What you Need to Get LinkedIn

It's a pun today, people, to get linked in, to get LinkedIn, never mind, it was a terrible pun.

Things one needs to get started on LinkedIn:

A decent headshot.
A clear photo, of your face, top of chest up, looking at the camera, ideally smiling.  It can be a photo your friend took of you with your phone, but it must be a good one.  No selfies, photos with friends or your dog, or casual clothes please.  Plain or simple background, not too busy.

A decent email.
If you don't already have a semi-professional sounding email, get one.  Your student email and the sierrathegreat@excite.com account you made in middle school are not going to cut it here.

A decent introductory bio.
This is a very important space for you to communicate what you are looking for, what you are good at, and to give a little preamble to your work experience.  It's also a great space for adding some personality.

A decent description of your most relevant work history.
I have heard some contradictory strategic advice on choosing work experience to share on LinkedIn.  Some have suggested that LinkedIn can be a repository for the sum total of your work experience, and others have suggested that you limit and tailor your referenced work experience to suit the position you are currently pursuing.

As all smart people do, I fall somewhere in the middle.  On my own LinkedIn, I include some odd jobs that most of my employers don't need to see (like my two summers as a Girl Scout camp counselor), and would be a waste of space on a single page resume.  However, the additional space afforded to me on LinkedIn allows me to give a more dynamic picture of myself, so I include my scout time online.

Give general descriptions of your work experience responsibilities, taking care to mention the relevant skills and abilities that will most apply to the career path you are seeking.  It will need to be general use for multiple employers, but still industry specific to make it clear why that previous job led to this new career path.

As you describe what you have done in the past, try to make a contiguous story, and even if you overstate how premeditated your transitions were, help a potential employer connect the dots.

Take advantage of the spaces for awards, memberships, and classes, and upload examples of your work or papers from school.  This is especially useful for students who have little to no work experience in their field yet.

This will be a painful process.  Just like writing your resume, it's going to suck, it's going to be hard, you aren't going to like it.

Pick a Saturday to sacrifice at the altar of the rest of your entire career, and write the damn thing.  There's no getting around it.  You cannot expect that your career will carry on successfully if you won't even commit a few hours to writing a compelling resume and LinkedIn page.  No hiring manager or professional will respect you more because you had to explain away your terrible writing.

Please, please, please, avoid using overly generic words to describe what you did.  Yes, you were a bookkeeper's assistant which meant opening envelopes, sorting mail, sending invoices to approval, and entering the approved invoices into the online accounting software.  Gosh, that must have been even more glamorous than it sounds.

How about this: I was the assistant bookkeeper at a fishing fleet management company, receiving invoices and depositing checks pertaining to the more than $20 million in annual revenue from our five Alaskan pollock fishing crews.  I saw bills through the approval process all the way to payment, and I reduced payment times from greater than 90 days to less than 45 on average.

Now, what's the difference?  I broke out of the minutia of the mechanics of my job, and described the purpose for my position, while highlighting specific achievements.  It can be hard not to fall back on describing the play-by-play of your work.  If you are really comfortable knowing what your purpose was, it will be easier to speak holistically.

A decent network.
This one will be an ongoing process throughout your career, but you need to get a good start.  Import your contacts from email, connect with your family and friends, your dentist, whomever you can connect with just to get the ball rolling.  You never how that connection with your milkman will pay off in the long run.

LinkedIn prefers that you connect with people you have actually met in person (especially on the web platform).  It will ask you how you know this person, so it behooves you to have added as many associations, jobs, and schools as possible.

Connect with everyone you know from college, and met at previous jobs and volunteer programs.  It is usually acceptable, after meeting a speaker or a professor at an event and chatting with them, to follow up by connecting with them on LinkedIn.

Connect with people even if you would never friend them on Facebook.  There are no baby pictures on LinkedIn, no partisan politics, or other personal drama, so don't be afraid to connect with someone who is a good contact but not a potential friend.

Once you've connected with some people and built a network, check out their pages and endorse them for a few skills.  Linked In will prompt you to endorse people periodically, and will also remind you when people in your network have big work anniversaries and milestones.

A decent effort at maintaining your LinkedIn.
Make a reasonable effort to check out LinkedIn, online or on your phone, at least once per week.  It's not as busy as Facebook or Instagram, but it is worthwhile to stop in and see what is up with your network and engage with them.

"Engagement" means endorsing others for skills, making new connections, and liking others' posts.

Periodically, you should post your own updates, and share articles with your network.  You can share articles just like on your Facebook news feed as a status update.  This is a place for semi-professional to very professional content, so sharing industry articles and recent projects is most appropriate.  If you have a private blog, be sure to promote it here and let your network know what you are up to.

A decent content plan.
You don't need to have a giant editorial calendar to post on LinkedIn, but you should have some idea of what kind of thing you want to share.  It also provides an incentive to you to stay up on what is going on in your industry.  Some ideas include:

• articles you've read recently.  Include articles your read for school assignments if you are still a student.
• an interesting blog you read (or better, that you wrote)
• videos from YouTube about things related to your industry.
• reshared articles from other people in your network.

Strive to update your network 3 to 4 times per month, which works out to approximately once per week.  You don't have to make a giant thing about it, but be on the lookout for something worthy of sharing to keep your name popping up in the news feed of your network.  If you have connected with potential employers, this is especially important, and that name recognition could mean getting the job.