Executive Job Search: Using LinkedIn’s Company Follow is a post from: Executive Career Brand

At the end of April, LinkedIn launched the new “Company Follow” feature, allowing you to stay current with the latest news from your target companies that have posted LinkedIn profiles. With nearly one million companies on LinkedIn, you’re bound to find many of those on your target list.

What’s so great about company follow?

By setting up “follows” for your target companies, you’ll receive email updates on their new developments, business opportunities, and jobs.

According to Ryan Roslansky in his LinkedIn blog post:

“This feature can deliver insights – you may be surprised at – such as the pace of hiring at your nearest competitor or the start of a whole new industry as you see web technology companies hiring geography teachers (for e.g.). Or better yet, you may find the job of a lifetime to do cause marketing for Major League Baseball.”

Additionally, once you follow a company, you and a link to your profile end up on that company’s list of followers. Chances are, people at that company are tracking who is following them. Hiring decision makers may notice you as a follower.

Using those lists of LinkedIn members following your target companies, you can expand your network to include fresh faces who may have similar interests. Check out their profiles, see what they’re about, and look at the LinkedIn Groups they belong to. You may want to join the same ones.

LinkedIn gives you two super simple ways to follow the companies of your choice:

From any company profile page: Click on the “Follow company” link at the very top of the right-hand sidebar.

From any person’s LinkedIn profile: Mouse over a company on a profile and click on the “Follow company” link at the bottom of the pop-up that appears.

Company profile pages also offer a wealth of information, such as:

• A brief company overview
• Current employees who have LinkedIn profiles and the number of them in your network
• New hires
• Former employees
• Recent promotions and changes
• Career path for employees before and after working there
• Key statistics including company size, common job titles and percentage of employees holding those positions, median employee age and tenure, percentage of male versus female employees.
• LinkedIn members following the company

Go to the Company Profiles homepage to find companies to follow. You can also access this homepage through the “More…” tab at the end of the menu along the top of any LinkedIn page (see “Companies” at the top of the drop-down list). LinkedIn even suggests a dozen or so companies you may want to follow.

LinkedIn says the 10 most followed companies are Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple Inc., Facebook, Keller Williams Realty, Hewlett-Packard, Accenture, L’Oréal, and Cisco Systems.

Related posts:

FREE e-book: Executive Personal Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile

How to Get the Best LinkedIn Recommendations

LinkedIn: Best Tactic for Undercover Executive Job Search

Power Your Executive Personal Brand with LinkedIn Groups

Stalled Executive Job Search? Get Busy on LinkedIn and Twitter

How to Get the Best LinkedIn Recommendations is a post from: Executive Career Brand

Why are LinkedIn recommendations so important?

The true measure of your executive brand and promise of value to future employers is reflected in what those who know your work the best – co-workers, peers, top management, team members, customers, etc. – have to say about you.

Executive recruiters and hiring authorities routinely source talent through LinkedIn search. They’re attracted to candidates who have quality recommendations on their profiles. If you have no recommendations, they may question the value you offer and skip over you.

And, at least 3 recommendations are required (among other criteria) before LinkedIn considers your profile 100% complete, giving your profile a much better chance of landing high in LinkedIn searches.

Best tip to get the best recommendations?

Write good recommendations to get good recommendations. Two bonuses when you use this strategy:

1. Your recommendations of others include a link to your profile, extending your footprint on LinkedIn. Hiring authorities checking out the person you recommended will click over to your profile if you are someone of interest to them.

2. Recommendations that you write and the ones written for you show up in network updates for you and for the people you recommended, keeping your brand top of mind with both networks. 

A few cautions:

Only ask for recommendations from people who will give you a good recommendation. Don’t strive for quantity over quality.

Only give recommendations to people you can honestly praise. Social media authority Chris Brogan noted in his recent post on LinkedIn Recommendation Tips:

“I’ll say this once: if you recommend someone and can’t really vouch for their work, you’re just setting your own reputation up for a blow. Don’t do it . . . I’ll never recommend someone whose work I don’t know enough about.”

Avoid obviously contrived recommendations, ones that look like they were written just for the sake of reciprocating (“I’ll write one for you, if you write one for me.”). They will probably backfire. Recruiters are good at sniffing these out, and they can harm you and diminish your value.

Don’t demand a reciprocal recommendation.

Give the same kinds of recommendations you hope to receive. When writing recommendations Brogan suggests:

“Lead with the strongest thing you can say about the person. ‘Gerry is a clutch player in the world of project management.’ If you can’t say anything particularly strong, you might reconsider whether you’d recommend them.”

