Companies looking to hire someone locally with a specific skill like social media marketing can create a ProFinder request, which will be sent to local service providers who registered that skill in their profile. If you have a ProFinder profile and match with a request, you will receive a message in your Notifications that there is a new ProFinder request. But you have to act fast—only five service providers can submit a proposal to the potential client, which can happen within minutes.
LinkedIn ProFinder is a great idea and is improving as LinkedIn gathers feedback from both service providers and businesses. When ProFinder was first released, you had to submit your hourly rate or a flat fee for a request, which was difficult if you had to submit a detailed quote for a request that only stated “I need ongoing marketing services.” The service does work well with well-defined requests, such as when someone asks for a LinkedIn profile makeover, which is a one-time service with a flat fee.
Initially, I created my ProFinder profile to offer online marketing and social media marketing, and I received some requests, but as I mentioned above, the project descriptions were very vague so I never successfully landed any new clients. After I changed my services offered to resume writing/LinkedIn profile makeover and career/leadership coaching the floodgates opened. I was receiving 30 to 40 resume requests a day and at least a dozen career coaching requests every day. Since I don’t do resume makeovers, I removed that service from my profile and I’m receiving up to 20 career coaching requests every day.
FIGURE 9–9. Finding a Freelancer Using LinkedIn ProFinder
You can register your company on ProFinder or search for local service providers at https://www.linkedin.com/profinder.
CONCLUSION
Use your target keyword phrases frequently when you fill out your LinkedIn profile, but don’t overdo it. The rest of your search ranking comes from the size and composition of your LinkedIn network, how active you are on LinkedIn, the relevance of the content you post and interact with, and other factors determined by the LinkedIn algorithm. The bottom line is, you need to be active on LinkedIn on a regular basis by posting new content and interacting with other people and their content to rank well.
You can also be found on LinkedIn by following popular hashtags and adding them to your status updates and articles. A third strategy is to register with LinkedIn ProFinder so you will be included in the directory for your top skills. The fourth way to be found on LinkedIn is through LinkedIn advertising, which you will read about in Chapter 20.
In the next chapter, I’ll show you the best way to give and receive recommendations, which are an essential part of your LinkedIn profile.
For additional updates and how-to videos, visit https://tedprodromou.com/UltimateGuideUpdates/.
Chapter 10
Giving and Receiving LinkedIn Recommendations
The evolution of the internet and social media has changed the way we make buying decisions. Social proof (when we make decisions based on what others recommend) existed long before the internet, but the ability to submit and view online reviews for products and services has revolutionized our purchasing behavior. In a matter of minutes, we can tap into the collective opinions of hundreds—even thousands—of people who have already purchased a product or service. You can see how many fans are gushing about the product or how many disgruntled customers want their money back. With the evolution of mobile apps, we can scan a bar code on a product with our phone to compare prices and read product reviews right in the store.
Today, there’s no hiding if you’re offering an inferior product or service. If you read a lot of negative reviews online, you probably won’t complete the purchase. On the other hand, when you see a lot of positive reviews, you won’t hesitate to spend more for the latest version of the product if others recommend it. Your chances of buyer’s remorse also diminish significantly because social proof has justified the purchase in your mind.
In the past, social proof was primarily word-of-mouth or through print media, so word spread slowly. Today, a good or bad review can be seen or heard by millions of people around the world instantaneously. Let’s go back a few years to an example of social proof before the digital era. Say your best friend went to a movie last night and can’t stop raving about it. They’re gushing with enthusiasm and want to tell you every detail, but they resist because they don’t want to ruin the movie for you. You can tell it was one of the best movies they’ve seen in years.
Based on this, will you go? Of course you will—probably tonight! This is classic old-school social proof.
When someone you trust tells you they like a movie, you want to see it as soon as possible. If your trusted friend tells you the movie sucks, you won’t see it, and you’ll probably tell your other friends to avoid it as well—even though you haven’t seen it yourself. Negative social proof spreads exponentially based on what people say, even if they didn’t have a negative experience themselves.
The key to social proof is that you act on someone else’s advice—without question—if you trust that person. If you don’t know the person well enough or don’t trust them, you’ll probably take the advice with a grain of salt and seek advice from a trusted source instead. We all have a circle of friends and colleagues we depend on when we need to make decisions. The bigger the decision, the more trusted opinions we will seek. We all want to feel certain that we are making the right choice. So we like to bounce ideas off people we trust. Discussing the issues with others makes us feel confident, even if they just listen to our concerns.
