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Looking for a full-time job or a part-time contract? How are your LinkedIn skills? The social network is crafted just for people like you, and yet it doesn't always show up in peoples' lists of go-to tools. How can you turn LinkedIn into a powerful part of your job-seeking arsenal? I recently gave a presentation on using LinkedIn more productively Here are five tips that I talked about, which will help you up your game.

Understand advanced searching

Advanced search is your friend. This system lets you carve up search results using a number of important criteria, such as industry, company, and location. Premium accounts also give you other criteria, including seniority. Searching on these criteria using the click boxes and entry fields in the Advanced Search form give you an incredible amount of power, but they are vastly augmented when
combined with Boolean search.

LinkedIn supports Boolean search, in conjunction with a variety of operators, such as 'ctitle' (which describes a person's current title), and 'pcompany' (which describes a company that someone has worked for in the past).

Combining these terms with Boolean operators can yield some useful results. For example:

ccompany:IBM NOT Security ctitle:Engineer AND country:"United Kingdom"

Will find you everyone in and around the edges of your network in IBM (but not IBM Security systems) who is an engineer, working in the United Kingdom. You can really go to town with Boolean queries, slicing your network into very precise subsets of data.

Use your second-level connections

LinkedIn connections capitalise not only on the people you know, but on the people that they know. People that you know directly are your first-level connections. Those who are one degree of separation have a transitive relationship with you; you don't know them directly, but the opportunity for an introduction is there.

Smart LinkedIn users will use these connections to their advantage. They can often represent new opportunities outside your immediate social network, while being close enough to you within that network to be approachable.

You can find these people in two ways. The first is simply to conduct a search, looking for second-degree connections within particular industries. The second is to target a particular company, search for the people you need inside a company, and see which of them is connected to someone you already know.

When you find a potential target, LinkedIn offers you the chance to get introduced to them by your mutual friend (who will be a first-degree contact of yours). This is certainly doable, but seems somewhat automated, and false. My own preference is to telephone the first-degree contact, reconnect and catch up, before asking during the conversation to be connected with the
second-degree contact. Not only is this more personable, but it also gives you the chance to find out a bit more about your second-degree target, which could be useful when you get to speak with them.

However, the LinkedIn introduction feature can still be useful to help you find out which of your first-degree connections is most strongly connected to the second degree target. The feature lists the connections between you and your target in order of strength. The contact who shares the most mutual contacts with your target is listed first.

In the example below, I want to connect with Lisa. The first contact of mine listed is the mutual contact with the strongest link to her, because they share the greatest number of mutual contacts with her. However, I don't know him that well. The second contact in the list is very well known in the community and could be useful. However, the third contact has employed me regularly for contracts,
and I know he likes my work. Even though he is the third strongest contact, he may be my best bet. Time to give him a call. While I'm at it, maybe I'll pitch him for some work too.

 

Discover the joys of the Jobseeker Premium account
If it's a job you're after, you could do worse than invest in a premium account tailored to the task. The Premium Jobseeker account lets you apply for jobs using a featured premium applicant listing, which highlights your listing at the top of their applicant list. you can also see who has viewed your profile, helping you to find out who is interested in you. And finally, you can send personalised InMails (emails via LinkedIn) to hiring managers.
Get to grips with groups
Groups are a LinkedIn goldmine, for two reasons. Firstly, joining the right group gives you access to a variety of experts and high rollers in your chosen field. This gives you a chance to get yourself noticed by making judicious, high-quality contributions to the discussion.
Secondly, a little-known feature of LinkedIn is the ability to directly message people in the same group as you, from within the group. These people may not be first-degree connections of yours, but group membership gives you access to them.
Monitor company movements
Just as people have their own profile pages, so do companies, and following companies on LinkedIn can give you some interesting data. Buried in each company profile page is a statistics section. Selecting this gives you information including how much companies are growing (or shrinking) their staff on a monthly basis compared to the industry sector average, in key areas such as general and administrative, and research and development.
You can also see how many employees are changing their title compared to the industry average. And at the bottom of the page is the motherlode: who just left? You can find out about key departures, which could give you some clues as to which roles the company needs to fill.
So, there are some guidelines that will help you turn LinkedIn into a powerful marketing tool. What are you marketing? Yourself! Go get 'em.

