Power Formula LinkedIn Blog

LinkedIn is contacting more and more companies and trying to convince them to upgrade their sales teams to Sales Navigator accounts. In addition, LinkedIn is putting more limits on the better features of their free accounts. Thus, more and more business professionals are asking me, Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator really worth the $99.99/month?

I've been using Sales Navigator for about nine years. Since it's a fairly expensive upgrade, I've put together some facts, figures, and personal thoughts to help you figure out if it's right for you.

Note: These comments do not address all of the Sales Navigator features but merely the ones I feel might justify the significant monthly investment. As part of my upcoming virtual workshop on May 22 Using LinkedIn to Generate a Steady Stream of Sales Prospects, I do a short live demo of these and other Sales Navigator features and extensively review the best ways to use free LinkedIn to generate leads. You can check out the details of this two-hour workshop and register here.
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What is Sales Navigator?

Sales Navigator is LinkedIn's stand-alone business development platform that works in conjunction with your regular LinkedIn account. LinkedIn says that Sales Navigator will help you "target the right buyers, understand key insights, and engage with personalized outreach."

Users don't have a separate profile or separate login. You access Sales Navigator by simply clicking the Sales Nav icon, which will appear at the far right of your top toolbar after you upgrade your account.

There are three levels of Sales Navigator (with increased features and capabilities), beginning at $99.99/month. A free, 30-day trial is typically available. Click here to check out the differences between the three options. I pay $99.99 per month, and my comments here relate to that version.
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You should consider upgrading to LinkedIn Sales Navigator if:

You're tired of LinkedIn limiting your people searches each month. If you're taking advantage of LinkedIn's expansive database and doing lots of searches, you've probably reached the commercial use limit. No one outside of LinkedIn seems to know how many searches you can do before reaching the monthly limit, but it sure seems to have been reduced over the past couple years. This is the number one complaint I get from people who are hanging onto the free account but should probably consider upgrading to Sales Navigator.

You can avoid the commercial use limit by upgrading to Premium Business ($59.99/mo), but I'm not convinced this upgrade is valuable enough to justify the investment. You cannot avoid the commercial use limit by upgrading to Premium Career ($29.99/mo). Here is a chart to compare these two plans against Sales Navigator plans.

You want more helpful filters when searching for people. As part of Sales Navigator's Lead Builder function, there are currently 38 very specific filters available—and they're adding new ones all the time. This is one of the main reasons you might want to upgrade.

In my opinion, the best filters to help you find just the right people are Company headcount, Geography-Postal code, Years in current position, Years in current company, Posted content-Keywords in articles, Spotlights-Changed jobs in last 90 days, Spotlights-Posted on LinkedIn in last 30 days.

Searching for people with the free account, where you need to use Boolean search rules, can be quite challenging, but it's very easy with Sales Navigator.

You'd like to save your advanced filtered people searches. Once you've done a good job of figuring out the right filters for a people search, it's usually helpful to save those search criteria for future searches. This saving function is no longer available on free or Premium LinkedIn. With Sales Navigator, you can save fifty searches, and LinkedIn notifies you weekly when new people meet your preselected search criteria.

This is, hands down, one of the most useful Sales Navigator features. It's like having a virtual assistant who's looking for the right people for you 24/7.

You want to send messages (InMails) to people who aren't first-degree connections. Sometimes you just don't want to connect with someone in order to send him/her a message. A Sales Navigator subscription includes an allotment of InMails. I get fifty InMails per month, and they carry forward if I don't use them all before month-end.

You'd like to track only certain people (leads) or companies (accounts) and avoid extraneous information. On your Sales Navigator home page, there is a feed that looks similar to the feed on your regular LinkedIn account but with one big exception—the only information in that feed relates to people (leads) or companies (accounts) you've designated.

In other words, there's no advertising and a lot fewer posts that really don't interest you because you handpicked the people or companies, and you get everything they share because there's no feed algorithm where LinkedIn decides what you want to see.

