How can I use LinkedIn professionally?
We often hear questions from students about whether they need to use LinkedIn, and the short answer is no. The longer answer is that LinkedIn is one tool that you can use to accomplish multiple objectives. You can, of course, accomplish these same objectives without using LinkedIn, but it might require more effort on your part. Here, we’ll outline five things that LinkedIn can be useful for, and discuss alternative methods you could use to accomplish the same objectives without using LinkedIn.
Objective 1: Keep track of existing professional connections
The perhaps most obvious use of LinkedIn is to maintain a list of your professional connections so you can easily contact them later, if needed. Many graduate students and postdocs think of LinkedIn as a tool that is most useful for connecting with people outside of their current academic environment, and LinkedIn is certainly good for that (see Objective 2!). However, it is also a great tool to maintain contact with your current network. Your graduate school peers and postdoctoral colleagues will disperse to various geographic areas, job sectors, and career paths over time, and these connections may be valuable later on. LinkedIn is also particularly great for maintaining “loose” connections: the people you’ve met once via an informational interview, someone from another university that you met at a conference, or the person who works a couple labs over that you know a little bit, but not really well. Would it be weird to ask for their phone number? Maybe, but it’s totally normal to add them on LinkedIn!
It’s certainly possible to keep track of your existing connections without using LinkedIn: you may already be doing this via contacts in your phone, email archives, or other social media platforms. One advantage of LinkedIn is that it’s easy to see changes in your connections’ professional status (like position or organization changes), whereas it may be more difficult to determine this using these other methods. The main advantage of LinkedIn is the ability to maintain “loose” connections with little to no effort - as long as the person continues to use their LinkedIn profile, you can still contact them easily without relying on institutional/work emails that are associated with a position they no longer hold.
Objective 2: Make new professional connections
We often encourage graduate students and postdocs to use LinkedIn to identify people who have roles that interest them and reach out to learn more. This is especially useful when trying to learn about a specific career path or transition into a job sector in which you have no existing network. You can use LinkedIn to search within specific companies (click the ‘People’ tab on the organization’s LinkedIn page and use the search bar and filters) for people with jobs you’re interested in. You can also use the search bar on the homepage to search for job titles or company names and filter within the ‘People’ results to find professionals with that title or at that company that you could reach out to and learn more about their work. The Office of Professional Development can also use our alumni database to help you identify people to reach out to via LinkedIn.
Making new connections without LinkedIn could entail asking people you already know to refer you to other people they know, approaching people at conferences or social events, or searching through publicly available company directories or professional society directories to identify people you could reach out to. One disadvantage of this approach is that these public-facing websites don’t always list contact information for individuals, so finding an email address or other method of contact might be challenging. You may also be limited by your current network, if these people don’t have many connections in the job sector/company/career path that you’re interested in learning more about.
Objective 3: Search for jobs
LinkedIn has a Job Search feature that allows you to search for position titles, company names, or other keywords and filter results by various criteria. Sometimes LinkedIn job postings indicate the individual who posted the position, which can be useful because you could reach out to this person if you have questions about the role.
LinkedIn’s job search function is easy to replace using other tools. Job search websites like Indeed, Glassdoor, or the Google Job search work very similar to LinkedIn, and are all great alternatives. In some sectors, like the academic faculty job market, sector-specific job search sites like HigherEdJobs.com might be better than LinkedIn, as academic researchers and faculty tend to use LinkedIn less than other types of professionals. All of these job search websites (LinkedIn included) are limited by which organizations choose to post jobs on that platform. Some organizations don’t use large job search websites to post positions, so it’s a good idea to check for job postings directly on an organization’s website, especially if you have identified organizations that you’d be interested in working at.
Objective 4: Let jobs find you
Organizations want to find talented people to fill their open roles, and one way they do this is by recruiting. Organizations might manage recruiting via in-house professionals, like a member of the HR team, or via recruiting firms that are contracted by the organization to help them fill a role. LinkedIn has a dedicated infrastructure for this, called LinkedIn Recruiter. LinkedIn Recruiter allows people to search for candidates that match their hiring criteria, and filter by various factors (current title, location, skills, past engagement with that organization, and many more). Recruiters can then reach out to people who look like they might be a good fit for a specific role, and encourage them to apply. Recruiting firms are paid by providing the hiring organization with high quality candidates who fill the open position, so they often invest time in helping you prepare for the application and interview if they think you’re a good match for the role - they want you to look as good as possible! To maximize your chances of being contacted by recruiters for roles that suit you, optimize your headline and summary to include keywords and skills that are relevant for the type of job you’re seeking. Follow the pages of organizations that you’re interested in working for, because this appears as you having “engaged with the organization’s Talent Brand” in LinkedIn Recruiter and demonstrates interest in the organization. You can also reach out to recruiters proactively to inquire about open roles.
You can engage with recruiting firms without using LinkedIn by contacting the firm directly. For example, a quick search for “scientific recruiting firms Minneapolis” returns a list of several local companies that manage industrial scientific recruiting in this area: Kelly, Pace Labs, Verum Technical, Aerotek, and others. These companies have job boards where they post jobs that they’re recruiting for, and contact information listed on their websites. Apply to a job or reach out via the indicated contact method on the website to connect with a recruiter and be added to their talent pool!
Objective 5: Research companies or positions
One of the underrated ways to use LinkedIn is to learn more about companies or positions without having to talk to people. If you’re interested in a particular role, search for people who have that type of position and look at their profiles to learn more about it. You can learn:
- How they describe the work they do (useful for informing your own vocabulary if you need to prepare a resume/cover letter for a job application, or talk about your work in an interview)
- Educational or professional histories of people currently in that role (can be useful to learn if there are similarities between people in that role type - do they all have the same type of degree? Did all of the people in that role have prior industry work experience before getting that position? Are people’s paths to the role pretty variable, suggesting that the organization places a value on skills rather than previous role titles/company affiliations? All of this can be useful information when considering how to present yourself as a candidate for a specific type of position.)
- Professional trajectories of people who used to be in that type of role (useful for learning the types of career opportunities that might be available to you, should you proceed down that career path)
This strategy works best at larger companies where there are many people working in similar roles (lots of data points makes for more generalizable conclusions!), or for position types that exist at many different companies. It can also be interesting to compare similar role titles across companies, especially since the same job title can correspond to very different roles at different organizations.
Gathering this information without using LinkedIn is hard to do without talking to people. Conducting many informational interviews is a great way to learn the vocabulary associated with a specific position or field, or about the career paths of professionals in a particular position. However, informational interviews take time to arrange and conduct, and require the other person to accept your invitation to meet.
Summary
LinkedIn is just one of many tools that are available to you to maintain and build your professional network, learn about career options, and find jobs. All of these objectives can be achieved without using LinkedIn, but we think LinkedIn makes this process easier!