 

A short while ago, my colleague Tim Anderson posted an innovative piece about augmented reality CVs. Seeing yourself floating above a piece of paper on a webcam surrounded by digital artefacts is nothing short of awesome. But not everyone has the capability to undertake a production like that, involving large amounts of coding, green screen video, and 3D production work. How can the rest of us get our CV to stand out above the others?

I'm just back from judging entries for the CWJobs Augmented Reality CV contest. The idea is that presenting your skills and work history using multimedia technology is more engaging than doing so with a few sheets of A4 paper. In the judging session, we looked at the best CVs from hundreds of entries, with the winners getting a professional augmented reality makeover for their jobseeking efforts.

The augmented reality bit is a neat twist, but I doubt we will see it become a mainstream technique for submitting a CV. At the same time, it seems extraordinary that we are still so reliant on traditional CVs, particularly in the IT industry. Still, given that situation, what does it take to create a CV that will impress and get you interviews?

My perspective on this is unusual because I'm a technical journalist rather than someone in the recruitment industry. That means I'm in the business of communicating technical information; and I noticed that many of the CVs we looked at were poor in this respect. In reading the CV, you had to do detective work to figure out what sort of skills the person has, and what sort of work they have done, rather than this being clearly stated. Often there was too much information, and the CV was verbose and hard to digest.

There is no harm in assuming that the person reading your CV has little time or patience, which means you have to communicate the essentials at a glance. For example, you could think of the three top reasons why someone might want to employ you and place them as bullet points in your introductory profile.

My general suggestion is to be as concise as possible, avoid jargon and meaningless management-speak, be wary of littering the CV with too many unexplained acronyms, and get a friend to check basics like good English and grammar. You might imagine that everyone does this; but judging by the CVs we saw, simply getting these easy things right will lift your CV above the crowd.

Moving beyond these essentials, the question that interests me is how individuals can make use of the internet to communicate their skills and experience. In some cases it seems obvious. If you are a web designer, for example, it seems odd if you do not include a few links to work you have done. It is harder for developers or admins whose work is less public and often confidential; but nevertheless there may be forums where you help solve technical problems, or an open source project to which you contribute. Similarly, if you are an IT consultant, there could be blog posts or online papers which demonstrate your insights.

Another idea is to create your own skills cloud - CW Jobs has made this easy with a drag-and-drop web site for this purpose.

In a tough job market, it seems to me that building an online profile is a great way to invest some time and energy. It can also lead directly to job opportunities, as potential employers come across your work.

It does seem to me inevitable that traditional CVs will become less important as we learn to make better use of the internet in this context, though I am not sure whether this means the emergence of electronic CVstandards, or more reliance on profiles at key web sites, or some other trend. The CV is resilient though, so in the meantime it still pays to make it as good as possible, but supplemented by online content that will bring it to life.

I was speaking with a colleague of long-standing (an old friend). He's newly unemployed. He's been a tester for years, and for the last few years has been a developer. He'd like to keep doing development kinds of work, possibly creating automated tests or for a product. But he's resigned himself to being a tester.

I asked him what he wanted to do. "Oh, development. But no one will hire me for that." I asked why. "Because I was a tester for so long".

Your attitude around a potential job will shine through in an interview. If you would not hire yourself for a particular job, no one else will. Part of your job search is to manage your reactions to a potential job as you search. Some ideas about what you can do:

1. Know what you want to do. If you see a job you could do, but it's not what you want, reassess whether you want to investigate this job. If they hired you, would you work there? Sometimes the answer is "yes, because I'm broke." But more often, the answer is "Hmm, that's not really the right job for me."
2. If you're relatively new to a particular role, and you have a ton of experience in another role, make a list of all the reasons why your more junior role is the role for you. Go back to your resume and take a look at your accomplishments.
3. Use those accomplishments to explain your value to other people. Take the time to articulate your story of why you are valuable in your preferred job. My colleague has a bunch of stories to support how his testing expertise makes him an amazing developer, especially in a test-driven environment.