Also, you can designate people or companies that aren't part of your network. In other words, they don't have to agree to connect with you, but you can still monitor their activity. Then, if you use some of the information you've learned about them, you might be able to convince them to engage with you.

So, as you can see, the answer to the question of whether Sales Navigator is worth the $99.99 or more per month is yes, no or maybe. For me, it's definitely worth it, because I do a lot of searches for prospecting purposes. This synopsis should help you decide if it's right for you.

To learn more about the very best sales features on Free LinkedIn, see a live demo of these and other LinkedIn Sales Navigator features, and learn other quick and easy strategies to improve your sales pipeline, join me on Monday, May 22, for my two-hour webinar Using LinkedIn to Generate a Steady Stream of Sales Prospects. 

 

Your LinkedIn company page has several important purposes and none more important than to share, influence, educate, and attract your target audience—but none of that will be effective unless people make the choice to follow your company.

Note: I will be covering these strategies and so many more in my upcoming 90-minute virtual workshop Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page & Effectively Market Your Business on April 24. Check out the details and register here.

Here are the best ways to get more company page followers.

1.  Install a LinkedIn Company "Follow" Button on your website and blog.

2.  Ask people to follow your company in your other channels of corporate communication (snail mail, email, newsletters, advertising, etc.). And it's kind of lame to simply say, "Please follow our company page on LinkedIn." Instead, share with them what's in it for them. For instance, explain what interesting information you're going to make available to followers, like special promotions, job postings, articles, video, checklists, events, etc.

3.  Get more employees from your company to join LinkedIn, and be sure they correctly list and attach to your company as their current employer. This has been done correctly when your company logo shows up on their profile, and it will then click through to your company page.

4.  Allow employees who may have a large number of individuals in your company's target audience to invite people to follow your company page using the new Invite Connections feature. Find more details on this very helpful feature here.

5.  Show your employees how to include a link to your company page in their email signature.

6.  Discuss with all employees the importance of liking, sharing, and/or commenting on posts that come from your company page. Your company's posts will then go to each employee's network—of course, based on the LinkedIn feed algorithm. More views = more followers. (Note: Employees are automatically followers of their employer's company page.)

You can use the new employee notification feature. This is one of the best new features LinkedIn has come up with for improving the effectiveness of your company page posts.

7.  Mention and link your company page on your other social media platforms.

8.  Refer to your company page when interacting with people in your LinkedIn industry groups.

9.  Share good, helpful resources and information via company posts on a consistent basis. If you do this well, over time you will acquire lots of followers. LinkedIn has shared great information on what people want to hear about in its Publisher's  Pocket Guide—How to Spark Meaningful Conversations on LinkedIn.

10. Attract new followers by offering unique content that is only available to your LinkedIn company page followers.

In three weeks, I picked up close to 300 followers for my company page when I shared my free ebook 10 LinkedIn Mistakes Companies Make—and how to fix them before they damage your company's reputation. I gave my followers access to it before I released it to anyone else.

If you haven't gotten your copy of 10 LinkedIn Mistakes Companies Make—and how to fix them before they damage your company's reputation, click here to download your free copy.

If you want more solid LinkedIn corporate marketing strategies like these, be sure to sign up for my upcoming 90-minute virtual workshop Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page & Effectively Market Your Business on April 24. Check out the details and register here.

 

LinkedIn's Skills profile section has been rather confusing from its inception, but they've been improving it over the years. With the latest feature changes, you now have complete control over the section, which could have a significant impact on your business and career.

Because LinkedIn has made at least a dozen revisions to the Skills section over the ten years of its existence, we can assume this section is fairly important in the overall scheme of how LinkedIn works and, most importantly, in the way the critical search ranking algorithm works. I can't prove it, but I don't think LinkedIn would spend this much time and effort unless it really matters.

Speaking of LinkedIn changes, have you kept up with all the changes available for your LinkedIn company page? I will be covering many LinkedIn company page changes and strategies at my next virtual workshop on Monday, April 24, Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page & Effectively Market Your Business.

