Your Professional Network

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. Whether you're a marketing executive at a major company, a business owner who runs a small local shop or even student looking to explore future career options, LinkedIn is for anybody and everybody who's interested in taking their professional lives seriously by finding new opportunities to grow their careers and to connect with other professionals.

Features of LinkedIn:

The home feed is your news feed, showing recent posts from your connections with other professionals and company pages you're following. Your profile shows your name, your photo, your location, your occupation and more right at the top. Below that, you have the ability to customize various different sections like a short summary, work experience, education and other sections similarly to how you might create a traditional resume or CV. Here you'll find a list of all the professionals you're currently connected with on LinkedIn. If you hover your mouse over this option in the top menu, you'll also be able to see a number of other options that will allow you to add contacts, find people you may know and find alumni. 

All sorts of jobs listings are posted on LinkedIn everyday by employers, and LinkedIn will recommend specific jobs to you based on your current information, including your location and optional job preferences that you can fill out to get better-tailored job listings. In addition to your connections with professionals, you can follow certain interests on LinkedIn as well. These include company pages, groups according to location or interest.

Business Need:

It's pretty obvious that LinkedIn can immensely help any business out there today as it can be used as a recruiting tool, and an extremely effective one. On LinkedIn you essentially have the entire candidates profile which is basically the same as a resume with more information and typically more organized. From a candidate standpoint, I have always viewed it as a way to digitalize business cards. If you have a business card from someone that you spoke with at a job fair or even just in passing you can add them on LinkedIn and you wont ever forget who they are, and if you do, you can check your connection list and find them once again. 

My Own Experience:

As far as I know, I have never gotten a job offer through LinkedIn but I also haven't really applied to many jobs on the site. I do remain active however, and I typically always add professional connections that I meet throughout my collegiate or professional career. I actually enjoy LinkedIn because you get a chance to see what is going on in the business world and just the news in general but its at your disposal. What I mean by that is you click on the articles you want to read or posts you want to think about. If you don't like it or are uninterested you can just keep on scrolling.

Piece of Advice:

If you are a business owner and you have no presence on LinkedIn of all social media platforms you really need to get it together, pal. LinkedIn is specifically designed for business professionals and you can only benefit from AT LEAST having your own profile updated to show people that you work for company XYZ and awareness can at least be brought amongst your audience in some way, shape, or form.