What are the best LinkedIn recommendations?

Assuming you have clarity on what jobs, industry, and audience you’re targeting, and your LinkedIn profile reflects this, you should seek recommendations that will hit home with your target audience and align with the qualifications and qualities they’re seeking.

It’s okay to help people write a recommendation for you, if they’re willing, by letting them know what kind of information you’re looking for. Asking them questions such as these should help them compose a paragraph or two:

1. What do you feel are my top strengths and skills that have most benefitted the company?

2. In what ways did I add value to the team and to the company?

3. What things did you know you could always rely on me to deliver?

4. In what ways have I helped you do your job?

Better yet, you may want to provide them with suggested verbiage and an actual example of the kind of recommendation you’re looking for. This would give them a foundation to work from and improve upon.

Related posts:

Executive Personal Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile FREE e-Book

LinkedIn: Best Tactic for Undercover Executive Job Search

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Stalled Executive Job Search? Get Busy on LinkedIn and Twitter

LinkedIn: Best Tactic for Undercover Executive Job Search is a post from: Executive Career Brand

Are you job hunting now or planning a search in the near future, but afraid your employer will find out, so you’re hunting on the sly?

Most of my clients are employed c-suite executives who either see signs of a possible layoff, or have become dissatisfied with their jobs and want to test the waters to see if there’s something better elsewhere.

I counsel them to create a fully-fleshed out, keyword-rich (and hopefully branded) LinkedIn profile, or revisit their existing profile – I know many of you slapped up a perfunctory profile months or years ago and then forgot about it – and get it up to snuff for their current search target. Download my free e-book if you need help, Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile.

Some are resistant to having a LinkedIn profile, or any online presence, and putting themselves out there. They fear, and rightly so, that if their profile indicates that they’re in the market, they’ll sabotage their career. They think it’s safer to limit their search campaigns to responding to job board postings.

They’re unaware that, although this active search method requires a significant investment of time, it yields dismal results. At most, maybe 5-7% of executive job seekers land jobs through the boards.

You can easily optimize your LinkedIn profile to make it more search-friendly, without shouting out “I’m looking for a job”.

Make sure it’s updated with your latest achievements and contributions, and clearly communicates your value proposition. Be careful about your LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn Groups activities – your co-workers probably belong to some of the same groups and will know if you’re discussing your job search there.

NOTE: Please see Bill Cohn’s comment below for advice on adjusting your LinkedIn privacy settings to keep your network from receiving notification when you update your profile.

LinkedIn is an accepted (and vital) part of ongoing healthy career management. Chances are your company’s other executives and c-suite all have LinkedIn presence, and your company itself probably has a profile, too. Take a look at your co-workers profiles. Anything there hinting that they’re job searching?

Did you know that something like 85-90% of recruiters rely on LinkedIn to source talent?

If you’re not there, you may be invisible to them – the very people you NEED to find you. By merely positioning yourself with your LinkedIn profile, you’re leveraging a key strategy for passive job search.

See my post, Does Your Online Identity Scream “Hire Me”?, to find out what one recruiter says you need to do with LinkedIn and your profile to tip the scales in your favor.

You’ve already worked on, or are updating, your executive resume in anticipation of your search, right? If you’re doing it correctly, you’re building all the information in it around what your target hiring decision makers are looking for in candidates.

You do know who your target audience is, don’t you?

If not, back up and work on identifying companies that will fit your career needs, how you will meet their needs, and the hiring authorities within each one that you hope to attract. Need some help here, see my post 4 Executive Job Search First Steps, Before You Write Your Resume.

Your updated (hopefully branded) resume, with strong positioning summary sitting above the fold, along with bites from your career biography, become the foundation for your branded LinkedIn profile.

Read what Jon Burke, a computer software major accounts executive, had to say about LinkedIn and his job search, in Elizabeth Garone’s Wall Street Journal article, Job Hunting Under the Boss’s Nose:

“In this market, having a profile on LinkedIn doesn’t necessarily mean you’re looking,” says Mr. Burke. Unlike wearing an interview suit to work, using such websites isn’t a clear sign of job hunting, since many people use these portals as part of their job. For Mr. Burke, who uses the site daily as a sales tool, it was the easiest way to search for a job without being too obvious.

After Mr. Burke made the changes to his profile, he says he was contacted on a regular basis by recruiters. He’d respond via LinkedIn to ask what they had to offer. Mr. Burke was able to quiz the recruiters almost exclusively through email. “I was very picky,” he says. “I … couldn’t afford to waste my time.”