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How to optimize your Skills profile section

To help you make the most of your Skills section, I will give you some overall strategies for capitalizing on it, in addition to discussing the updated, new, or revised features. Implementing these strategies will help the viewers of your profile better understand how you can help them, and the result will be great new relationships that should lead to improved business and career success.

1.  You can only receive endorsements from first-level connections and for skills you have acknowledged you possess. If you receive a pending endorsement notification from LinkedIn saying, John Jones wants to endorse you for basket weaving, don't say yes if you aren't a good basket weaver or don't want basket weaving listed as a skill in your Skills section.

2.  You can manage them. Scroll down to the Skills section of your profile, and then you can:

Add any skills that show what you're good at from a professional standpoint. If your job duties include sales, add keywords that relate to the products and services you sell. After you click "+" in the top right of your Skills section, type a skill in the box. LinkedIn will then suggest other skills based on the words you put in the box. If those skills are part of your skill set, be sure to add them to your list of skills.

Attach a specific skill to a specific job experience entry. Just click the pencil on a specific skill, and then you can check off which of your job experience entries you would like that skill attached to and displayed below that Experience section entry. This is the newest change and looks to be a very important one.

Delete a skill. Click the pencil icon in the top right corner of your Skills section, and then click the pencil on a specific skill listed that you want to delete. Next, click Delete skill in the bottom left in the specific skills box, and it's gone—along with any endorsements of that skill, of course.

Reorder your skills. This feature enables you to reorder your most important skills to the top of your Skills section, providing greater visibility and credibility for you. Simply click the three dots on the top right of your Skills section, and then click the up-down icon. You can then "drag and drop" to rearrange all your skills in the order of importance.

Because you can now put your best skills at the top of the list, your connections will be more likely to endorse you for those skills—and soon they'll be the most endorsed skills on your profile. This will help you get closer to the top of the search results when people search for those skills.

Choose (1) whether or not you want to be endorsed, (2) whether you want LinkedIn to suggest endorsements to your connections, and (3) whether you want suggestions for endorsing your connections. Click the three dots in the top right-hand corner of your Skills section. Then select Endorsement settings on the bottom of the page to revise your settings. I recommend choosing Yes for all three settings.

3.  You can be endorsed for up to 50 skills. These skills are essentially keywords, and LinkedIn and other search engines love keywords; so I would use all 50 slots if you have keywords that would help people find you.

4.  You don't have to endorse everyone who endorses you. If you want to endorse them, go ahead, but don't feel obligated to do so.

5.  I'm pretty sure endorsements and the skills they attach to are part of the LinkedIn search algorithm. LinkedIn doesn't publicize its algorithm, but, as I mentioned previously, my guess is that skills are an important part of it, because LinkedIn doesn't invest this much time and effort into something that isn't going to help their top-line revenue. They are making a lot of money on their Recruiting Solutions product, and they obviously think this feature helps them deliver the "best" candidate for a certain skill ("best" meaning most endorsed).

6.  List skills that are important and consistent with your current or future business strategy. The skills you include, especially the ones you pin and move to the top of the other categories, should be important for you on a moving forward basis—and these may not be the same skills that have been historically important for you.

Also, don't worry about putting new skills in the top three spots. You may not have any endorsements for them yet, but you'll get them over time.

7.  You might get someone's attention if you endorse him/her. Your face and name may appear on the person's profile, and LinkedIn will also send the person a message saying you just endorsed him or her.

8.  Endorsements may be the differentiator. If two profiles look similar in all respects but one has 120 endorsements for the skill you're looking for and the other has only 20, you will probably be inclined to choose the person with 120.

9.  Endorsements are great, but LinkedIn recommendations are still important. I recommend you get at least three recommendations, because LinkedIn now displays them very prominently and in full on your profile. This is especially important if you're a job seeker. Great recommendations will increase your credibility—and the more the better.

