{"id":1581,"date":"2013-08-19T09:18:23","date_gmt":"2013-08-19T16:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/?p=1581"},"modified":"2013-08-19T10:43:54","modified_gmt":"2013-08-19T17:43:54","slug":"why-worry-about-linkedin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/career\/why-worry-about-linkedin","title":{"rendered":"Why worry about LinkedIn?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Many readers of this newsletter and blog are employees within companies.\u00a0 You have a job, and you&#8217;re not particularly wanting to change.\u00a0 And social media tools such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\" target=\"_blank\">LinkedIn<\/a> may not help you to take your next career step.<\/p>\n<p>Right?<\/p>\n<p>Not exactly.\u00a0 Here&#8217;s some great reasons why LinkedIn might just help you.<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When someone&#8217;s evaluating you for your next job position, if they&#8217;re not familiar with you, it might be reasonable for them to check your LinkedIn profile.<\/li>\n<li>It takes a long time to build up a robust set of LinkedIn connections.\u00a0 If you only start doing that after you&#8217;ve lost your job, it&#8217;ll be very difficult.\u00a0 Start making the connections now, even years before you&#8217;ll need them.<\/li>\n<li>LinkedIn is a great way to help other people.\u00a0 Maybe you&#8217;ll find out about a job in your own company, and you&#8217;d like to spread the word to your connections.<\/li>\n<li>LinkedIn discussion groups are a great way to stay on top of industry trends.<\/li>\n<li>Those groups are also a way for you to demonstrate your expertise by helping others.\u00a0 I often get requests to connect on LinkedIn merely because someone saw me being helpful and interesting in the discussions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m using LinkedIn here as an example, but that&#8217;s only because it&#8217;s the one I&#8217;m most familiar with.\u00a0 It&#8217;s well tuned to people who think of themselves as professionals, who will get great value from connecting with their peers in a semi-formal context.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re working on your profile, here are some things to consider:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>LinkedIn only lets you present a single professional image &#8211; unlike your ability to create custom r\u00e9sum\u00e9s for each job application.\u00a0 This can be a challenge, but potentially rewarding as well &#8211; you never know what parts of your experience might be interesting to someone!<\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;d like to let people know about your range of interests and abilities, so don&#8217;t be shy about mentioning something if you think it might help your professional connections.<\/li>\n<li>For things which will hinder your professional connections, use other social media.<\/li>\n<li>Join discussion groups which support your connecting to the right people.\u00a0 Even if you aren&#8217;t active, it demonstrates where your expertise and interest is, and you may potentially see some useful discussions.<\/li>\n<li>A broad range of people may see your profile, including your current boss, industry peers, competitors, and so on.\u00a0 Stay upbeat and professional &#8211; this isn&#8217;t a place to air your grievances.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I confess that I&#8217;ve never used LinkedIn&#8217;s paid services for job hunting or finding employees.\u00a0 Certainly take advantage of free trial period offers if you think it might help, and don&#8217;t be shy about asking advice from people who have deeper experience.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve heard a few interesting success stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many readers of this newsletter and blog are employees within companies.\u00a0 You have a job, and you&#8217;re not particularly wanting to change.\u00a0 And social media tools such as LinkedIn may <a href=\"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/career\/why-worry-about-linkedin\" class=\"more-link\">[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,42],"tags":[76,29,10,43],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-carl","4":"has-more-link","5":"post-1581","7":"format-standard","8":"category-career","9":"category-newsletter","10":"post_tag-career","11":"post_tag-job-hunt","12":"post_tag-networking","13":"post_tag-social-media"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1581"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1583,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581\/revisions\/1583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}