Spontaneous Human Combustion and the Job-Seeking LinkedIn Influencer
Learning from others is invaluable in setting expectations for success.
The last of my initial prospects for a new job finally fell through. I sat at my computer wondering what to do. I had applied to a pile of jobs using LinkedIn, but after some time, there was no positive, or really, any, response. The graph on LinkedIn that shows who is looking at your profile was flatlined. That was when I had what I thought was a bright idea.
My bright idea was to prioritize human engagement over trying to penetrate the defensive wall of the LinkedIn Applicant Tracking Systems. The structure of my idea was, more or less:
"If I can just get people to look at my profile," I thought, "it will remind them I am still alive and looking for work. The more views of my profile I can get, the more likely it will be that someone with actual real open headcount will see an opportunity for both of us. "
Linkedin is text heavy, not video heavy, so I signed up for a newsletter account on a blogging platform, and wrote a couple of essays which I posted on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Encouragingly, the feedback was immediate. More people looked at my profile, which is the engagement metric I was trying to boost, and some even sent me messages with advice and encouragement.
One thing I learned from the feedback I received is that my LinkedIn friends are way ahead of me on this influencer stuff. Here is one extremely qualified and experienced friend explaining his daily strategy:
The most promising experiences I've had in the year have been recruiters reaching out to me. Most of that has been a product of consciously focusing on engaging with LinkedIn every day. Beyond working friends and former colleagues as I'm sure you are doing, engaging in LinkedIn is the closest virtual equivalent to company gathering networking that exists.
My engagement consists of:
1. Authoring/posting articles (not near as often as I should)
2. Posting less structured questions or observations (with visual aids when I can)
3. Announcing a new certificate that I've earned (since I spend most of the day I'm not applying or engaging with LinkedIn doing online learning)
4. Commenting on interesting posts by others (focused on individuals, not company ads, etc.)
5. Reposting job postings
6. Reposting "I've just been laid off" and other job seeking requests of connections, with promotional comments if I know them well and believe in them strongly
7. Reacting (like/support/love/etc.) to just about anything interesting I see
I spend 30-60 minutes every day doing 4-7. [...] it's a habit now and it appears to be more useful to churn up possible opportunities than applying (even though I've easily applied to more than 900 jobs since a year ago).
The other thing I learned is that spontaneous human combustion just doesn't happen as often as you might think:
I think this approach is working better than spewing applications. I've gotten to a "final" interview with all participants twice and both did not come from me applying. That said, the yield is still disturbingly low.
Strategically it probably seems pretty obvious that any system which relies on spontaneous human combustion for success is probably destined to be a pretty low volume producer: as a quantified prospecting funnel, two completed interview rounds and no solid employment after ~250 hours of unrewarded content creation labor seems like a system that needs improvements on lead generation and conversion.
At this point I expect some people might suggest profile optimization, better keywords, basically tweaks to the inputs, and sure, there is always room for incremental improvement, but it also feels a bit like victim blaming to me. If someone expertly, consistently, and authentically engages in the Job-Seeking LinkedIn Influencer strategy for a year, and the rewards are this low, I would be more likely to suspect the linkage between the influencer activity and the desired employment outcome is simply too weak for the strategy to be really viable. This is a bit dispiriting given the performance of the formal resume submission route seems far weaker still.
So what to do? Although the effectiveness of the Job-Seeking LinkedIn Influencer strategy seems very questionable, it is still the most effective documented strategy for job-seeking I have seen demonstrated, so I will learn from the best practices that have been shared with me, and continue to post authentic thoughts here, while heavily managing my expectations of how likely it is that a job opportunity will somehow result.
While doing that, another friend-of-a-friend messaged me about an in-person networking event organization that puts people together in various ways, and while that is much less inside my comfort zone, and has never worked for me before, trying is always more effective than simply judging. So off we go.