1. In the Twin Cities Metro there are 4K LinkedIn listings with “marketing communications” mentioned, 59K with “sales,” and 31K with “engineer.” 65% social media participants users use to stay in touch with friends, 47% use social media “for work” and but only 26-28% use it for “career search.” # That means you need to develop strategies to be appealing to all kinds of networkers who will find you there and you need a very well written profile and customized communications to rise above the clutter.
2. The average reader spends 8-10 seconds with a profile. Your full resume does NOT belong in LinkedIn. The correct profile is closer to an executive bio in a corporate website.
3. LinkedIn should not be viewed as a stand-alone tool especially by those of you who are uncomfortable pairing LinkedIn activities with networking done in-person or by phone. Using LinkedIn exclusively can actually damage your professional image if your best means of reaching out to someone is the pre-written and highly superficial messages available by default in the system. Aim for a small, high quality network of people you can vouch for and whom you can trust to recommend you effectively. Consider that you will be judged by the quality of relationships you exhibit there. When you suddenly need a strong recommendation, a large quantity of poor quality contacts in your network will dilute the credibility of someone who really has considerable knowledge of you, especially if they use the standard messaging and tools to recommend you.
4. Hide your contacts. You want to manage how, why, and when others are reaching out to your best contacts and clients. The social media are mechanical software tools that encourage use without much thought which may be good as a strategy for the company LinkedIn, but bad as yours. Approximately 1/3 of the requests I receive through electronic social media I consider inappropriate to someone else in the relationship. The sender did not think hard before sending the request because it was easy to do so. If they had to make the same request in person they would have thought about it a lot more carefully. I think it is also happening more because people are in a panic over job security.
5. Hiring managers prefer people who are currently employed and can buy access to all 40 million names. There are many ways to reach potential hirees without buying a job ad in LinkedIn and most hiring managers are not bothering to. Ads on the 2 big job boards declined 5-44% last year depending on industry.
6. You are judged in LinkedIn as much by your EQ as by your IQ. An ExecuNet study (12/08) showed:
   • 86% exec recruiters search online for information beyond resume
   • 70% say their opinion of job seeker improves if find positive info on internet
7. We know that being active and engaged in LinkedIn activities improves your rank in LinkedIn searches:
   • Include a picture
   • Participate in discussion groups and Q+A with others
   • Answer InMail queries from others and pass profiles onwards if and only if you can vouch for the recommendation
   • Give and get recommendations
   • Name corporate, academic awards, boards, associations, biz charities
8. Remember that what you post in social media is VERY public and available to be scrutinized and commented on by many critics. A recent survey by Career Builder and highlighted in the Wall St Journal stated that 35% of employers report they found content on social media sites that caused them not to hire a candidate. ##
   • Candidate showed poor communication skills – 29%
   • Candidate lied about qualifications – 24 %
   • Candidate shared confidential information from previous employer – 20 %
9. If you think about the experience of the person searching for a resource in LinkedIn, he/she is confronted with 100-500 profiles (depending on subscription level) with similar titles or search criteria. The first profile the seeker will reach out to will demonstrate:
   • Better accomplishments than their peers
   • Good communication skills, and transparency of skills
   • Candor, warmth, accessibility, and ethics
   • NO Political, racial, religious, marital status, or sexual preference mentions because Hiring Managers will avoid downloading it for fear of an EEO lawsuit

So, invest some time and effort into your LinkedIn strategies. Don’t use the software as your only means of networking. Don’t settle for its default messages. Think about the paradigm of the other people in the LinkedIn network and what they might want from you when they are looking at your profile. LinkedIn has huge potential but can be more damaging than helpful to your career image if used too casually.

#   http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Adult_social_networking_data_memo_FINAL.pdf
## http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20090819-902554.html

But if you have a finance or family in the targeted city, and you rent, you have a better chance of successfully relocating.

