Five ways LinkedIn can help advance your career

One of our key focus areas on the blog this past year has been to share with you how different professionals use LinkedIn to advance their career. Here are five videos we picked from a slew of LinkedIn user success stories we featured this year. Feel free to leave a comment on how you've used LinkedIn this past year to advance your career:

1. How LinkedIn Referrals can help you find new business and talent

Sasha Strauss (Innovation Protocol), describes how he has leveraged his trusted referral network on LinkedIn to not only to hire every employee in his firm but also to find most of his valued clientele.

I do business with people that are pre-qualified, and the only way that they are pre-qualified is that they have a robust profile that showcases who is willing to support what they claim! It really is an authenticity protocol!

Edit your LinkedIn Profile now

2. How LinkedIn Answers can help you build client relationships

Steven Shimek (Ruder Finn), used LinkedIn to build client relationships in over 20 leads that led to business worth over a quarter of a million dollars! He uses LinkedIn as a litmus test to qualify leads for his business development practice and explains his philosophy of digital karma in the below video.

LinkedIn isn't just about networking. It's about your friends, clients, and associates being a resource to you. I like helping people because they've all helped me!

Ask or Answer questions from your network

3. How LinkedIn Jobs can help you find your dream job

Evan Gotlib (Travel Zoo) describes how LinkedIn helped him find a dream job that he wasn't looking for! Evan started seeing the power of LinkedIn right after he hit 50 connections on LinkedIn and calls it the tipping point for him!

Using job search, I stumbled upon a dream job opening in the travel industry. This is the first job I proactively went after and it wouldn't have happened without LinkedIn!

Find your dream job using your LinkedIn Network

4. How LinkedIn Search can help you find the right candidate for the right job

Lenny Bourdeau (Stephen James Assoc.) faced the same challenge that recruiters and executives face these days, a dearth of talent with specific skill sets that they are looking for. Lenny was looking for somebody with a specific skill set in "revenue recognition". His Search yielded three candidates whom he contacted via InMail and soon one of them was hired yielding a placement fee of $20K!

This person wasn't on the job boards. So LinkedIn tremendously increased my candidate pool within that niche segment that I was specifically looking for!

Try LinkedIn's new Advanced People Search

5. How LinkedIn Groups can help corporations can find unique value

Mark Kvamme (Sequoia Capital), describes his LinkedIn Aha moment when he was able to reach out to Ross Levinsohn (Velocity Interactive Group) through a trusted referral from Marc Andreessen (Ning). Watch more in the short video below.

I can really see how corporations and individuals can get some unique value from LinkedIn that they could not get in any other place.

Manage your Groups on LinkedIn

Stay tuned as we bring you many more examples of how professionals utilize LinkedIn and leverage the power of their professional network. If you have a LinkedIn success story you'd like to share with us, please leave a comment.