Over the past week, I've covered why you need to be on LinkedIn, how to create a stellar profile and build a network of trusted connections, and the benefits of participating in LinkedIn groups. I'm going to conclude this series with a few miscellaneous topics to help you get even more out the service (and avoid a problem or two).

Recommendations

Adding recommendations to your profile is a great way to make yours stand out to hiring managers, potential clients, and anyone else who may be looking at it. I'm not going to through the entire process of requesting a recommendation, because it's pretty straightforward:—go to Profile > Recommendations, click the Request Recommendations tab, and fill in the form. Note that you can only request a recommendation from other LinkedIn users.

When choosing people to ask, here are some things to think about:

• Don't limit yourself to direct supervisors. References from peers, people who report(ed) to you, internal clients, customers, and business partners all help paint a more complete picture of what it's like to work with you.
• Spread them out among positions. I'd rather see one or two references from three different companies a person has worked for than six from the current job.
• Keep mutual recommendations to a minimum. By this, I mean when Harry recommends Sally and Sally turns around and recommends Harry. If all of the people you have recommendations from are people you've recommended, it makes you wonder if no one was willing to give you a reference without getting one in return. What I like to do is, when I give a recommendation to someone, I ask them NOT to give me one. Instead, I ask that they "pay it forward" and write one for someone else in their network that they think is deserving. I also explain this approach to people I ask for recommendations and I've never had anyone have a problem with it (and I always follow through on writing the recommendation for another person).

The LinkedIn Job Board

The LI job board is pretty crappy. It's missing a lot of basic functionality that other main job boards have, like the ability to save listings or even to email them to yourself. (You can e-mail them to people in your network, but not yourself!) However, if you are looking for a job, I definitely recommend regularly searching them, because they do get listings that other boards don't have. And when you find one that interests you, you can immediately see if you have any connections to the company that can help get your resume into the right hands.

Questions and Answers

LinkedIn has a pretty extensive section for users to ask and answer questions on just about any topic you can think of related to your professional life. (The Advanced Answers Search tab lets you see all the categories.) Unfortunately, they've hidden the link to it under the More button in the top nav. But once you find it, it's a great place to browse through questions that have already been asked on topics that interest you, as well as to ask your own. And answering them can help position you as someone very knowledgeable in your area.

Applications

Compared to Facebook, LinkedIn's selection of applications you can add to your profile is pretty meager. I haven't used any of them except for the the WordPress one that simply displays recent excerpts from T4L on my profile. But you can check them out by going to More > Application Directory. (Note that the Tweets application is different from connecting to Twitter through LinkedIn's Settings menu.) If there are any you use that you especially like, please let me know so I can share with my other readers.

Email Addresses

I mentioned this in the post about setting up your profile but you should make sure you have at least two confirmed e-mail addresses associated with your LinkedIn account and at least one of them should be personal. A friend of mine was recently laid off and, shockingly, one of her first thoughts was NOT, "I better change my e-mail address at LinkedIn." But once that address was disconnected, she was no longer able to add a new one (she could still access her account). So now she has to create a new account, import all her contacts from the old one, and re-invite them to connect with her. Not fun.

If you don't already have a second e-mail address for your account, I suggest you add one now by going to Settings > Email Addresses.

And that's it for this series on LinkedIn! I hope you found the information useful. You might also want to check out my previous posts on LinkedIn. If you have any questions about any of these posts, or anything else related to LinkedIn, please send them to me and I'll do my best to address them as soon as possible.

Happy Networking!

Posted in How To, LinkedIn, My Two Cents, Series, Social Media