The nation wakes up to another week of job losses with nearly 75,000 job cuts announced this Monday and over 500,000 job losses predicted for the month of January. In an interview with Stacy Delo of Market Watch, DJ Patil, Chief Scientist and Sr. Director – Product Analytics at LinkedIn, outlines three different ways job seekers can enhance their chances of finding the right job in this economy.
As DJ spells out in the above video, here are three ways to position yourself better to find that dream job:
1. Find suitable opportunities and similar connections:
LinkedIn has always been about finding the right professional connections who can either offer you business input or career advice. One of the easiest ways to identify those peers is to stumble upon “People You May Know” – a feature that can be found on the top right hand corner of your LinkedIn homepage.
LinkedIn can be used as a professional data mining tool, one that’s particularly valuable during the interview process. Search for peers with similar profiles, find people at companies you’re interviewing at and more.
DJ also reiterated an oft-repeated theme of building your network before you need it. As Jeremiah Owyang, Sr. Analyst at Forrester, spelled out in a recent post:
Unfortunately, networking doesn’t work this way, relationships take time, getting to know folks requires patience, and people are generally cautious –if not fearful– of Johnny come lately that is asking, rather than giving. Some people change their status message on their LinkedIn profile, saying they are now looking for jobs, and I question if it’s too late.
A professional networking site like LinkedIn eases you through the relationship building exercise through a slew of tools, chief of which is a webmail importer application that allows you to effortlessly bring online many of your real world contacts. Updating your status message on LinkedIn during your job hunt, will now be far more effective given the robust professional network you’ve built over time.
3. Build out a robust profile that’s in sync with your capabilities:
The last piece of the puzzle that’ll set you up for success in your job hunt is being found when hiring managers or recruiters are looking for talent such as yourself. The starting point is building an exhaustive LinkedIn profile that accurately reflects yourprofessional qualifications.
In November 2008, we rolled out the new LinkedIn Search platform after many months of design and technical work. Listening to the LinkedIn community is extremely important to us, and search is an application that millions of LinkedIn users depend on to get their jobs done everyday.
It has only been a little over a month since the full launch, but the results of that effort have been amazing. We’re already seeing a huge increase in the number of searches on the site on a daily basis. As more and more people use the platform, they are discovering more of the more advanced features built into LinkedIn search.
In 2007 I wrote a popular blog post called 5 Tips on How to Search LinkedIn Like a Pro which walked through some of the basics of Advanced Search and how to use advanced features like Boolean search. These features are extremely powerful, and are fully supported in our new search platform.
However, for real power users, our old search interface had a limitation: you had to use the actual Advanced Search form to target specific fields for your queries. Not any more.
The new LinkedIn Search allows users to easily target specific fields directly from the search results page:
This makes it incredibly easy to iterate through your search, adding more specific terms and fields to help narrow your search, which is crucial to finding just the right people among an audience of 33 million professionals (and growing).
However, we know that real power users always want to go even faster. And to go faster, you need to move beyond the graphical user interface, and be able to control your search directly from the query box itself.
Now you can. The new LinkedIn search platform allows any query that can be executed from the user interface to also be executed straight from the query box using the new advanced search operators.
For example, let’s say that you wanted to search for designers who used to work at Apple or Google.
You could type
designer AND (Apple OR Google)
into the LinkedIn search box. That would give you every person who has the keyword “designer” in their profile, and either the keyword “Apple” or “Google”.
That’s a good query, but it will find people who have the keyword “Apple” or “Google” in their profile for other reasons. For example, maybe they never worked at Apple, but they have training and skills with Apple products. You can refine this with the “Modify Your Results” box, but that requires a large number of clicks and edits.
Now, with the new Advanced Search Operators, you can skip those steps and execute your query right the first time, straight from the search box.
Just type:
designer pcompany:’Apple OR Google’
The advanced search operator “pcompany:” tells the search engine to only look for the terms “Apple” or “Google” within the past companies field on the LinkedIn profile. This way, you’ll only see people who actually used to work at either Apple or Google.
With the new advanced search operator functionality, you can target first name, last name, current position, company, school, or any field supported by the LinkedIn search engine. A complete list of the fields supported is located on the LinkedIn Learning Center. We support fifteen advanced search operators already – more are planned in 2009.
We’ll follow up here on the blog with more great search functionality in the coming weeks. Now go out and query like a Pro!
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!
