Using LinkedIn: one student’s experience

Oonagh Mannix – 5th year MChemPhys, University of Edinburgh

I've used LinkedIn for a few years now and I was never particularly sure of its effectiveness. It was something that everyone said was good to have but no one really knew why. As part of my Master’s in Chemical Physics, I spent a year in industry with Syngenta and found that it was very useful to have LinkedIn to add contacts I made there – people you possibly didn't want to be friends with on Facebook but still wanted to keep in contact with.

As LinkedIn makes it easy to edit your CV online, when I returned to university, I wrote a brief paragraph on the work I did during my year in industry. I also added some of the rather particular scientific skills I'd developed. Several months later I received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter for a big international company (Akzo Nobel) who was looking for someone with the skills I'd learned during my year in industry – colloid science and dispersions. They had done a LinkedIn search and my name had come up. It was really exciting to see how useful LinkedIn could be - instead of trawling through job adverts someone was coming to me with a job I was suitable for! I spoke to someone at Akzo Nobel and I would have gone through the normal recruitment procedures but I decided not to apply because I felt I was lacking management experience for the position (ironically, I no longer have that problem).

Since then I've heard a lot of stories about people who've had similar experiences through LinkedIn. A friend looking for work as a web developer got approached by several companies via LinkedIn, and a senior chemist I know said most of his friends had been hired via LinkedIn.

I tend to use the strategy of making small updates regularly so that I stay up high in people's newsfeeds – making a lot of big changes at once optimises where you turn up in the algorithm for only a short period of time. The system tends to reward you more for logging in and doing little things regularly.

No longer do I assume LinkedIn is just 'something nice to have'; it almost takes priority over my CV as I know that often people just take your name from the top of your CV and use that to find your LinkedIn profile instead of even reading your CV! In my opinion, social media is how most job hunting will be done in the future. I've learned it should be a priority – not just an add-on.

Oonagh’s LinkedIn profile

March 2015