A Guide to LinkedIn

This is a guide to LinkedIn. Information, techniques, and methods can be found herein. The goal of this guide is to appeal to a wide variety of job and internship seekers. Therefore, some “things,” for lack of a better overarching term, will seem fairly basic to some, but revolutionary to others. A few techniques will be fairly advanced, however when used properly, can prove to be highly beneficial.

Moreover, this guide will primarily focus on LinkedIn as a tool for finding, pursuing, and securing jobs/internships. It will not focus on the optimization of the LinkedIn profile or the LinkedIn newsfeed, although both are important to the LinkedIn experience.

The following “things” are listed in an arbitrary order as different people may find different “things” more beneficial than others. However, they are organized into two sections (Jobs and People), as LinkedIn is useful for searching both job postings and specific people.

Jobs:

Thing 1: Step 1

When beginning a search from the jobs page, click the search button right away, instead of filling in either the search description or search location. This will prevent you from narrowing your search more than you would like to in the onset. For example, if you don’t care about the job description or location, but you do care about the industry, then you can filter by industry later.

Thing 2: Viewing Options

The job search platform has two views: classic and split. The split view is far more functional, as it allows you to view everything about a job without actually clicking on it. There’s just one problem. You will not be able to manage your saved job searches from the split view. So, if you want to access them, switch over to classic view and they will show up on the right side of the page.

Thing 3: Filtering

There are numerous filters you can use to specify which jobs you actually see in your search. Some of the more useful filters are “job type,” “location,” and “industry.” Think of filters as a tool to find the right jobs, not exclude the wrong jobs. This is an important differentiation because by doing so, you will avoid filtering out too many jobs. With too much filtering, you risk excluding jobs that in fact, you may actually be interested in. The key is to slowly add more and more filters after looking through the search results periodically.

Thing 4: Saved Searches

Yup, you can save searches, meaning specific combinations of filters. You can even tell LinkedIn to notify you of new jobs for that search every day, week, or month.

People:

Thing 1: Finding Alumni

Searching for your school’s alumni can be exceptionally helpful when it comes time to apply for jobs. Alumni are great for informational interviews, referrals, and just connections in general. To find alumni, just filter your search (in the general search bar) by a school. This simple step will produce a list of all of your school’s alumni. However, you may already have a list of companies that interest you. In this case, you can go one step further by filtering the results by company or companies (in addition to school). This particular filtering tactic has been instrumental for me in the past. In early 2018, I was able to connect with an alumnus at Catalant Technologies where I later interviewed and was given an offer. The company happened to only be recruiting at certain schools in the Boston area, but with my alumni referral, I was able to get my foot in the door.

Thing 2: Finding Employees

Filter that general people search by company. You’ll find all of the employees at pretty much any company you could imagine. (Be careful as there may be multiple companies with the same name.) Before filtering any further, it is important to scroll through the employees and begin to observe job titles. Depending on the size of the firm, you may be able to get a better idea of the company’s structure, as well as who is doing the hiring. (Extra tip: At companies with less than 20 employees, c-level executives are typically doing the hiring. At companies with 20–300 employees, hiring managers or “talent people” are doing the hiring. At companies larger than 300 employees, your first point of contact will typically be a recruiter and you may transition to a hiring manager later.) Click on different employees and read! Everything has value. Profile descriptions will help you understand company culture, past positions will shed light on paths towards working at that specific company, and schools will help you determine what types of schools that company hires from.

Thing 3: Secondary Connections

Of course, you probably have connections on LinkedIn, but where the true value of LinkedIn begins to become apparent is in those secondary connections. These are people who are connected with your connections, but not with you. Just be doing a basic search (maybe filter by school, company, etc.) you will begin to see some people listed as secondary connections. You can also filter by just secondary connections to remove everyone else. Let’s use an example to uncover the power of secondary connections. Take your aunt for example. She works at General Electric. Perhaps you see that there are three people in your list that share her as a mutual connection. You could ask her to introduce you to any of those people in order to get your foot in the door at a specific company. Maybe one is even a hiring manager!

P.S. These things led me to five internships during my undergraduate career.

And no, I do not have a specific obsession with Dr. Seuss.