How To Land Your Dream Job…Without Your Resume

This article is the first in the series, Syfter on LinkedIn. In this series I will be pulling back the curtain to show you the industry tricks to land your next dream job. I’ll tell you all the dirty secrets of recruiters and show you how to make your LinkedIn pop to land the big interview.

 When most people ask the question, “How do I start looking for a job?”, the first thing they’ll think of is to update their resume. Plenty of articles online suggest to jobseekers that the perfect resume, with just the right touch of personality will get you through the door and on your way to your dream job. These articles are meant to prepare people for the job hunt, but they don’t mention the most relevant aspect of this process - your potential employer has most likely made up their mind about you even before you have a chance to interview, and it’s not because of your resume. 

The way to impress employers in today’s job market is to have a LinkedIn profile with a strong personal brand, and a professional online persona. LinkedIn is not used to get a job, in the way that your resume is, LinkedIn should be viewed as a sales tool to get an interview. This involves curating your LinkedIn profile to showcase your strengths and what makes you stand out from the competition.

Who Are You Curating Your Profile For?

Think about this... If you want to land your dream job, whom from that company is looking at your LinkedIn profile? Your potential boss? Your potential boss’ boss? The person creating the budget? A peer of yours?... It’s actually none of the above, because those are notthe people deciding who gets an interview.

Typically, when a position opens up within a company, leadership are not the ones going out to find potential candidates, it is the HR rep, internal recruiter or corporate recruiter that is going to find the person, and it’s going to be based on their LinkedIn profile. Yours needs to stand out.

 At the time I’m writing this article, national unemployment is at 3.7% - there are more job openings than people looking for jobs - and LinkedIn has become the go-to recruiting tool for corporate recruiters. These recruiters scour LinkedIn looking for the ideal candidate to present to their superior, and they reach out to people who are primarily passive about finding a new job. To impress a recruiter who is going through hundreds of profiles a day, yours must be maintained and kept up to date. This should not take hours and hours of work.

In this series, Syfter on LinkedIn, I’ll show you how to use LinkedIn as a sales tool to get the job interview, so you can get in front of your potential boss and show them what makes you great. You’ll learn how to take advantage of every section of your LinkedIn profile, so you can land your dream job without even trying (or at least to make it look that way).