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
Search is an important aspect of the LinkedIn experience and a big part of many professional’s everyday jobs. We recently launched a more streamlined design for LinkedIn Search, with the goal of helping our users, often on the run or at work, to find who they’re looking for both quickly and effectively.
While Esteban’s post from last week focused on the product upgrades within LinkedIn search, I’d like to walk you through the process of designing an improved user experience for Search.
Listening to the LinkedIn community
Prior to launch, we conducted a rigorous research and design process in order to identify customer pain points and potential opportunities for improvement. We gathered feedback from a variety of sources and at different touch points, ranging from site feedback to analyzing site data to see what users were searching for on LinkedIn.
Most importantly, we talked to different types of our users: both in individual think-aloud studies and in group forums, continually iterating based on their feedback. Given below are some of the key design improvements that resulted from those conversations:
1. Simpler and more flexible layout
Our query analysis told us that our users were typically searching by name for someone they know. Therefore, we’ve simplified our default People Search view to make it easy to skim names and pictures and see key supporting information to confirm the right selection. The blue highlights on mouse-over group the information about a person and give quick access to the available actions.
We know that there are times when you’d like to see more detailed information, so it’s now easy to switch to an expanded view, or even design a custom layout, directly from the top of the search results page. You can choose to see more, less, or different information for each result, and your view selection will be remembered the next time you visit.
2. More efficient search results
With over 32 million professionals to search through, we wanted to make it very convenient to narrow it down to the person(s) you’re looking for, or to edit your existing search without extra pages or clicks. We have surfaced the advanced search fields and sort options directly from the page and, like the results views, your sorts will be remembered next time you run a search.
Other new efficiency tools, which you can learn about in Esteban’s blog post, include type ahead short cuts to the profiles of your connections, spell check for names, saved searches, and saved search email updates.
3. More enjoyable experience
Last, but not least, we did hope to make the act of finding your peers and colleagues on LinkedIn more delightful, without compromising on functionality, simplicity, and ease of use. For example, we created a new field called “In Common”. Here we show each of the connections and groups you share with that person, in the hopes of further inspiring that “ah ha” moment, and helping each user better understand how connected we all are on LinkedIn.
As part of the Interaction Design team, our goal is to address your needs and this is a first step in optimizing your search experience on LinkedIn.
I am writing today to announce the full release of LinkedIn’s new search platform to over 31 million LinkedIn users.
The new search platform at LinkedIn is redefining the way professionals go about finding talent, business partners, customers or a former colleague.
Here is a video that summarizes some of the key features in the new search experience, followed by key elements of the new functionality:
Many more ways to find people
Our user’s profiles include a wealth of structured data that enables powerful search refinement options. You can refine search results by entering data in more than a dozen different fields that range from “name” and “company” to “school” and “language”.
Expanded search space
We eliminated the need to switch tabs if you want to see results with professionals from outside your network. The new search will retrieve the most relevant professionals from the entire LinkedIn community.
Relationship matters
One of the most important factors in ranking search results is the searcher’s network. This means that every matching search result is evaluated based on who is executing the search. The end result is a personalized relevance algorithm that places the professionals that are most likely to be of interest at the top of the first search results page.
Powerful productivity tools
We synthesized over a thousand pieces of feedback and analyzed data from over a billion search queries. We leveraged the research to design powerful tools to help our users be more productive when looking for the right professional. Given below is a list of key functionality that the feature launches with today:
• “In Common” is a new field in search results that lets you find what connections and groups you share with the selected user.
• We’ll allow you to save searches and receive reminders by email if we find that someone new meets your search criteria.
• We now offer two views as part of the search results redesign: basic and expanded. In addition, we also let you customize your own view. You’ll be able to add or remove fields from search results based on what makes the most sense for your search.
• We know how hard typing people’s names is. We hear it from our users and also see it in the data. As a result, we built a robust spell checker for names. We’ll expand the spell checker to other type of keywords very soon.
• We also saw in the data that many of you use search to get to your connections quickly. In order to make it more efficient, we developed a type-ahead widget that recommends connections as you type from any people search box.
These are some of feature enhancements you’ll see rolled out over the next few days. We hope this augments your productivity and we’d love to hear your feedback, questions and suggestions.
Here’s a LinkedIn user best practice to end the week with. You’ve probably seen a lot of our past users describe their Aha moments – whether it be finding a $1M client or creating an “accidental” global enterprise – but millions of other users find their Aha moments through simple mutual introductions that LinkedIn affords on a daily basis.