Your attitude about a potential job has a huge effect on an interviewer. What does your attitude say?

You might not be aware of the pattern, "Broken Windows." Well, I think it's a pattern. It's at least a parable. The idea is that if you allow a broken window, pretty soon the neighborhood deteriorates, because other people think it's ok to leave broken windows, litter, graffiti, and more. Soon enough, you have a neighborhood no one wants to live in.

We see the Broken Window pattern at work all the time: builds that stay broken or take too long, defects that remain open, coffee machines where the coffee has boiled away, recycling containers where no one has taken out the recycling.

Broken Windows matter even more on a resume. If you can't somehow help the hiring manager see that you don't tolerate small problems on your resume, the hiring manager thinks you can tolerate them at work.

Make sure someone else reviews your resume. Look for Broken Windows in all of your work. Talk about it in an interview--you'll make points :-)

Don't leave a mess for other people to clean up. They won't.

While there was a time when job seekers could afford to be choosy about the roles they took on, which company they worked for and the hours they worked, unfortunately, there's no doubt recession and large-scale redundancies have had an impact on the IT industry, turning the job-scene very much into a buyer's market. As candidates find themselves competing with many others for fewer roles, flexibility will be a key factor on deciding who gets the job.

Although there are definitely jobs available in the market, especially for those with specialist skills and relevant experience, candidates who are willing to show flexibility in their requirements do give themselves an added advantage. Whether it involves taking on a different role than you're used to, working different hours than usual or considering short term rather than longer term contract work, a willingness to adapt to the changing needs of the market could be the one key skill that propels you to the top of a potential employer's list.

Nor does flexibility necessarily involve making sacrifices; one very positive effect of the new jobs market is that it has removed some of the barriers that have stopped candidates putting themselves forward for certain roles in the past. Perceptions about the kind of roles and responsibilities they could get or take on have often caused candidates to take a cautious approach to job-seeking in the past. Now, however, as employers demonstrably place more value on specific skills (rather than generic 'IT skills') and a willingness to understand the wider business context, candidates are in a position to explore avenues that they may not once have considered, whether that involves applying for a different type of role, considering a change in sector or approaching a different kind of organisation.

As long as they remain realistic and willing to negotiate, there are still many opportunities for IT workers in today's market; while knowledge and skills are always important, a change in mindset can be the key factor that makes the difference between finding or keeping a job and not.

Just about everybody uses Times New Roman. It's the default for Microsoft Word, and although it's perfectly serviceable as a typeface, there are better choices. Perhaps as someone with graphic design and typography training, I'm biased - but steering clear of the default is always a good way to make your CV more distinctive.

I'd stick to serifed typefaces for most purposes - there is a wealth of professional looking, readable faces suitable for using in a CV. Classics such as Garamond or Caslon are good, but delve into your font collection and suit what suits your needs and image best.


Long CVs, along with the closely related CVs-set-in-a-6pt-font, are not the best way to present yourself, even if you do have a massive repertoire of skills. If a CV is too long, you can pretty much guarantee it won't be read - 2 pages is the standard allowance, and works just fine for most people. If you find yourself slipping into smaller font sizes to make it fit, or you are considering going to three pages (or beyond) - you might want to cut out some of the content.

I realize that many people are hunkered down, working hard at their jobs. And, a bunch of people are unemployed, looking for work. But what about all those people who are still employed but are unhappy and want to look for a job? How open can they be?

