5on5: Is it possible to find a job on LinkedIn?
“…to establish yourself as an industry thought leader that’s one of the best places to spend your time by answering questions in the Q&A section” – Khan Ozol, PhD
We are on our last week of the 5on5 Expert Blog Series hearing from recruiters on recruiting through LinkedIn. I interviewed Khan Ozol, PhD, who is an experienced recruiter and sales professional with a scientific background. He specialize in recruiting accountants and scientists, throughout the Atlantic Canada market. He focuses primarily on the recruitment of accounting professionals.
How long have you been a recruiter and what jobs do you recruit for?
I’ve spent roughly half my professional career engaged in recruiting. That’s probably an accumulative amount of about 6 years. I’ve recruited scientists, financial advisors, and accountants. Primarily in the last year I’ve recruited accountants in the local market that I’m in. So going forward it’s going to be accountants and potentially I’m going to go back to recruiting scientist, pharmaceutical and biotech.
What tips would you give a potential applicant for their profile?
First of all, complete your profile. You get that nice little indicator that tells you where you are at percentage-wise, so take the time to complete your profile to 100%. Because individuals that are searching on LinkedIn are going to find you by those keyword searches and you never know what searches you’re going to pop up in. And have a decent amount of information within each position and go as far back as you’d like. Because the further back you go in your experience the more power that’s going to give you in a keyword perspective. Because you’re probably going to be hitting on multiply keywords in multiply positions. So if someone was going to type in a cost accountant or a formulation scientist and you’ve been a formulation scientist three times in the past and you think, ah I’m not going to put that on my profile. It might be worth it in case someone was looking for a director level individual and they type in a keyword formulation or formulation scientist you’re going to have more likelihood of coming up in that search. So focusing in on your keywords is important, building out your profile to 100%, add a picture preferably with a smile on your face. There’s lots of reading material out there on how to get your profile optimized. Two books in particular I would suggest are, “How to Find a Job on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Other Social Networks” and “Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0″.
How has LinkedIn changed the role of a recruiter?
Geographically speaking it’s different for different recruiters and depending on the position they are recruiting for. So for example, I said I did financial advisor recruiting. Successful financial advisors are not looking for jobs on LinkedIn. So for a recruiter looking for financial advisors LinkedIn is not the number one strategy to find them. Now if you’re looking for accounting clerks or accountants or various other roles then LinkedIn may be a better tool for that. More and more people are obviously subscribing to LinkedIn. I’ve heard it’s one per second right now new users signing up on LinkedIn. So what you’ll see geographically there are better areas to use LinkedIn as a tool than others.
What tips would you give to someone who’s looking for a job through LinkedIn?
Number one you have to complete your profile. Don’t forget to fill out as much as you possibly can. The groups that you join are also a good source of leads. You can find groups on almost anything you could think of in terms of career specializations. So there are groups for accounting professionals, cost accountants, usually there’s accounting and financial groups within specific regions and geography. A lot of folks post jobs in those groups. Job search strategy in my opinion from looking at the data responding to job boards, gives you about a 12% chance of landing the job. Another way I would use LinkedIn if I were looking for a job would be to create a target list of the companies you are interested in. So let’s say you have a target list of 25-50 companies that you think would have the potential type of role that you’re looking for. And now you can basically leverage LinkedIn to find people within those companies and make connections. LinkedIn is a goldmine for you to actually go and start making connections within those companies.
How much time do you spend on LinkedIn and how do you utilize your time?
I try and restrict myself to at least an hour a day. But 9 times out of 10 I don’t succeed at that. This year my goal is to spend time on LinkedIn, So my time is spent building my network, looking for folks, looking at groups, looking at updates within groups to see what’s going on. Potentially looking at other job postings that are out there to see what might be happening in the market place. I don’t engage in the questions and answers section, but if you want to establish yourself as an industry thought leader that’s one of the best places to spend your time by answering questions in the Q&A section.
I want to thank Khan for his time and sharing his tips for potential candidates in how to find a job on LinkedIn. This completes our 5on5 Expert Blog Series on Recruiters – Recruiting on LinkedIn. Please go to our website and subscribe for our FREE white paper on this series that will have the additional questions asked. Our 5on5 Expert Blog Series on Life/Business Coach launches on March 29th. Please feel free to add your tips and tricks to your profile and how you use LinkedIn for looking for a job.
