From the course: Finding a Job on LinkedIn

Research people - LinkedIn Tutorial

From the course: Finding a Job on LinkedIn

Research people

- [Instructor] In this chapter, we'll take a look at how you can use LinkedIn as a research tool to help you find and get the job that you want. First, let's take a look at how and why to research people on LinkedIn. There are a few reasons that I would research people on LinkedIn when trying to find a job. The first is to look up people with a similar job title that either I have or that I want to have. Look at their profiles. Find ones that you think look good. Find some ideas based off of these on how you can improve your profile. Take note of the skills that they have listed and the keywords that they're using in their profiles. A second reason is to look up the profiles of people who work at a company that you'd like to work for. Again, see what skills and keywords they're using. If you're connected to them, see what they're posting about. Third is to prepare for an interview. If you know who the interviewer or interviewers will be, it'd be a good idea to look up their profiles to learn more about them. You may be able to find common ground or experiences that you can reference or find out about what the person values. Going into your interview prepared with this type of information can give you an edge. Now, let's take a look at a couple of ways to research people. I'm inside of Julie's account, and let's say first that she wants to find more program managers because that's the position she wants to apply for. Up in the search bar, I'll type in program manager, and from here, I'll go to program manager in people. When I do this, it will bring up a bunch of them. In fact, it's 14.5 million. Now I can use these filters to narrow that down further. So maybe she wants to find people from a certain area or maybe she wants ones in a certain industry. So you can go ahead and filter that down. Now, remember this also illustrates a very important point and that is how important it is to have connections and have a network, because right now, Julie doesn't have one, so she's unable to see most people's accounts here. She can't connect and can't really see their names or information about their account. Now, once you start to build a network, it will grow exponentially and you'll be able to see many more people. Now another way to find people is at a specific company that you want to work for or maybe that you're interviewing at. So I'm going to go up here to the top in the search bar and type in Microsoft. I'll go here, Microsoft's company page, and on this page is information about Microsoft. I can go here, learn more about them, but at the top, you can see people. And when I click on that, I can narrow this down by people who work at Microsoft. So I can go in and find employees in certain areas, where they studied, based off things like that, and narrow them down, then scroll down and find their profiles. So this is a good way to find people. Finally, you can use a search bar to find specific people if you know their name. I'll go ahead and go up here, and let's say that Julie wants to look up a specific person, and that is Oliver Schinkten. She'll look him up, here he is, and she can click on that account. So, wow, he looks like a pretty awesome guy. So take advantage of the ability to do this and research people on LinkedIn. Going into an interview looking prepared and knowledgeable about the company and its employees is a great way to stand out.

Contents