropped images look like they are out of context, with poor lighting and a less-than-perfect impact for your personal brand. Also, don’t avoid the profile picture. According to a study in 2014 by LinkHumans [http://linkhumans.com/blog/tips-linkedin-profile], a profile with a picture is 14 times more likely to be viewed. Instead, recognize that you are running a business, and LinkedIn is one of your most powerful marketing tools. Invest some money in your professional image. Hire a headshot photographer in your area, and not just the cheapest one you can find. If it’s been more than a few years since you updated your picture, it’s time you refreshed.

Writing LinkedIn profiles is a different skill than any other career writing you’ve been trained on

First, the context for a résumé is totally different from an online profile. A résumé is typically sent upon application for a job. Sometimes they are circulated around, but that happens less and less. In contrast, a LinkedIn profile makes its play before application during sourcing, or after application during vetting. A sourcing recruiter will – and 94 percent of them do – use LinkedIn to find candidates to put into a recruiting funnel. This implies that LinkedIn’s role is all about search result rankings and first impressions. Next, your client’s LinkedIn profile will be perused by hiring managers and decision makers while they’re trying to decide between two or more candidates during the vetting process. This implies that LinkedIn’s role is also about relevance and trust factors. This information is not random opinion; it comes directly from Jobvite’s annual State of Job Search studies. The second reason that LinkedIn profile writing is totally different is based on the very nature of social networks. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan said, “The Medium is the Message.” This ground-breaking commentary on modern media refers to media as an extension of the human experience. The wheel is an extension of our feet. The CD player is an extension of our ears. If McLuhan were alive today, I believe he would say that the online profile is an extension of someone’s personality.

Many people, professional and job seeker alike, mistakenly believe that their LinkedIn profile is an online résumé. It’s not. This is wrong thinking on several levels.

Online profiles are far more personal than traditional résumé writing. And they’re far more dynamic.

Action Tip
Don’t assume your past résumé writing training will help you much when crafting LinkedIn profiles. It’s a different skill set. Look for opportunities to train and improve this skill.

Ranking your client’s profiles isn’t as hard as you think

I write about keyword research in my blog [http://careerenlightenment.com/keywords-socialmedia-profile-job-seekers] and in my books [http://careerenlightenment.com/2014-workbook]. There are five areas in a LinkedIn profile that should include at least one of your strategically researched keywords. Here they are, not in any particular order: • • • • • The headline The job title in the current position The summary Your Skills The job title in past positions

If that keyword isn’t overly used and very competitive, then you should see results right away.

I’ve been able to rank a client’s profile in under five minutes, without ugly keyword packing or other nefarious tricks. This isn’t bragging, just stating facts. It’s not as hard as you might think to do this. Actually, the hard part is figuring out which keywords to use!

LinkedIn profiles are about what your clients wants to do next, not what they did

So we always lead with that aspiration. If they want to change industries or roles, the headlines we write reflect what they want to do, not what they’ve done. Sometimes clients feel uneasy with this. That’s okay. Our job is to help them achieve a goal, not help them feel cozy. Another area that many profile writers get wrong is not changing the location and industry to where and what the client hopes to do next.

Action Tip
It’s easy to think that a résumé and a LinkedIn profile offer the same value. But someone wiser than me once said, “A résumé is an obituary; it only tells what someone did.” Now I know some of the new résumé formats include a professional statement. But the fact is that a LinkedIn profile can do a much better job demonstrating value. In my own LinkedIn profile writing practice, I get clients all the time who send in résumés and tell us they want to do something new and different with their careers.

Always lead with what’s next for the client by demonstrating value and movement.
• • The headline should reflect what the client is looking to do next. The location should reflect where the client wants to do it.

The multi-media section should demonstrate actual work samples to show value.

The window of offering premium LinkedIn services isn’t that long

The younger generations, X and Y, often feel like they already know enough about LinkedIn and aren’t as willing to ask for help with it. If you’ve been on the fence about offering LinkedIn writing, or improving your skills, now is the time to do it.

Action Tip
Sign up for The LinkedIn Profile Writing Masterclass [http://careerenlightenment.com/lipw] and earn three CEUs toward your national designation with several national associations. You’ll gain the confidence you need to charge more for your LinkedIn services and also fulfill a strong need for your clients.

I estimate another five years before the LinkedIn profile business dries up, evens out, and then becomes stale. Those of us in the career field who take advantage of the opportunity now will make a lot of money and help a lot of people. In five years the baby boomers, who are about 80 percent of my clients, will retire for good. They’re not going to invest in stunning new profiles.

If you don’t act on this, you’re leaving money on the table. Your clients will go to someone else.

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