You should now be ready to impress readers of your profile with your specific skills and affirmation of those skills by LinkedIn members—and greater visibility and credibility are sure to lead to increased revenue or a great new job.
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SPECIAL OFFER

To learn about terrific company page changes, address the mistakes you're making, and formulate a specific strategy for your company page, be sure to check out my April 24 virtual workshop Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page & Effectively Market Your Business.

 

I'm frequently asked Should I connect on LinkedIn with competitors? My quick answer is Are you nuts? Why would you want to hand over your database of prospects and customers to a competitor?

However, because not all relationships are simple and one-dimensional (competitor or not a competitor), here are some factors to consider when deciding whether to connect with a "competitor."
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• Is the identity of your customers already public knowledge? If it's public knowledge, then connecting with competitors is not as big of deal.

• Do you hide your list of connections from your network? If you do, then they can't see who you're connected to anyway, so there's less risk.

• Do you think you're better at LinkedIn than your competitors? If so, then maybe you're going to gain more from having the ability to look through their connections than they will gain from looking at your connections.

• Are you connected to only people you trust or is your network more open? If you choose to connect with people who are not your trusted friends, those people could potentially allow your competitor to come over to their office and scroll through your list of connections. This is certainly unlikely, but it is possible.

Also, keep in mind that relationships change over time. If a trusted coworker who's in your network goes to work for a competitor and becomes your number one nemesis, then you may want to consider disconnecting from that person.

As you can see, there's no simple answer to the question of whether you should connect with competitors. But after you consider the points mentioned above, you can make the decision with your eyes wide open.

SPECIAL OFFER

To learn about terrific company page changes, address the mistakes you're making, and formulate a specific strategy for your company page, be sure to check out my April 24 virtual workshop Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page & Effectively Market Your Business.

 

When was the last time you updated your LinkedIn Company Page? One, two, five years?

When was the last time you checked to see what some of your most influential outward facing employees said about your company on their LinkedIn profiles? A long time ago, never?

The answers to these questions may just lead you to the fact that you have been a bit delinquent in not making sure you put your best foot forward as it relates to your company's presence on LinkedIn.

To help business leaders corral this potential value, I have written an eBook titled 10 LinkedIn Mistakes Companies Make—and How to Fix Them Before They Damage Your Company's Reputation.

In this 15-page eBook, I address common mistakes, provide solutions, and give tips for using LinkedIn to grow revenues, find new employees and suppliers, and maintain a consistent brand in the ever-changing online world.

Download your copy of my eBook here.

Note: Don't miss your chance to register for my April 24 virtual workshop Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page & Effectively Market Your Business. 

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How many of these five mistakes are you and your company making?

1.  Unprofessional or poor-quality employee profile photos—or, worse yet, no photo at all

2.  Sharing incorrect or inconsistent information about the company

3.  Failing to monitor employees' profiles and activity as well as what's being said about the company through LinkedIn

4.  Underutilizing the features and tools available on the company page—or not even having a company page

5. Having a woefully inadequate corporate social media policy—or none at all

To learn the rest of the mistakes and how to address the mistakes you're making plus formulate a specific strategy for your company, be sure to check out my April 24 virtual workshop Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page & Effectively Market Your Business.

 

LinkedIn's database includes over 950 million professionals, and smart companies are capitalizing on this massive database. However, LinkedIn is not very user-friendly when it comes to searching for great new employees.

LinkedIn's simple solution is to purchase their Recruiter product—but Recruiter licenses come at an annual cost of $6,000 to $8,000 per user.

Well, as a past CFO myself, I never really thought much of one-size-fits-all solutions—especially those with hefty price tags.

So, as your trusted LinkedIn advisor, I have some simple ideas to help you use LinkedIn to recruit great employees for your organization, and you don't need a premium LinkedIn account to take advantage of them.

To learn all my secrets for capitalizing on LinkedIn's recruiting potential, join me on Monday, March 13, from noon-1:30PM CT, for my 90-minute webinar Using LinkedIn to Recruit Top Talent Without a Premium Account. 