Today, online social proof has evolved from online forums to websites like Yelp, where you can post reviews about local businesses. On Yelp, the business owner doesn’t have control over the reviews. A few positive reviews can send your sales through the roof, but an angry customer can write a scathing review and damage the reputation of a business. The business owner can respond to the criticism online, but the negative comments remain. These unmoderated comments make social proof more credible because everyone knows that every business occasionally has dissatisfied customers. A series of negative reviews should be a red flag telling you to avoid that business. Chances are it won’t survive if it doesn’t address the negative comments head-on and change its business practices.
Facebook created its own form of social proof with the “Like” button. You “vote” for comments, pictures, and companies you like on Facebook. Unlike Yelp, which posts positive and negative comments, Facebook only registers positive votes. Facebook likes have taken off, and it has become a significant measure of success if your Facebook company page receives a lot of likes. It has the same effect as great reviews on Yelp.
Today, Google is focused on local businesses claiming their business on Google Maps and people writing reviews like Yelp.
So what does social proof have to do with LinkedIn, anyway? Essentially, you are marketing and selling yourself on LinkedIn. Your profile, job experience, skills, expertise in Groups, and recommendations are your marketing collateral that people read to get to know your product—which is you!
HOW CAN SOCIAL PROOF GET YOU HIRED IN TODAY’S ECONOMY?
You and a few million other people are looking for jobs these days. You can spend hours every day on Craigslist and hope you can be one of the first to submit your resume when a new job listing is posted. If you don’t submit your resume within the first few minutes, it will go unnoticed because often hundreds of people apply in the first hour.
You can spend the day searching Glassdoor.com, Indeed.com, and other job websites and pray your resume will be noticed. You can apply for hundreds of jobs, but rarely will you receive any acknowledgment that they even got your resume.
I remember how frustrating it was looking for jobs in the past, especially when you know you are qualified, but you can’t cut through the noise and get noticed. You can resort to making one of those crazy YouTube videos to catch their attention, but your chances of getting the job are still minimal.
Finding a
job online is very similar to cold calling. You are a complete stranger to each company, so getting past the gatekeepers is a huge challenge. You need to get very creative to get your resume in front of the hiring manager, which seems nearly impossible.
Now let’s look at the other side of the coin. Say you work in the human resources department and you’ve posted some jobs online. Within minutes, you have more than 100 resumes for one open position. You scan through a few of them and very few are qualified, even though you clearly spelled out the requirements in the job posting.
People are so desperate that they’re applying for any job, even if they aren’t qualified. They hope to catch the attention of the HR department or the hiring manager, so they can get hired for a more appropriate position. HR is overwhelmed and spends hours digging through resumes to find a handful of people to interview. There has to be a better way!
So how do you find good candidates in today’s economy, with millions of qualified workers looking for jobs?
Most jobs are filled through word-of-mouth recommendations, not by sifting through hundreds of resumes. It’s much easier and more reliable to hire someone who comes highly recommended by a trusted colleague. The old adage “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know” is more powerful than ever, and you can get to know the right people by leveraging social proof.
Again, the key is building your network and keeping in touch with them so they are there when you need them. Once you establish your core network of 100 to 150 people, you can reach out to them and tap their expertise or their own network to solve your problem. If they can’t help you, they’ll introduce you to someone else who can. If you suddenly lose your job and you don’t have a stable professional network, you have to spend months building your network and gaining their trust before you can reach out to them for help.
You build a strong professional network by creating a solid online reputation with a lot of social proof. When someone searches LinkedIn (or any other search engine) for your name, you want a lot of very positive social proof to appear. When people see pages and pages of positive social proof about you, they will pursue you to join their professional network. You will be in demand, and your professional network will be full of A-list players. One way to achieve that is by getting recommendations.
WHAT ARE LINKEDIN RECOMMENDATIONS?
LinkedIn has created its own version of social proof called recommendations, which is a reputation manager for professionals. When someone writes a recommendation for you on LinkedIn, it’s the online version of the recommendation letters you used to receive from instructors and former employers. The good news is that you control the recommendations that are posted on your LinkedIn profile, so you won’t see any negative comments.
Recommendations are not just useful for the person receiving them. The person writing the recommendation can display the recommendations they write on their own profile as well. Writing strong recommendations for others adds to your credibility because it shows other LinkedIn members that you have strong connections in your professional network.
Think of LinkedIn as a reputation engine for business professionals. Your LinkedIn activity paints a picture of you and your business. Your profile is more than an online resumé with a list of your jobs, education, and accomplishments. Your professional reputation includes the people you associate with, the Groups you belong to, the associations and clubs you join, and how much you interact with your network. You can think of all these factors combined as your LinkedIn persona.