This week, we shine the spotlight on Mark Kvamme (partner at Sequoia capital, one of LinkedIn’s early institutional investors), who’s also on LinkedIn’s board of directors. Mark talks of his original Aha moment on LinkedIn – finding and connecting with Ross Levinsohn through a mutual connection, Marc Andreessen.
Also, the biggest priority (and, challenge) for entrepreneurs is finding the right talent for their companies. LinkedIn can be a boon for start ups since it enables you to find the right candidates to lead various disciplines in your company through the power of a mutual introduction.
2 Quick Tips from Mark Kvamme
1. How to ask for a mutual introduction on LinkedIn
1. Go to the profile of Person A
2. Click “Send a message”
3. Click the link “Include others on this message”
4. Type in the name of Person B
5. Write my message
I’d like to announce today the launch of our new search platform, currently released to a small percentage of our LinkedIn users. In addition, a certain percentage of the remaining users can explore the new search experience by simply clicking on the “Try LinkedIn’s new People Search” link at the top of search results pages.
As the largest global professional network, we’ve had the privilege of having millions of users enter over a billion professional search queries, and we’ve been working hard to build a much more robust professional people search engine. We interviewed lots of users and aggregated thousand of pieces of feedback. The end result is a completely redesigned search experience aimed at making it easier and faster to find the most relevant professionals that you’re looking for.
Here is a quick summary of the new features that will be phased out to all of our users in the coming months:
1. Unified search results:
We eliminated the need to switch tabs if you want to see professionals outside your network. The new search will retrieve the most relevant professionals from the entire LinkedIn community.
2. More powerful relevance algorithm:
The new relevance sort not only takes into account keyword relevance but also leverages both the professional graph and the rich profile data to ensure that the most relevant professionals are always shown at the top of your search results page.
3. Redesigned search results page:
Speaking of the search results page, we’ve redesigned this page from the ground up to make it more readable and actionable. This includes a new streamlined look, the ability to refine you searches from a new “Modify your search” module on the right rail, easily accessible sorts and views, and the ability to take actions from the results page as you mouse over results.
4. In Common:
“In Common” is a new field in search results that lets you see what connections and groups you share with the selected user.
5. Saved Searches:
This is one of the most requested features. We’ll allow you to save searches and very soon we’ll let you get reminders over email if we find someone new that meets your criteria.
6. Views:
We now offer two views as part of the search results redesign, basic and expanded. In addition, we also let you create your own view. You’ll be able to add or remove fields from search results based on what makes the most sense for your type of searches.
7. Spell check:
We know how hard typing people’s names is. We hear it from our users and also see it in the data. As a result, we built a robust spell checker for names. We’ll expand the spell checker to other type of keywords very soon.
8. Type-ahead for connections:
We also saw in the data that many of you use search to get to your connections quickly. In order to make it more efficient, we developed a type-ahead widget that recommends connections as you type from any people search box.
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We’ll be testing all of these features over the next few weeks as we fine tune them for full release. Stay tuned for more here, as these improvements mark just the beginning in helping your professional people search.
Ron Lissak, managing partner at Catapult Advisors told me in an interview (see below) how he uses LinkedIn to equalize the differences between a smaller firm like Catapult and the much larger firms he’d worked for in his past. In the video interview below, Ron talks about LinkedIn as a research tool and its ability to unearth hidden connections through the power of common contacts.
Many of those connections have yielded millions of dollars in business and brought in “many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars” in fees to firms such as Ron’s. In his own words:
It enables a small firm like Catapult to compete effectively with much larger firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley!
LinkedIn User Snapshot
Who: Ron Lissak, Managing Partner at Catapult Advisors:
How: The key to Ron’s success using LinkedIn lay in LinkedIn search, which he used effectively to research potential prospects and clients. How many of you are aware that the power of LinkedIn search is tremendously amplified when you try Advanced Search?
Also, for single point access to search across different pages (People, Inbox, Answers, Groups, and Jobs) try the search bar on the top right hand corner of your homepage right above the header.
LinkedIn Tip from Ron:
Research people, answers, groups, and jobs using LinkedIn Search
The right person, talent, or knowledge you’re looking for is already on LinkedIn. Use search to find what you need to be more effective professionally:
Search by name and other distinguishing characteristics to quickly locate the person you are looking for.
Use the advanced search to target specific skill sets or find subject-matter experts.
Conduct reference searches on potential job candidates and business partners.
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