If you can't attend live, no worries, because you'll receive a link to view the recording at your leisure. Seating is limited, so grab your seat now at https://linkedinrecruitingmarch2023.eventbrite.com.

Here is a sneak peek at two of the secrets I'll be sharing.

Advanced People Search. Use these criteria when building your Advanced People Search:

Title. Be sure to try some different words for the same job separated by the OR operator. For example, purchasing OR sourcing OR buyer.

Current and Past Company. Put your competitor's name(s) here. You can choose current or past, based on your desire to hire someone who is still there, has left their employ, or either. This is really helpful. It's how I found the last employee I hired.

Connections of. Drop the name of one of your connections in this filter box, and then use any of the other available filters to get a great list of potential candidates that he or she knows.

From the search results, send customized LinkedIn connection requests to people you aren’t connected to whom you might be interested in hiring, and explain your interest in speaking to them about your job opening.

Direct message candidates in your first-degree network. Using criterion similar to those listed above, perform an Advanced People Search of your network. Then send direct messages to the best candidates from the search results, and give them the details of your current job opening.

On Monday, March 13, I'll cover these strategies in depth and many more—including a simple way to start receiving regular notices from LinkedIn that include prequalified candidates for your job openings.

Be one of the smart companies that uses LinkedIn to recruit and hire top talent—without a premium account.

Get more info about the webinar and register here: https://linkedinrecruitingmarch2023.eventbrite.com

Have you taken advantage of your free LinkedIn job posting?

What??? You didn't know you could do that?

Yes, and it has been that way for quite a while now. However, in typical LinkedIn fashion, they failed to let you know.

Here is an article from the LinkedIn Help Center that will give you the blow-by-blow details. Of course, they will encourage you to boost that free job post, but you don't have to do it.

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/121660

But is that really the only way—or the best way—to use LinkedIn to find your next great employee?

My answer to that question is a solid "maybe." It might be all you need to do, but my experience in working with lots of companies is that it isn't the only thing you need to do. What really works is to put together multiple LinkedIn strategies in addition to just posting the job and hoping people will find the post.

During my upcoming virtual workshop Using LinkedIn to Recruit Top Talent Without a Premium Account on March 13, I'll show you eight ways to effectively use free LinkedIn to directly find and reach out to people who have the perfect experience for your open positions. You can check out the details of that workshop and register here.

Here is a preview of just one of the eight highly productive LinkedIn strategies I will be sharing during the workshop.

LinkedIn Alumni Tab on the University Page. Use the Alumni feature to find potential candidates who attended a specific school. Fellow alumni of the schools you attended is a good place to start.

Step-By-Step Instructions

1. In the large search box on your top toolbar, type the name of the school you're interested in. When it shows up in the drop-down list, choose that entry—or you can just click the name of a school on anyone’s profile.

2. Once you're on the university's page, click the Alumni tab. This will take you to that school's Alumni page.

3. You can now filter the entire list by entering words in the Search alumni by title, keyword or company box, entering years in the Start year and End year boxes, or selecting or entering information into one or more of these six columnar filters:
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• • • Where they live
    • Where they work
    • What they do
    • What they studied
    • What they are skilled at
    • How you are connected

If you are looking for a person from a certain age group or years of experience, use the Start year or End year filters on the top right to find alumni who are probably in that age range. Granted, it isn’t exactly an age search because not everyone gets an undergrad degree at age 22, but it should still provide some valuable information.

4. Once you have selected your filters on the Alumni page by clicking the bars under your desired selections, LinkedIn displays a mini-profile for everyone who meets your filtering criteria.

Without leaving the page, you can send a message to any first-degree connections or use a personalized message to invite anyone on the list to join your network. As part of your personalized invitation, you can begin a conversation about your job opening.

If you'd like to see this strategy demonstrated on live LinkedIn or learn about my other seven proven ways to find great employees with a free LinkedIn account, then join me on March 13—or at least register so you can get the recording after the event. The full 90-minute workshop is only $99 plus fees.