There’s just no getting around the fact that, in today’s executive career and search landscape, you HAVE to have a 100% complete (according to LinkedIn’s standards), keyword-rich LinkedIn profile and pump up your network with new connections through LinkedIn.

Don’t be afraid to broadcast your brand and value proposition in your LinkedIn profile. Just keep the job search part under wraps.

Related posts:

10 Steps to an Authentic, Magnetic Personal Brand

How to Write An Irresistible C-level Executive Brand Resume in 10 Steps

How to Write a C-level Executive Career Brand Biography

Stalled Executive Job Search? Get Busy on LinkedIn and Twitter

The 20 Most Common LinkedIn Mistakes

LinkedIn Helps You Find the Right Twitter People to Follow is a post from: Executive Career Brand

Are you like many of my c-level and senior executive clients – a Twitter noobie, or thinking of diving in, and having a hard time figuring out who to follow?

You know that the more quality people you follow, the more value you’re likely to derive from Twitter. But how and where to find them?

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Here comes LinkedIn with one solution to your dilemma.

They’ve just rolled out a huge improvement to their Tweets application, which launched last November.

Now you can easily find and monitor your LinkedIn connections on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In his May 25th post on the LinkedIn blog, Adam Nash (@adamnash on Twitter) described the features:

• Once you’ve installed the Tweets application, you can easily access it from anywhere on LinkedIn using the “More…” menu at the top of the website.
• The Overview tab has been updated with an improved design to help you easily find everyone you currently follow on Twitter, view their Twitter feed, and tweet from your own account.
• A new module, “Connections to Follow”, has been added to recommend new people for you to follow, based on your LinkedIn connections.
• A new tab has been added to Tweets called “Connections”. On that page, you can see all of your LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles. Simple navigation is provided to make it easy to see who you are and aren’t following on Twitter.
• One of the most useful features of the new Tweets application is the ability to save your LinkedIn connections as a dynamic Twitter list.

Still on the fence and leery about joining the Twitter phenomenon? See my post, Twitter Turbocharges Executive Job Search and Personal Brand Visibility.

Related posts:

14 Reasons I Won’t Follow You On Twitter [Revisited]

Give Twitter 15 Minutes a Day, Land Your Next Executive Job

Stalled Executive Job Search? Get Busy on LinkedIn and Twitter

Twitter Personal Branding Strategy — The Beauty of a Re-Tweet

Power Your Executive Personal Brand with LinkedIn Groups is a post from: Executive Career Brand

You’ve worked hard on getting your branded, searchable, 100% complete LinkedIn profile up and humming. What’s next?

One of LinkedIn’s most powerful networking features that’s bringing great value to me is Groups. For executive job search, LinkedIn Groups can be invaluable for communicating your personal brand and unique promise of value to potential employers.

According to the LinkedIn Learning Center:

“LinkedIn Groups is your destination to find and join communities of professionals based on common interest, experience, affiliation, and goals. Stay in touch with organizations, schools, and companies that you are and were a part of, network with professionals with similar interests and goals, and collaborate in a professional community online.

LinkedIn Groups allows group organizations to extend their brand’s reach and strengthen the brand with existing users by providing additional value through LinkedIn’s features.”

I land new business because of my participation with LinkedIn Groups. You may land your next gig through your participation with LinkedIn Groups.

Groups are a terrific way to:

• Hobnob with and express your executive brand directly to key decision makers at your target companies or organizations,
• Position yourself as an industry thought leader and subject matter expert,
• Build a strong executive network with new faces, 
• Give value, help your network, and thereby build trust and brand equity, and 
• LEARN.

Getting started:

Search Groups in the Groups Directory. Choose from the “Categories” drop-down menu:

• Alumni
• Corporate
• Conference
• Networking
• Non-profit
• Professional

Or search groups by company name, industry and relevant keywords in the LinkedIn search bar at the top right of any page (click the drop-down menu for “Groups”).

Some groups are open to all and allow instant membership. For others, you may be subject to review by the group manager.