• If you have friends or relatives in the new city, and you could stay with them for a short time, put two addresses on your resume. It makes it look like you are easier to move emotionally and physically. Show two phone numbers if possible also.
• An employer may not pay to fly you out there for an interview depending on your salary level and the ease of finding people like you. (Web Designers are easy to find, Marketing Managers with Fortune 100 consumer packaged goods experience are not.) So you may need to organize a lot of interviews around a few trips you pay for. Call recruiters and potential interviewers and tell them you will be there the third weekend of every month from Thursday to Tuesday and can they arrange interviews for you while you will be in town.
• Find recruiting firms that have offices in both cities. The references from the current location recruiter office will make you much more appealing to the remote office (because the local recruiter can verify the quality of your clients and work.) You can look up recruiters in both cities by using the printed Directory of Executive Recruiters published by Kennedy Publishing, Fitzwilliam, NH. You can buy a copy for $40 on www.amazon.com or find it a $300 version of it in a business oriented public library. If you are junior or your title is common in the job databases, you can use www.indeed.com to do the same thing.
• If you frequent a church or temple, go to the elders’ council of the sister church/temple in the new city and network.
• If you belong to a professional association that has chapters in both cities, join the chapter in the new city months before you want to be in the new city and attend some meetings or a regional conference. Network with the Board of Directors. Write an article. Give a speech.
• Look for opportunities to do part-time contract work in the targeted city before you move. Use that employer as a reference to other employers in the new city.
• Look for companies with a large percentage of telecommuters. They will be less threatened in the transition stage.
• Look for companies with hundreds of global offices. Many of my contacts at one employer travel 50-70% of the time anyway and as long as they live near a large airport, the parent company does not care where “home” is.
• Interview current employees of the firm to understand why the potential employer is willing to go to the hassle of importing someone. Sometimes you will uncover problems for the firm with its reputation in the local market.

A job is said to be “hidden” when it is not public knowledge (such as being posted in a newspaper or on a job-posting site like www.monster.com.) Very early in the life cycle of a job posting it is only known by the hiring manager and perhaps 2-3 key execs who work closely with the hiring manager. It frequently is not even approved by HR before the hiring manager has 2-3 candidates in mind he intends to interview and is biased towards because they were recommended by someone he knows well.

Industry studies show that 30-35% of people hired are identified before the knowledge of the opening gets beyond this stage.

Over time the job is posted on the cafeteria wall, in the company intranet, is discussed by current employees with former co-workers, and makes its way into the meetings and websites of professional associations like the AMA (American Marketing Association) or IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.) Knowledge of the job is still confined to insiders and their sphere of influence, although over time more and more outsiders are learning of the job opening.

70-80% of jobs are awarded to someone referred to the hiring manger before the job gets beyond this semi-public stage.

If the methods above have not yet produced a satisfactory candidate, it is published in the newspaper, on job-boards like www.monster.com and www.careerbuilder.com. At this stage, these efforts usually generate more candidates who DO NOT fit the job, than candidates whose skills are appropriate.

If the above methods have not worked well, or the client does not have the time to screen candidates, or does not have HR staff who have been able to identify the desired candidates, the client hires a recruiting firm to find and screen candidates.

By the way…

If you are one of those candidates who submit themselves to jobs which they clearly don’t fit, don’t bother. I have an interesting metric for you. An HR person from one F100 firm headquartered in town told me they get 50,000 unsolicited resumes per month company-wide. Another F100 firm I work with receives 30,000 unsolicited resumes per month. Now how do you imagine that your ill-fitted applications stand up in that environment?

These figures will also hopefully motivate you to improve your resume, cover letter and interview skills as much as possible, even if you fit the job specs.

What have you been doing about it?

Most of you concentrate 80-90% of your job seeking efforts responding to ads on client websites and on job boards like monster.com or careerbuilder.com. Both tactics result in you being in a pool of many applicants where you are statistically less likely to succeed.

What you can do about it

You are far more likely to be hired if you are referred to the client by someone whose opinion the hiring manager values. The earlier in the life cycle of the opening the hiring manager sees your resume the fewer competitors you have and the more likely the hiring manager is to take a chance on someone who is not a perfect fit but whom was recommended by someone he/she trusts.