Here is the link to check out all the details and grab your seat:

https://linkedinrecruitingmarch2023.eventbrite.com

 

LinkedIn is always the best research tool to find the right people, but it may not always be the best tool for communicating with them.

I confidently share this statement with most of my audiences, and here's why.

Most people have a LinkedIn profile by now, and we can find those pretty easily. But based on user statistics that LinkedIn used to share often (but hasn't shared since its purchase by Microsoft) and also reports from others who track actual usage of social media sites, the majority of people who have profiles don't access the site monthly—yes, that's right, not even monthly.

Thus, you need to think about your options (on and off of LinkedIn) for taking the next step and communicating with someone in your target audience who has a LinkedIn profile. You'll need to decide which option is most appropriate for your situation and whether the person's profile tips you off to whether that person is on LinkedIn consistently (profile photo, number of connections, complete profile, posting information, etc.) or may not even remember his/her password.

Note: I will be covering strategies like these specifically for recruiting employees on LinkedIn at my 90-minute virtual workshop "Using LinkedIn to Recruit Top Talent Without a Premium Account" on March 13. Check out the details and register here.
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LinkedIn communication options

Send a direct message. This option is available to you if you're already connected or if you're in a group with the person you want to contact. LinkedIn lets you send an unlimited number of direct messages to your current connections and to fellow group members.

(Note: LinkedIn users can change their settings so no one can direct message them in the group, but it is not the default, so you can usually do this.)

To message a connection, just go to the person's profile and click the Message button.

To message a person within a group, click the Groups icon in your Work tab in the top toolbar, and then pick the group to which you both belong. Click Show all, and enter the person’s name in the Search members box. When the person’s entry comes up, click the Message icon to the right of his/her name and type in your message.

Send an InMail. InMails are direct messages to people you're not connected to. This option is only available to premium LinkedIn members. When you're on the person's profile, simply click the More button, and then select Message from the drop-down choices.

As a premium member, you get a specific number of InMails each month as part of your premium membership. You can purchase additional InMails at $10 each.

If someone responds to your InMail within 90 days, you get a credit from LinkedIn for another InMail. In other words, LinkedIn gives you credit for sending InMails to people who are more apt to respond. This helps control spamming.

LinkedIn power user tip: If you want to message someone who isn't one of your first-level connections, join one of the person's groups, and go through the steps outlined above. This will save you $10 or one of your allotted InMails.

Get introduced through a connection. This step not only enables you to have your first-level connection introduce you to your target but also gives your connection the opportunity to write something nice about you, your services, or the products you offer.

Although LinkedIn's official Introduction feature was eliminated several years ago, you can still forward to one of your first-level connections the profile of a person you're interested in getting introduced to. Simply go to your target's profile, click the More icon, and select Send profile in a message. Then put your connection's name in the Type a name or multiple names box and enter the details of your request in the message box, which now has been populated with a link to your target's profile.

Include your message in an invitation to connect. If the person is someone you want in your network, this is probably the best option, because if the person accepts your connection request, you can direct message him/her forever, assuming (s)he doesn't disconnect from you.

Because it's advantageous to customize your invitation, go to the person's profile. For 2nd degree LinkedIn members, click the big blue Connect button. For 3rd degree members, click the More button and choose Connect from the drop-down menu. If you don't see either of these options, the person may have changed his/her setting and will not accept invitations. Once you click Connect, select the Add a note button and craft your best 300 character invitation to that person.
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Non-LinkedIn communication options

Call the company and ask for the person. Duh! Believe it or not, this still works with some people, especially with people who grew up using the phone as a phone 😉

Send an email. Some people provide their email address on their profile or you can use any one of the many internet tools for tracking down emails—or now that you know where the person works, check out the email format the company follows and take a guess at the person's email address.

Send the person something by snail mail. Since the dawn of email, most of us receive less physical mail. Personally, this causes me to open most of the snail mail I receive. An envelope with a handwritten address is even more likely to be opened.

