Every month I speak with senior & mid senior professionals about their career needs & goals & common discussion about LinkedIn comes up. Usually during the discussion I try to ascertain if they even landed a job through LinkedIn. What I hear from most professionals that they have good & vast network & connections, but do not see much action. They were not able to figure out how to leverage LinkedIn network to their advantage. While some of C-suite are not sure what they should be doing on LinkedIn being so highly visible.
Let me throw light on what should be LinkedIn communication strategy!
Your audience: To start with, you should have a clear vision & idea of who your target audience is? In other words, who would be interested to view & go through your LinkedIn profile? Fortune 500 companies? Executive Search Firms? Private Equity firms/ Mid sized organisations? Fast growth corporations in a particular industry/sector, MD/president/ C-suites of Information Technology Firms? Or combination of above. Do you have geographical barriers? Or you are open to locations beyond your current/home location. This will align your list to your geographical preference( save headhunter & PE firms who have clients across geographical locations.
Your Goals: Set your goals including selecting industries/sector even corporations of your choice. However make sure that these sectors/industries are growing or at best are stable( but not falling).
Reverse engineer your job search: Social media for businesses is a perfect way & a great collaborating medium to reverse engineer your job search by connecting with your target audience. To start with, your focus should be connecting with them. This is the most important step.
So why should you reverse engineer your job search? If you are in senior /leadership roles & /or C-suite roles, only 10% to 12% of jobs would be advertised. Rest of jobs are filled through network & referrals even before the company has to refer it to executive search firms to hire potential fit candidates. LinkedIn is the most important & sought after platform which eliminates such middlemen & provides you an opportunity to directly get in touch with the decision maker. Be a leader in your job search. LinkedIn enables you to retain your leadership role, control your job transition & sometimes even bypass predefined screening assessment.
Top executives/C-suite should adopt the following 3 pillar approach:
- Connect with key players:Join groups to connect with key players: LinkedIn allows you to join upto 50 groups. These groups give you instant access to the target audience in a particular industry/sector, company, recruiter group, alumni group or in a particular geographical location. For instance you can join various groups if you are looking to connect with the CEO, COO & CMOs.. If you are a CTO in the Automotive sector, you can enter keywords such as CTO, automotive, cars, construction equipment on the top of the search bar to find & join the relevant groups. Once you have been accepted in the group, you can start posting questions, liking &/or commenting on discussion/article or even share your blog/article to initiate a constructive engagement. However the most important action you should do after having been accepted in the group is to have a look at the list of members & invite key players/ recruiters & hiring managers to join your network. You can do so by selecting members & sending them emailed to strategically expand your network. This is required since you should be in someone’s 1st/2nd or 3rd degree connection to appear in their search results when they are looking for someone like you. Check their profile for an email, then click the connect button and choose the “Other” option. Your message has to be simple-We’re in X group together and I want to invite you to join my network! In case you are not able to find an email, you can directly message them or ask another group member to introduce you. If your group is job related or you have joined group outside your current sector/industry & you are worried that you this will let your current company know that you are part of a particular group, you can easily go to group settings to hide the group icon so that it does not show on your profile.
- Populate & optimize your profile with relevant keywords that enable recruiters/hiring managers/readers to pitch you job opportunities aligned with your skills, competencies, experiences as detailed in your LinkedIn profile.
- Develop thought leadership: You can post articles on topics relevant to your thought leadership that may include:
- Info on a particular leadership book you just read.
- Update on a seminar/workout you recently attended. You can post a picture of you being a speaker at one of those events.
- Published a blog on leadership & /or coaching/motivation that can be promoted in various relevant groups.
Doing such activities twice or thrice a month would do wonders to build your professional brand.