• When you join, elect to display the group logo on your profile. This is a good way to let people who are assessing you through your profile see that you’re an active, savvy LinkedIn user and check out your groups activities.
• Join and begin giving value by commenting on existing discussions and starting your own.
• Post relevant news items that will be of interest to members. Better yet, add your own blog posts to broadcast your personal brand and value proposition.
• Respond to group members who need help.
• Hang out with key decision makers at your target companies and others by joining groups they belong to. Find their groups by scrolling down their profiles to see which ones they belong to.
• Join affinity groups for your companies, industry and areas of expertise.
• Think about starting your own LinkedIn Group.
• Join groups where you can learn from personal branding and job search experts. Here are some of my favorites for these topics:

Job-Hunt.org runs 6 (and growing) “Help” Groups, the Job-Hunt Help main group and 5 subgroups (social media, boomers and beyond, help for veterans, help for introverts, and personal branding), which you’ll find in the “Subgroups” drop-down menu on the main group page.

I manage the personal branding subgroup. Come join us!

Other excellent groups I belong to:

• Darren Rowse’s Professional Bloggers
• Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Network
• Tim Tyrell Smith’s Ideas For Job Search, Career And Life and his Career Experts Subgroup
• Alison Doyle’s About.com Job Searching
• Kate Lorington’s Jobs & Career Network
• Michael Quale’s Job Shouts

Aside from connecting with people at the companies you’re targeting, you’ll link with, learn from, and give value to new communities of thought leaders and SMEs you never would have known otherwise.

Related posts:

My free e-book, Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile: How to Transform Your Executive Brand, Resume, and Career Biography Into a Winning LinkedIn Profile

Stalled Executive Job Search? Get Busy on LinkedIn and Twitter

YIKES! My LinkedIn Profile is Missing!

10 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand Online Without a Blog is a post from: Executive Career Brand

A new client of mine understood that he needed to pump up his online presence. A Google search for his name yielded a dismal number of relevant results, plus he had a common name and the little that was out there about him was lost in a sea of same-named people.

To win at executive job search in the digital age, he knew that having on-brand evidence online supporting and differentiating his promise of value was critical. Recruiters and hiring decision makers Googling “his name” were assessing him based on what they found.

Think that your online identity doesn’t factor into executive hiring decision-making? See my post Does Your Online Identity Scream “Hire Me”?

My client also understood that blogging was a powerful way to extend his online footprint and build evangelism for his brand and promise of value in the marketplace. But he didn’t enjoy writing and knew he didn’t have the time or inclination to commit to his own blog.

Although I hate to dissuade anyone from starting a blog because I love blogging so much and I know what it can do for executives in job search (see my post Executive Job Search and Blogging: Perfect Together), I know that working your own blog may not be a realistic piece in your personal brand communications plan.

Here are 10 places to build top-landing search results for your name:

Realize that the sequence of search results that you get for your name may not be the same as the results others get for your name. They can vary by location and even from one computer to the next, in the same room!

Create branded, searchable profiles on these strong link-weight sites. Update them as you gain new skills, certifications, achievements, etc., and when your target changes:

1. LinkedIn

Make sure your profile is branded, searchable, and 100% complete. Download my free e-book, Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile: How to Transform Your Executive Brand, Resume, and Career Biography Into a Winning LinkedIn Profile.

Once it gains traction, your LinkedIn profile should land within your top 3-4 search results.

2. Google Profile

One of the nifty things about the search result for your Google Profile – it appears on the search page with your gravatar (tiny photo), if you’ve uploaded a photo with your profile. Very eye-catching! See Google Profiles Powers Up Your Online Personal Brand Identity.

3. ZoomInfo

Hiring professionals run searches on ZoomInfo when they’re filling jobs. Brand up your profile, if one exists. Otherwise create one.

4. VisualCV

The beauty of a VisualCV is in its interactivity and multi-media features, and you can link to PDFs of your portfolio of personal marketing documents (resume, bio, references, etc.). Practically everything you want people to know about you is housed on one web page.

See A VisualCV Belongs in Your Personal Brand Toolkit.

5. Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.

Create a key word-rich profile (or bio) on these and other social networking sites. Establishing presence here positions you as up-to-date and social media-savvy. Come back and get busy leveraging all that social networks have to offer. Want to follow me on Twitter?

6. Business Week’s Business Exchange

Enables you to save, post, react on and share news in the Business Exchange. Register using your LinkedIn account.

7. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online booksellers.

Create a profile and write book reviews on relevant publications.

8. Relevant professional organizations that allow you to create a profile.

See Job-Hunt.org’s monster list of over 1,000 national and international Professional Associations and Societies.

Other ways to build your online footprint.

9. Publish white papers and articles on relevant websites.

And check out your professional affiliations and organizations. They would probably love to have you contribute content to their websites.

10. Build a website using the domain “yourname.com”.

Even if you don’t plan to do this, it’s important to claim your name by owning the domain. GoDaddy is a good, inexpensive (about $10/year) place to do this. Your website can be a 4 or 5 page web portfolio of your personal marketing documents (executive resume, career biography, achievement summary, leadership initiatives, etc.)

