As a college senior and social media certified professional myself, I know a lot about how job-hunting-oriented and frighteningly professional Linkedin can rouse up a lot of anxiety in rising graduates. Though i’d love to follow up that sentence with an assuring, “well don’t let it!”, I will, instead, simply provide a guide to help ease the stress that social media can provide for.
Firstly, don’t underestimate the power that Linkedin has. Anyone reading this can easily say “psh, I’m clicking off this post, 
IDC about Linkedin, and nobody even uses it anyway”. False. Linkedin is something you should care a lot about, as it not only illustrates your work experience, like a resume does, but also shows your level of social influence, provides insight about how others perceive your skill sets, and gives you an opportunity to post updates, showing your network what you deem as relevant. Also, unlike a resume, where you are cramming all of your experience and its components into tiny margins with too-thin of fonts, Linkedin’s structure allows you to delve deeper into how your experience within your industry has given you skills or understandings. It’s interactive structure allows potential employers and connections alike to click on any component of your Linkedin profile, which could do everything from show the number of followers or employees a company you’ve worked at has, to showing other professionals in your industry that hold a shared certification.
Before I keep tangenting about Linkedin’s infinite important features let me cut to the real chase of this piece: when used as an effective tool, Linkedin can do a lot for you as a college senior entering the job market.
How to Use Linkedin As A Rising Grad
- Sing, (Dance, Paint, & Write) Your Own Praises: In cover letters, on resumes, and even in person, we are taught to describe our qualifications without overzealously and seemingly egotistically overselling ourselves. We’re told to make our qualifications known, but to not come across like a condescending “I-do-it-all” candidate. Linkedin, however,
can give you a break from the “have I said too much?”, “ugh, I didn’t say enough” inner dialogues, as it’s appropriate on this website to include all jobs held, certifications earned, projects worked on, and pieces published. Linkedin is set up so that the more content in your profile the better! So you no longer have to debate with yourself whether or not you want to include this position held, or that award you earned junior year of undergrad. Also, Linkedin recognizes the many different categories of qualification in the real world, and allows one’s profile to reflect that. In some positions past experience and education are the sole measures of qualification, in others certifications, project examples, causes and interests are more relevant, and Linkedin asks you to provide a chosen amount on all of the above, covering all potential hiring bases. Since you comprise your Linkedin profile yourself, you can use it as a medium to show off all the awesome places you have interned, pieces you have written, etc. You can shamelessly sing your own praises because, it’s the format of the website right? - Build a relevant network: This isn’t Facebook, where you’re now friends with everyone from your high school peers, to current college colleagues, to your mom, your mom’s friend, and your former Spanish TA that you thought was pretty
cool. It’s also not Twitter where you follow EVERYONE relevant to your future dream job, (sorry everyone at NBC Universal that just got a follow from a random fuzzy-headed blonde). Linkedin is a place to build a professional network that’s comprised mainly of people who are in your field, and directly relevant to you. Linkedin myth debunked really quick: the more connections the better. While it’s true that connections are a positive attribute, as they show you have many different ties and people who are interested in being professionally connected to you, Linkedin is much more a quality over quantity driven ‘site. If you have 500+ connections but half of them are old peers from your small town high school, chances are your big network of connections isn’t going to help you out much at all. If you have, say, 168 connections but they are all members, whether student or professional, of your industry, you’re going to be much better off than your not-so-strategic peers. Having a network that is made up of peers and members of your industry will be more helpful than having a more mixed network because they will find your posts, positions, published pieces, etc. more interesting, are more likely to share/endorse, and will provide great content or 
modeling for you. You can connect with industry members by sending them an inbox, explaining to them why you’d like to be connected. The more stacked and professional your Linkedin profile is, the more likely it is that industry members will want to connect with you. Whether you’re employed at a great job, or pounding the pavement looking for one, we, as active industry members, are always looking for interesting people to engage with professionally, as it provides new insights and opportunities. Having an industry relevant Linkedin network is also effective because of the way it allows you to be viewed within searches. If you were to search a well-known person or professional in your industry, and you see that he or she is a 1st connection with one of your undergraduate peers, that peer is going to be viewed as a lot more credible after seeing that. Am I right or am I right? - Actually post updates: Most of us don’t think of Linkedin as our social media outlet of choice when it comes to posting links to our favorite articles, or updates about relevant news/opinion. And why not? We see it as either unnecessary, or simply unheard of. What do you mean there is an updates stream section of Linkedin? Haha, yeah bro it’s on the main homepage of the ‘site! But we usually navigate right away to our “profile” to either update info, stalk our professional, workin’ selves, or simply check our notifications ‘n log off. What you should do on Linkedin though, is post
updates to the website, just as you would on Facebook, for your connections to view. To be honest, Linkedin isn’t necessarily one of those ‘sites that we sit down on and scroll for eternity, (yeah i’m talking about you Tumblr), but it is effective to post updates to keep your Linkedin profile visible to those you’re connected to. If you scroll on Linkedin, you see that many industry professionals, (my field is media so it may be different for you), and brands or businesses are constantly posting content, to keep themselves visible on your feed, and to show to their networks what they care about/deem as relevant. Within Linkedin, unless you type someone’s name in, really searchin’ for them, it’s not likely you will be directed to their page. So next time you go on the ‘site post a status update, and see how many “views” it directs to your page by doing that alone!
#HaleySchluter 