Yes, their stock price crashed by 40%, but LinkedIn still remains the most popular professional networking site. Of all the global professional networking sites, it is also the largest, with over 238 million users in over 200 countries and territories around the world.
It’s no surprise that LinkedIn’s most important revenue stream comes from Talent Solutions, used by companies to recruit employees, growing 45% to $535million. That’s a lot of hiring companies. But at the same time, you have to compete with a large number of users. Not forgetting the number of outstanding Netflix series you have not started on.
Job search really is such a chore!
Automating Your Job Search Process
Luckily for you, this article is going to teach you how to automate your job search on LinkedIn, so at the end of it, you will get more profile views, which could lead to (more) calls from headhunters.
Rather than discussing LinkedIn profile optimization, this article is just going to focus on automating your outreach on LinkedIn.
Let’s get started:
1) Craft a magnetic tagline
Or professional headline as LinkedIn would call it. The headline is the part that comes right after your name.
You probably have one that states your current job title and company such as this:
- Design Engineer at HP
- Customer Service Director at Apple
According to MyMarketbility, there are two parts to a compelling LinkedIn headline: the keywords, and the value proposition. Keywords would be what recruiters would search for; the value proposition is what drives them to read more.
So you might put down Personal branding (keywords) strategist providing business leaders with techniques to maximize their brand value for career success (value proposition).
In marketing terms, this is called a click bait.
To make sure yours is good enough, search for your competition on LinkedIn. Run through what they listed down on their professional headline and ensure that you have the best.
2) Have a Call-To-Action
Right after the headhunters click into your profile, they would be scanning through before deciding if they should pick up their heavy mobile phone and give you a call. And according to The Ladders, they do it in 6 seconds. That might be an experiment based on resumes, but I bet my money it is more or less the same for LinkedIn profiles, which are even more accessible.
Your summary and experience must contain bite-sized content that would entice the reader to extend their 6 seconds stop-watch.
Your summary should resemble an elevator pitch or the answer to ‘Tell me more about yourself.’ The key difference is the Call-To-Action at the bottom. That is crucial to let the world know you welcome connections and contacts.
3) Automate & forget
Unless you have a highly optimized profile, you might land on page 10 of any search results. That isn’t going to get you many views from headhunters.
So while you work on optimizing your profiles to improve inbound traffic, you need to put the foot on the pedal on outbound. And this is where the automation part comes into play with Auto-Pilot for LinkedIn. This Chrome extension can be used when you use the LinkedIn Advanced Search page and what it does is it automatically visits the profiles that you have searched. In the trial version, you could visit up to 400 profiles automatically.
The rationale is that active LinkedIn users (the headhunters) would see your visits as an alert. And they would click your profile to view yours.
That obviously isn’t going to happen on every visit but if you are visiting 400 profiles a day and 2,800 a week, I would say the probability would get much higher than before.
My profiles view has more than doubled since I started on this tool.
And did I mention the outbound views are automatic?
Visiting profiles is a passive approach, which works better than chasing after the headhunters. It also makes for easier salary negotiation when it is them who come to you, and not the other way round.
Now, where did I stop at Netflix?
[Image Credit: Shutterstock]