Stop at the person's place of business and drop off some goodies. This will surely surprise the person. When I worked at M&M Office Interiors, we would drop off a bag of plain or peanut M&M’s.

LinkedIn is a great tool for researching and finding people and also communicating with them, but sometimes the best communication method might be one of the traditional methods.

Good luck engaging with the important people you find on LinkedIn!

If you'd like to learn about my proven ways to find great employees with a free LinkedIn account, then join me on March 13—or at least register so you can get the recording after the event. The full 90-minute workshop is only $99 plus fees.

Here is the link to check out all the details and grab your seat:

https://linkedinrecruitingmarch2023.eventbrite.com

LinkedIn could quite possibly be the greatest tool you have to address all of the openings you currently have at your company, and I don't mean just paying LinkedIn to post your open positions.

So how much time did you spend on the site last week taking advantage of the world's largest professional network with over 900 million members?

Don't feel like you're alone if you answered "very little time." I find that most people still don't know how to take advantage of LinkedIn to find and reach out to people who could be just the right fit for openings they have.

In this article I will share with you some of the best strategies to do just that—and you don't even need a premium LinkedIn account.

To learn all of my strategies for capitalizing on LinkedIn's recruiting potential, join me on Monday, March 13, from noon-1:30PM CT, for my webinar Using LinkedIn to Recruit Top Talent Without a Premium Account.

If you can't attend live, no worries, because you'll receive a link to view the recording at your leisure. Seating is limited, so grab your seat now at https://linkedinrecruitingmarch2023.eventbrite.com.
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Four easy ways to recruit on LinkedIn

1. Individual Update.  Post an update to ask your network if they know of anyone who is qualified for the position you're attempting to fill. After all, this is your network, and the people in your network know you well and understand the nature of your company. If someone in your network is aware of a prospective candidate, he/she should be able to quickly introduce you to the candidate.

This is the easiest and most efficient way to find your next hire. That being said, I would not post this update every day, but try to limit this update to a couple times per week at different times of the day, maybe even once on the weekend.

To get additional exposure, ask a few of your most connected coworkers or friends to like, comment on, or share the post. That will get the post in front of their connections as well and increase your organic reach.

I know a president of a local company who found a new VP for his company in just five days after using the status update to ask his network for help. Think of the time and money that saved him.

2. Company Update.  On your company page, post a similar update. This shares the information with some of your company page followers. Job seekers interested in working for your company are probably among your followers.

To get more viewers of this update beyond your company followers, ask all employees in the company to like, comment on, or share this update so their connections may see it as well.

Consider “pinning” your status update to the top of the update feed.

3. Company Followers.  Review the list of your company followers periodically to look for good candidates. Several HR directors have told me they found the exact right candidate (sometimes working for competitors) in that list of followers just waiting to be contacted.

If you are an administrator of your company page, you can view a list of your followers, in reverse chronological order of when they began following your company.

Go to your company page, select Followers from the dropdown menu on your Analytics tab (see screenshot). If you find someone interesting, consider sending a connection request (or InMail) with a message asking the person if he/she might be interested in a role with your company.

4. University Page.  Here you can find potential candidates who attended a specific school. Fellow alumni of the schools you attended is a good place to start.

Access this by clicking the name of one of the schools on your profile. Once you’re on the university’s page, click the Alumni tab.

You can sort the individuals by:
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• Where they live
• Where they work
• What they do
• What they studied
• What they're skilled at
• How you're connected

Reach out to qualified candidates about your job openings. Because most people have warm, fuzzy feelings toward fellow alumni, they'll probably respond to you if they're interested in a new job.

On Monday, March 13, I'll cover these strategies in-depth and many more. Join me, and be one of the smart companies that use LinkedIn to recruit and hire top talent without spending a dime.

Get more info about the webinar and register here: https://linkedinrecruitingmarch2023.eventbrite.com

 

Recommendations, testimonials, positive reviews, and five-star ratings are all ways you and your company's brand can be compared and contrasted with others. Then you are either selected—or not!