If you are a small-business owner looking to hire new employees, recommendations can help you determine if a potential employee will be a good fit. Recruiters and hiring managers at large companies also take your recommendations into account when deciding if you are the right person for the job. Recommendations add value to your overall LinkedIn profile, and the more recommendations you have, the better. Later in this chapter, I will show you some sample recommendations that are so powerful they can influence a manager’s decision to hire a person. These are the type of recommendations you want to look for when you are searching for new employees.
Savvy LinkedIn members can tell if you are actively networking or if you are a passive LinkedIn member with a static profile and no networking activity. If you are not active on LinkedIn, it doesn’t mean you are not good at what you do. It just means you are not actively building your professional network as well as you could be. Ideally, you should spend a few hours every week networking on LinkedIn so you can quickly land on your feet if you lose your job (and chances are it will happen at some point in your career).
Jobs, companies, and even industries come and go quickly in today’s fast-paced business world, and you will most likely have to change jobs or careers sometime in the next few years. My 20-year career as a network engineer in the 1980s and 1990s doesn’t exist today, and I had to learn new skills. Now I manage Google AdWords and social media and do search engine optimization for a living. None of these jobs existed in their current form a decade ago. A few years from now, AdWords will evolve into some other form of online advertising, social media will have a new name, and who knows what search engines will look like. We’re already seeing big changes with voice-activated searches on smartphones, virtual assistants, and even remotest on some cable service providers.
By keeping my LinkedIn profile current, participating in LinkedIn Groups, and publishing and sharing great content, I can tell potential employers more about me than they could ever learn by just reading my resume. The icing on the cake is the recommendations, which provide third-party verification of my skills. Each online activity is like a piece of a puzzle; recommendations are the glue that holds the puzzle together. When you are looking for new employees on LinkedIn, you want members who have a complete, updated profile with lots of great recommendations.
Recommendations are a huge part of your image on LinkedIn. Obviously, it’s good to have a lot of recommendations—but what really matters is that they are quality recommendations. These days you can hire people to write fake recommendations for you. You can have hundreds of hollow recommendations in a matter of days for less than a hundred bucks. It’s better to have a dozen high-quality recommendations than hundreds of low-quality, suspicious ones.
WHY DO I NEED LINKEDIN RECOMMENDATIONS?
People rarely provide written recommendations or testimonial letters when they apply for jobs these days, so why bother getting recommendations on LinkedIn?
First of all, your LinkedIn profile will not be complete until you have at least three recommendations. Getting to the All-Star level on your profile is a huge accomplishment and adds a lot of credibility to your LinkedIn presence, and you can only do that by adding recommendations.
The second reason is because recommendations are the only way you can prove that your LinkedIn profile is genuine. When you enter your profile information, including your education, work history, and accomplishments, there is no way for others to verify this information. But when people recommend you on LinkedIn, it’s a written testimonial of your abilities. It’s very important to have that third-party verification of your LinkedIn profile, especially if you are a consultant or independent service provider. Your potential customers will use your recommendations to help determine the quality of your work and your expertise before they’ll hire you or trust your product.
Third, when it comes to the LinkedIn search rankings, the more recommendations you have, the higher you can rank in LinkedIn searches. If your recommendations contain the same keywords you want to rank for, your search ranking should rise as your recommendations increase. However, don’t try to get recommendations stuffed with your keywords just to improve your search ranking. Be genuine and nurture good recommendations, and your search results will take care of themselves.
HOW MANY LINKEDIN RECOMMENDATIONS SHOULD I HAVE?
There is no right or wrong answer to this question. I see some LinkedIn profiles with just a few excellent recommendations that go
a long way toward highlighting the person’s expertise. I see other profiles with page after page of hollow recommendations that don’t convince me the person is someone I would hire.
How many recommendations are right for you? I would suggest at least one for every year you’ve worked at a job. If you’ve been at your current company for five years, I think you should have at least five recommendations for that company. I have no scientific proof to back up this formula, but don’t you think you have at least one great accomplishment at work every year?
When you accomplish something great at work, ask someone who benefited from that achievement to write you a recommendation. When you benefit from someone else’s accomplishment, write that person a recommendation. Don’t wait for them to ask you—just do it!
WHAT MAKES A LINKEDIN RECOMMENDATION GREAT?
People want to read relevant recommendations that are clear and concise and add value to their assessment of a person’s professional skills and capabilities. Recommendations are a form of social proof that express your personal and/or professional opinion of the person you are recommending.
Recommendations should go beyond letting people know someone is a whiz at Excel or a social media aficionado. Every recommendation should be personalized and detail why you think this person is worthy of your recommendation. When you recommend a person, it impacts your reputation as much as his. If you create a bunch of meaningless recommendations for people who are not worthy of them, it negatively affects your reputation.
Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business Page 10
