My LinkedIn profile has always been bare-bones: nothing but my name, when and where I worked, and position titles. Typically it has gotten around 10 views a month with no follow-up. In the past that’s been fine by me since I was either busy working or choosing not to work.
But at the moment I am not working much, and have decided I’d like more income. I work on line as a freelance writer and editor; the majority of my past assignments relate to infrastructure policy and finance in Asia.
So I thought, “well, it will make no difference, but what the heck…let me see what I can do with my LinkedIn profile.” I went in, switched the “open to recruitment” (or whatever the phrase they use is) button from off to on, and pasted in text from my CV.
Within hours a big investment firm with offices all over Asia contacted me. (My first thought was SCAM ALERT but everything checks out.) We’re going to video conference next week.
I have no idea if things will work out; it is much too early to say. They may not agree to my rates, or the work may not be something I feel competent doing - a lot could still go wrong. Nonetheless, I am pleasantly surprised.
So what’s the real scoop on LinkedIn? Has it worked for you? Proved hugely disappointing? I’m curious now.
I got a job through LinkedIn once. A contact I hadn’t seen/talked to in a decade randomly messaged me about an opening on his team: the work was different from what I was doing at the time (and from what I’d been doing when I worked with him), but it wound up being the right opportunity at the right time. I still had to interview and everything, but it never would have happened without LinkedIn.
I find it most valuable as a research tool: when I have an interview somewhere, I immediately check LinkedIn to see if I know anyone who works at that company. I was able to get a “yeah, they’re a decent employer” reassurance about my current job before accepting the offer.
I like LinkedIn; I signed up there before I ever had a Facebook account. After 26 years of working full-time and 8 years of doing business development work (I’m currently a proposal manager), I have 400+ professional contacts…and I’m pretty good about “pruning” every now and then. In contrast, I have fewer than 300 Facebook friends.
Half the successful job offers that I got since 2007 came from LinkedIn, as cold calls, passively, when I wasn’t really looking. (The other half came from people I already knew, which is how I prefer to do it, but I have been bad about burning bridges in the past).
If you need to build jobs, or find sales or employment prospects, you should be on LinkedIn and put enough info into it so people can find you.
My son-in-law got a great job through LinkedIn, and when we were looking to hire someone we did LinkedIn searches. No luck, the the job was so specialized that mostly people working in our place already showed up.