Professional Branding and Networking on LinkedIn

Reid Hoffman, Co-founder and former CEO of LinkedIn had a vision to

collaborate with a group of people to create a new project. He recruited a

team of colleagues who worked with him at PayPal and Social Net to come

up with a new program. With hard work and dedication, LinkedIn was born.

With less than 20 signups on some days LinkedIn was not looking promising

however, a “family of separate investment funds and other entities” called

Sequoia Capital saw potential in the new development and invested in it. In

2004, LinkedIn employees experimented with the site to ultimately come up

with features such as the ability to upload an address book to the site, Group

feature, and the ability to connect with American Express to promote other

business offerings. The business began to boom and in 2005, LinkedIn

subscribers increased from 20 signups to about 1,074,117 members,

allowing the team to create more important features like having the ability to

Job search on the site. With the investment, the hard work, and the number

of signups increasing, LinkedIn was able to afford to move into a third floor

office space in Mountain View. When the company reached about 15,115,294

members, LinkedIn goes global by opening an international office in London.

To accommodate their customers all over the world; the company adds a

Spanish and French version of LinkedIn. In 2009, Jeff Weiner joins LinkedIn as

the new CEO coming into office with the goal to narrow LinkedIn focus,

mission, values and strategies. The company mission is “To connect the

world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”. In

2010, LinkedIn member are at an amazing 90 million with 10 offices and over

1,000 employees around the world. The growth is so astounding that

LinkedIn is granted with being on the cover of Fortune magazine for their

April issue. LinkedIn goes through a transformation that focuses on

simplification, growth, and everyday concept and partners with other

companies such as Mumbo, Slideshow, and Rapportive to accelerate the

company’s strategy to clarify and get through the site efficiently. Partnering

with these companies allows members to easily develop their profile in a way

that enhances their business ventures and expertise in a particular area. For

example, Slideshow allows the member to add pictures and/or videos to their

profile to give recruiters a better understanding and visual aide of what it is

the person does. After a decade of development and growth with more than

330,000,000 members, LinkedIn focuses more on the economic spectrum or

graph. This will allow the company to track the amount of traffic,

development of professionals, and revenue that goes in and out of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a site designed to establish a virtual business community. It

allows registered members to network with people they know or trust

professionally. Koka Sexton a Global Senior Social Marketing Manager at

LinkedIn hosted a webinar through Hootsuite, providing viewers with a clear

understanding of how to use the site to professionally brand and market

yourself. The three key concepts LinkedIn focuses on for their members are

identity, networks, and knowledge. The identity portion allows you to create

a professional profile; Networks allow you to connect with different

professionals to ultimately build business connections, and knowledge about

professionals on the site. When creating a profile, it is important to have the

mindset that you are the CEO of the site; you have to be the expert. That

means know who your audience is to better connect to the things they like

and don’t like. It is also important to create a profile picture to give viewers

an amazing first impression. Sexton states the picture you decide to attach

to your profile should not be a family picture or of you on vacation, but a

picture that shows you at your best. It is extremely important to fill out the

contact information section of the profile building. You want people to be

able to contact you and connect with your profile. You can add other media,

pictures, and video to your profile to enhance the type of work experience

you have. For example, if you have your own baking company, you may want

to add pictures and videos to the profile to showcase the work you do. This

will also give viewers a better opportunity to connect with your profile. When

building your profile the four main areas that you need to spend time on are

friends and family, educational affiliations, work experience, and public

service to gain leverage amongst other profiles. Koka Sexton believes the

key to building a strong profile and attractive is to connect with people who

you can add value to or that you can get value from. Your network is your

business. Make sure to join conversations with like-minded people; people

who have the same interest as you. The good aspect to LinkedIn is that is

has a feature called influences which are famous celebrities that hare insight

about their ventures, inspirational quotes, and other aspects of their

businesses. Although LinkedIn is for all those future professionals, the group

of people who benefit the most from the site are recent graduates from

college who are looking for work. Laura Shin a recruiter from Forbes states it

is important to create a great first impression because 90% of recruiter use

the site. The downfall to LinkedIn is that you can easily put too much

information on the site or not enough therefore most people duplicate the

information on their resumes. This strategy could hinder the richness of your

profile because you are not able to add rich media to a resume. From Laura’s

perspective, it doesn’t matter what you do but rather how you do it.

Professional branding yourself to the Gods is what gives your profile one up

on the next.

LinkedIn seems to be an amazing opportunity for a one stop shop to find

work by making your resume richer and elaborate, meet real professionals

who you can get real insight and advice from, and the opportunity to be a

professional of your own. However, LinkedIn has run into some issues when it

comes to recruitment. According to a New York Times Article, four people

have sued LinkedIn in a class action suit claiming the networking feature

“Reference Search” cost them job opportunities. In their opinion, LinkedIn

allowed recruiters to anonymously tap into the employment history of

premium members to determine whether they should hire or fire the

employee. This is wrong because it is said to violate the Fair Credit Reporting

Act which entails protecting individuals who are denied a privilege due to

incorrect credit histories. LinkedIn help center page defines the Reference

Search “as a way to locate people in your network who may be able to

provide feedback about a job candidate or business prospect”. Only premium

account holders playing a monthly fee have access to this feature to

increase their chance of landing a job. The ultimate reason why members

feel they lost out on potential jobs because ‘”recruiters would not waste time

contacting people who clearly had no connection of significance to a job

candidate (NYT). All in all, LinkedIn is a great source to build a virtual

business community of people who you are interested in or maybe interested

in you. It is important to do your research in regards to creating a business

profile that is so detail and elaborate with rich media to ultimately get

leverage to potential get the job of your dreams.

Reference

Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn. (2013). Retrieved May 18, 2015, from https://university.linkedin.com/content/dam/university/global/en_US/site/pdf/TipSheet_BuildingYourBrand.pdf

How to Network on LinkedIn. (2013). Retrieved May 18, 2015, from https://university.linkedin.com/content/dam/university/global/en_US/site/pdf/TipSheet_NetworkingonLinkedIn.pdf

Sexton, K. (2014, November 1). Professional Branding and Networking on LinkedIn. RetrievedMay18, 2015,from https://learn.hootsuite.com/student.php?ctg=content&view_unit=194

Shin, L. (2014, October 20). How To Create The Ideal LinkedIn Profile. Retrieved May 18, 2015, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/10/20/how-to-create-the-ideal-linkedin-profile/

Singer, N. (2014, November 8). On LinkedIn, a Reference List You Didn’t Write. Retrieved May 18, 2015, from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/technology/on-linkedin-a-reference-list-you-didnt-write.html?_r=0

https://ourstory.linkedin.com/#year-2004