From the course: Tech Career Skills: Searching, Interviewing, and Landing a Job

Using LinkedIn

From the course: Tech Career Skills: Searching, Interviewing, and Landing a Job

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Using LinkedIn

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- With the exception of my first job way back in 2003, every single job I've ever gotten was via LinkedIn. However, LinkedIn is about more than just a job search tool. You'd be wise to use LinkedIn's power to turbocharge your interview preparation as well. There are several key insights you can glean from LinkedIn about the role, the team and the company. Let's look at some of them. First, how aggressively is the company promoting the role? This could help offer a signal about how important the role is for them. As a hiring manager, I want to attract amazing candidates as early in the process as possible before the job goes stale and before I lose the rack. This is an opportunity to rally the troops, encourage the team to tap their networks and influence the process that will add a colleague to their team. So you might want to check if others in the org are sharing the role besides the recruiter. This could offer insights into the team culture, is a team close knit or not, for example. I like to help my fellow managers by sharing their roles as well, in turn, they share mine and we also forward each other candidates as well. So LinkedIn is a powerful platform to recruit and for the candidates to get insights around the recruitment process. For example, how many other candidates have applied via LinkedIn? LinkedIn tends to offer these insights, which is also a great way to benchmark on who your competitors are. How many other employees from the company are on LinkedIn with similar titles? You might know someone in your network who knows them and he could leverage them to get additional context. How long have these employees been at the company? This could point to how mature the team is. How many employees with similar titles are no longer at the company? This could point you to attrition or team morale. You could contact some of these former employees and get info about the company and possibly even your interview panelists. How connected are your potential teammates to others in the company? How connected are they to their industry peers? These could point to whether the team is growing and vibrant or whether it is this isolated island where you may end up being disconnected and your skills may atrophy. All of these insights will help you prepare for the panels and the questions in the interview itself.

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