By Jez Styles, AdMore Recruitment- Specialists in Retail and Hospitality Recruitment, Search & Selection, Talent Management and Career Development.

Moving on from our terrible rhyme...Most business professionals in the UK now have a LinkedIn profile (if you haven’t got one click here) although begrudgingly so for some! LI is being utilised for a number of purposes however the primary focus is about creating a publically accessible profile. Also, recruiters are now using LI as a secondary database: 53% of LinkedIn’s revenue now comes from ‘talent solutions,’ and candidates (active and passive) are reacting accordingly. However, the increase in the volume of profiles has made using LinkedIn as a database harder rather than easier. The ‘coding’ criteria on Linkedin, such as skills, are not particularly useful for recruiters so unless you are working to a very narrow brief and searching on specifics such as Job Title and Company it can tend to be rather laborious looking for suitable candidates for a vacancy.

If you are an ‘active’ candidate or just keen to maintain an up to date profile, then it would be sensible to ensure that recruiters notice you through your activity on LI rather than merely hoping you will be found. Of course this can be a time consuming process so please follow the guide below to ensure maximum exposure with a minimal investment of time.

Minute 1

People You May Know; spend one minute checking through this feature for anyone you feel would be appropriate to make contact with. Ensure you personalise your invitation requests, particularly if it is a person you have had limited contact with in the past. When you connect with people this will come up in their connections activity feeds. It is a great way of flagging your profile to second degree connections!

Minutes 2-3

LinkedIn Today; you may never have looked at this before but it is growing fast and is a great source of interesting information. On a desktop it is under the News tab on the second row from the top. LI today is a blend of news stories from various media outlets in addition to Blogs and other business articles. You can follow specific topic areas such as ‘retail’ or ‘human resources.’ You can also save articles or follow specific blogging sites (Click here to follow ours!)

As with all activity on Linkedin you need to be proactive. Start with adding a comment to an article that is close to your passions / interests. This will flag up in other individual’s (who have commented) activity feeds.

Minute 4

Groups; there is a vast array of groups available on LI now with most specialisms catered for. It is worth checking for the groups with the highest levels of activity and most relevant to what you do. Again, the key here is commenting on discussions that genuinely interest you. I would focus on just a couple of groups. I personally use Retail Week predominantly as it is our industry publication.

Minute 5

Notifications; this is the flag icon next to the email icon on the top row. Having conducted a straw poll it would seem most people do not use this functionality. This is essentially a summary list of your activity, including who has looked at your profile, new connections and most importantly follow up comments to your own. If you spend one minute checking this you will ensure you do not miss anyone that has replied to you or shown interest in your profile. Try to keep the ‘conversation’ going. Hover your cursor over the specific notification, and then click to go straight to the relevant discussion.

Hopefully this will ensure you are able to do a little on LinkedIn every day to maintain your profile.

By Jez Styles, AdMore Recruitment- Specialists in Retail and Hospitality Recruitment, Search & Selection, Talent Management and Career Development.