I'm from the school of "be honest with your boss" while you are looking. Somehow, I always managed to send my resume to people who were friendly with my bosses! And, once you've found a job, give two weeks notice. But if you're too scared to be honest with your boss, try these ideas:

• As you update your social networking sites, say that you're open for any and all contacts: reconnecting, networking to help other people, and interesting options.
• As you tell people that you are looking for a job, also explain you do not want to put your current job in jeopardy.
• Make sure you use reputable recruiters. The disreputable ones will send your resume to everyone they know. The reputable ones focus your search.
• Only send your resume to a company that's honest about who they are. Never send a resume to a cloaked ad.
  

If your boss discovers you are looking, come clean--at least, about your job search, if not the reason behind it.

It's not easy to find a job, but they are out there.

As you can tell, I have portfolios on my mind these days :-) But there's a reason for that. A portfolio is a collection of work that you can assess over time. One way to prepare for an interview is to build your accomplishment portfolio.

It's easy to describe how to build this portfolio: In reverse chronological order (most recent job first), list each accomplishment and the meaning behind that accomplishment. A key piece of recognizing an accomplishment is to ask yourself "so what?" If you can answer that question in a way that has meaning for a hiring manager, you've got a great accomplishment.

Here's an example. If one of my accomplishments is to coach a project manager, I can say "Coach PM, with result that he saw more risks and took more proactive actions. Project came in on time, allowing company to recognize revenue in Q2." It's even better if I can put a specific dollar amount on that accomplishment, so I answer the implicit "so what" question.

So, that sounds pretty easy, right? Well, the difficult part is deciding which accomplishments you want to discuss from each job you've had. For example, if you've been working for 20 years, do you include the accomplishments from 15 years ago? Probably not, unless one of them led to a pattern of similar accomplishments in which your responsibility has grown over time. For the past 10 years? Probably.

The key is to use accomplishments which highlight your ever-increasing areas of responsibility, challenge, and knowledge. Make sure you think about accomplishments which point to work you want to take on more of, not work you don't want to do anymore.

If you've been working for a while and you haven't written down your accomplishments, start with your current or most recent job first, and write those down. Then, start moving backwards in your career. If you can, use the accomplishments as bullet points on your resume. If you think you really have some career-spanning accomplishments, consider a resume cover page (not a cover letter) that highlights your accomplishments over your career.

Whatever you do, remember to update your resume and accomplishments at least once a quarter, if not once a month. Doing this periodically helps you see where your career is going, and if you're headed on the right track for you. If you have a quarter where you haven't accomplished anything, consider whether this job is helping or hurting you, or if you could reorganize or remake part of your job.

Your portfolio is an indication of the kind of person you are and the kind of worker you tend to be. Use that information to help you manage your career.

Maybe you've been laid off. Maybe you just want another job. Yes, there are people hiring--but how do you find them?

Just as hiring managers need a strategy for hiring people, candidates need a strategy for looking for a job. Let's assume you're looking in an area in which you have experience. In that case, think about how you use these approaches:

Make sure you use social networks. You cannot afford to avoid LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. Maybe you have another social network that you prefer. Fine, as long as your potential hiring managers and/or recruiters use that network. Your network might be a specific tool's user group, as long as you don't mind getting a job using that tool.

Expect to customize your resume for each job you apply for. This sounds like a lot of work. "Can't I just customize my cover letter?" Yes, you can, and that may not be enough. You aren't applying for a generic job; why send in a generic resume?

Consider using a couple of recruiters. Yes, the recruiters are having trouble, but they still have positions which require experience, especially a lot of experience.

Make sure you have thought about all of the ways to reach potential hiring managers.

Now, what do you do if you want to change jobs to something you don't have experience in?

Try getting some experience. You can be an unpaid intern (ok, a paid internship is even better, but don't bet on it), work on an open source project, or some other way that allows you to work with people (so you have references), and build your experience.

Expand your network as much as possible. If you want to change jobs in this economy you have to meet more and more and more people. You need to build a reputation as someone who can get things done. Now, do all the things I mentioned above.

It's not impossible to find a new job; it's just difficult. Start now.