How to Leverage LinkedIn to Find Connections

Trying to make connections on LinkedIn can feel intimidating. You might ask yourself, “Where do I even start? How do I know who to message? I found someone – do I message them now or do I wait?”

There are a few ways to leverage LinkedIn as a job seeker. There’s the slightly laid back approach where you can configure your profile as your resume and let recruiters find you. You can be more hands on and use LinkedIn to find contacts to reach out to yourself. And you can use it as a tool to host your professional online presence – think writing and sharing your own articles.

My suggestion would be to leverage all three methods. Keep reading for a few tips on how you can implement each of them.

Proactively Finding Connections

Building relationships is a process. It might be tempting to reach out to a recruiter or engineer at the company you’re hoping to join and flat out asking them for a referral or to pass your resume along. Cold messages like those don’t usually get the best responses. What we really want to be doing is planting seeds with these potential connections in hopes of asking for some of their time down the road.

LinkedIn is a great source for finding contacts when we know where we want to work. It helps to start with building out your own list of ideal companies you want to work at. You can then search the company on LinkedIn and check to see if anyone in your network already works there – if you do, LinkedIn will tell you.

If you don’t already have a connection, go to the People tab on the desktop web version of LinkedIn. Here you can search company employees by their title or use keywords – for example, searching “recruiter” or “talent sourcer” would be helpful if you’re looking to connect with a recruiter.

You might be asking yourself, “how do I know who would make the best connection or be the person most likely to accept my connection request?”

• Recruiters, talent/technical sourcers, etc. – they are the least risky to reach out to because they need you. Reaching out to them saves them the time/work of having to look for you. Speaking with you, as a person who could potentially be a great fit for the company, is what they are paid to do.
• Engineers – they are a little riskier because they simply might not be interested in referring or they’ve had bad experiences with people who reach out to them. However, they do need a team and get referral bonuses so there’s an incentive. Also, there are a lot of engineers out there who are genuinely excited to help.
• Hiring managers – they are the most risky, but they do need to hire new resources (you). They’re also getting paid to find you and for companies with less recruiting resources, you reaching out to them is helpful.

Check out their profiles real quick and if you think they are someone who might be able to help you out as a referral add them to a list of contacts that you can sort by company. The key here isn’t to send out messages just yet, what we’re trying to accomplish is building a prospect list of connections we can leverage.

Helping Recruiters Find You

Most of you are probably familiar with having to use keywords in your resume to help you get noticed by the ATS, or Applicant Tracking System.
Think of a similar concept when using LinkedIn. You can start with your profile photo by using one that provides a close and clear shot of your face.

The most important piece to helping recruiters find you is to write compelling profile copy. Instead of thinking about the job you want to get, think about what type of value you want to bring to a company – that’s what you want to add in your headline, summary, and experience sections. Those are going to be the keywords that recruiters are looking for. Ask yourself what your ideal company is looking for in a team member. Think about all the keywords you see in job descriptions. Figure out a way to show you can provide what they need.

This will result in people wanting to connect with you – especially third party recruiters. And yes, you want to be conscious of who your connections are because you want make sure that you are getting value from them, just remember that a third party recruiter might be able to connect you with a company you hadn’t thought of.

Building an Online Presence on LinkedIn

Whether you choose to be a proactive LinkedIn user or more laid back, it always helps to establish a consistent online presence. The easiest way to start is to comment on other people’s posts by adding something of value or checking out and complimenting their work. It can feel awkward and terrifying at first because you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, you just need to practice.

If you come across an article or piece of information that you feel is relevant, share it. People might be looking through your profile and find something you shared useful or that relates to them in some way. This could entice someone to connect with you.

Another tip that can pay off more in the long run is to write and post your own articles on a regular basis – whatever regular means to you, just try to stay consistent. Recruiters or hiring managers that are checking out your profile will see that you are already providing value. People are going to be doing their homework on you anyway and it helps you stand out to have more than just a recap of what’s already on your resume.

Conclusion

As tempting as it is to fill out dozens of applications and hoping something good comes of it because it can be uncomfortable building connections, leveraging LinkedIn will have a huge return on your energy investment. Remember that the point of this step is to build a prospect list of connections at companies you are interested in. There’s no need to get caught up in writing connection request messages just yet. Just keep track of potential connections at this point.

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