And a bonus suggestion:

You can still reap much of blogging’s benefits, without committing to maintaining your own, (You knew I had to get blogging in here somewhere!) by:

11. Guest blogging and commenting on relevant blogs.

See my post, Blog Commenting: Build and Brand Your Online Identity and GQ (Google Quotient) and my Job-Hunt.org article, Build Your Personal Brand Online by Guest Blogging.

NOTE: If you don’t have a personal website, include a link to your VisualCV or Google Profile when you guest blog or comment on blogs, so people will be led to the brand-reinforcing information you want them to know about you.

 Related post:

Online Executive Personal Branding: Are You Digitally Distinct?

5 Tactics to Land a Green Industry Executive Job is a post from: Executive Career Brand

These days, the green industry is a tantalizing carrot dangling in front of people who are stagnating in jobs in anemic industries or finding diminishing opportunities while actively job-hunting within their niche.

Over this decade green jobs will open wide, as companies, organizations and all of us as individuals scramble to “go green”.

Do you have the goods to compete for top-level jobs in this emerging, sought-after industry?

You can count on your leadership and management skills to serve you well, no matter what industry, but that may not be enough.

As with any shift in career focus, your green career transition will require special preparation to position yourself as a good fit to recruiters and hiring decision makers assessing you.

A great starting point is Job-Hunt.org, one of my favorite resources for all things job search, for any industry and any professional level.

I’ve included just a few Job-Hunt green resources among these get-started-now suggestions:

1.  Identify need and opportunities.

Google relevant keywords to find resources, read relevant blogs, articles and white papers, and set up Google Alerts for relevant keywords. See my Brand-yourself.com post, Use Google Alerts to Amplify Your Executive Brand Visibility and Job Search.

2.  Research companies to target and compile a list of 20-30 to work on penetrating.

Your research helps you with market intelligence and due diligence, and prepares you to intelligently communicate with decision makers at each company. See Job-Hunt’s list of 50+ Green Industry Employers.

• Go to each company’s website to find a wealth of information, such as Boards of Directors, C-suite company leadership, and news and press releases. These resources will arm you with market intelligence, help with due diligence, and position you as a well-informed candidate in interviews.
• Research and make a list of key decision makers at your companies of interest. You’ll then work on positioning yourself in front of them.

3.  Determine what positions to target.

Job descriptions can provide a wealth of information about the industry, skills/qualifications, companies and their culture, challenges they face, and can help you decide what green jobs may be a good fit for you. Check out:

• LinkUp, a job aggregator that also includes employer websites
• Job-Hunt’s list of Green Job Boards.

Use job information to decide whether your existing skill sets are up to snuff and transferrable. You may need to sharpen your value proposition by learning relevant new skills.

4.  Learn the lingo. 

• See Job-Hunt’s Green Industry Glossary and Guide to Green Terminology.
• Leverage your newly-gained skills and knowledge to market your credibility and viability online. Blog and tweet about relevant topics so you’ll be found by hiring professionals who search online to source candidates.

5.  Expand your network.

Do keyword searches on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks to identify thought leaders and subject matter experts. Find out what they’re talking about and involved with, and which resources they rely on.

• Look for your target list of key decision makers at your companies of interest and see what they’re up to on these sites. Join the LinkedIn Groups they belong to and begin contributing. Follow them on Twitter and re-tweet them.
• See Job-Hunt’s list of over 100 Green Industry Professional Associations and Societies, broken down by categories such as Biofuels, Building & Construction, Engineers & Engineering, Health & Medicine, Recycling, Solar Energy, and Wind Power.

How to use this extensive list of professional organizations:

• Connect with and help people in the know in this thriving industry. Get a feel for whether you may be a good fit, too. Identify key decision makers whose radar you want to get on.
• Check out the membership directories to source key decision makers and potential employers.
• When you join a professional association, be sure to add it to your online career marketing communications (VisualCV, LinkedIn profile, web portfolio, etc.). Recruiters and hiring decision makers searching those key words when vetting candidates will likely be led to your online materials.

Your takeaway:  Scope out the lay of the land and get your ducks in a row before diving into the green arena.
 

Related posts:

Free Green Careers & Personal Branding Advice Guide

2010 Top 10 Executive Personal Branding and Job Search Trends

Executive Job Search and Blogging: Perfect Together

Resume Lingerie and 10 Other Guerrilla Job Search Strategies