LinkedIn has always made recommendations a very prominent part of your personal profile. Has it been a while since you thought just how helpful—or not—your LinkedIn recommendations are for you?

This article will help you think about recommendations in a new way, and it's one of the important strategies I will share at my upcoming virtual LinkedIn workshop Using LinkedIn to Generate a Steady Stream of Sales Prospects on January 30. You can get more details and register here. By the way, if you can't attend live, all registrants receive a link to watch the recording at a later time.
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LinkedIn Recommendations: The Secrets Revealed

This will not be the standard discussion of LinkedIn recommendations—how important they are and how you should strive to get a couple for each job entry on your profile. For "Recommendations 101," I suggest you pick up a copy of my book that includes an entire chapter on recommendations.

Here are some winning strategies relating to recommendations on your profile that you might not have considered.

1.  Your name appears on other people's profiles.

What better place to have your name and your job title show up than on the profile of a very important, well-respected individual in your town or industry. Talk about personal branding and increasing awareness of your brands—this really hits the target.

2.  The recommendations displayed in the Recommendations section of your profile can be used in other profile sections for increased exposure.

Currently, LinkedIn displays the three most recently received recommendations in their entirety, which I really like, but the rest of them are typically not viewed because the reader needs to click Show all [number of recommendations] received to see the entire list.

Action steps: Review all of your recommendations. Grab the most impactful quotes/statements, and include those in the Description section of any Experience entries to which they apply.

Another idea is to put together a document with a page full of your best quotes/statements, and add that as media in your Featured section or applicable Experience entries.

Both of these strategies will encourage more people to read your very best recommendations and could move you ahead of your competitors.

3.  The number of recommendations you have and the keywords included in those recommendations are part of LinkedIn's search algorithm (their "secret sauce").

LinkedIn has shared that a couple of the important components of their "secret sauce" recipe (who gets picked up in a search and how high he or she appears) are the number of recommendations and the keywords that people are searching by and for. You don't have to like this or agree with it—just understand it and then make it work for you.

Action step: Go out and get lots of recommendations loaded with your most important keywords. This will help you move up in the search rankings when people are looking for someone like you.

4.  Recommendations can give you insight into how people think.

This one is from one of my former job-seeking friends (notice I said "former").

Prior to an interview, she reviewed the recommendations the interviewer had written for others. From this she learned that the interviewer appreciates attention to detail. Armed with this insight, my friend made a point of sharing with the interviewer all the wonderful real-life examples she had that pointed out her attention to detail. She got the job!

This process can also be used to learn what attributes are important to your potential customer, vendor, donor, employer, etc.

5.  Recommendations are one of the fuels of the new trust economy.

Pre-Internet, selecting the vendor of choice included lots of phone calls, meetings, brochures, proposals, interviews, presentations, more interviews, more presentations, etc. by almost every potential vendor in the market. Now think of how we do it in the Internet age: Google, Google, and more Google.

I am not saying that all the steps I mentioned are no longer part of the process, but by reviewing company websites, business and product review websites, comparison shopping websites, blogs, and all the other social media sites, we are able to eliminate vendors before we ever actually contact them.

You may be thinking, sure, Wayne, but all those recommendations you got are written by people who like your products and services. No one ever writes a bad one—and if they did, who would let it be posted on his or her profile anyway.

That may be true, but would you want all those recommendations on your competitors' profiles instead of yours?

So get busy and seek out some impressive recommendations from your customers, clients, vendors, professors, anyone who can attest to how great you and your products or services are. It will make you stand out from the crowd and help you land your next business or career opportunity.
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SPECIAL OFFER

If you'd like to learn more simple but powerful ways to use LinkedIn to sell more products and services—or, if you're not directly selling something, maximize LinkedIn for yourself or your organization—join me on Monday, January 30, for my virtual workshop Using LinkedIn to Generate a Steady Stream of Sales Prospects.