Why you & your people should be using LinkedIn

I’ve been a LinkedIn user for the past ten years, admittedly I’ve only been very active over the past couple of years.

I’m a massive advocate of the platform and strongly believe that everybody in every organisation should be using LinkedIn. Notice I said using and not just being present. Most people do have LinkedIn profiles, but they vary massively in quality and there’s a hell of a lot of people who don’t ‘use’ the platform.

If you lead a team you should definitely be encouraging your people to be more active on LinkedIn.

The key here is to encourage them, rather than force them. It has to be authentic and people have to want to use it.

I find that most people don’t use it because they don’t understand the ‘why’. Here’s my take on the ‘why’.

You’ll consume more content

Where do you go when you want to read articles, listen to podcasts or watch videos about your industry or things you’re passionate about?

I used to be signed up to a stack of RSS feeds, mailing lists and had a load of different blogs bookmarked to make sure I’d stay up to date with all things that interest me.

And that’s ok. But it didn’t work for me, I had to too much stuff to go and check and I’d always miss good stuff.

I’m still on the odd mailing list, but the vast majority of the content I consume now comes from LinkedIn.

You see, I’m connected with a lot of people who share similar interests to me, they share content that will be relevant to me, and they help me stay up to date. Likewise I share content I find that I think will benefit my network.

Not only do you get access to all of this great content, but then you also have the opportunity to have a great debate with people about it. The pressing issues and the latest trends in your industry can lead to some awesome discussions, which can then lead onto meeting some great people.

I have learned more from LinkedIn in the past couple of years than I have from anywhere else. If you want to stay up to date and want to empower your people to do the same, you should absolutely be more active on LinkedIn.

It will 100% help to attract talent into your team

When potential new talent are researching your company they’ll search a number of places; your company website, your company Glassdoor page and probably your company LinkedIn page.

But they’ll also check the profile pages of the people who work in a similar role at your company, i.e. you and your team.

Why would they do that? Your company careers site and social media pages don’t tell them a great deal about what it’s like to be a Software Developer/Buyer/Data Scientist/HRBP/Finance Manager etc at your company. There may be some boilerplate type content on the careers site that recruitment have written up, but that doesn’t tell them what they’re really looking to know.

Checking out people’s LinkedIn profiles gives a lot more insight into what it’s really like to work there, such as:

• How long are people staying there? People don’t hang around if it’s a terrible place to work
• How long are people in their current role, have they been promoted or moved around the business into different roles? This shows that there is genuinely room for career progression and to broaden your skillset.
• What have people worked on? What have they achieved? This gives candidates a real insight into the day job that a job description will never be able to give them.
• What content are people sharing, what are they passionate about? People want to work with people who have the same interests as they do, who are passionate about similar things they are. People want to work with people they can learn from.

Attracting talent is harder than it’s ever been.

If you that think top talent is absolutely dying to work at your company and that a fancy careers site, a few videos and a job advert is going have them flocking to apply then I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.

You’re wrong. Really really wrong.

If you’re serious about talent, you and your teams absolutely have to help out your Recruitment team by sharing all the great stuff you’re working on, your team’s culture and all the things they’re passionate about.

Read a great article that might be of interest to other people like you? Share it on LinkedIn. But go the extra yard, don’t just share link, share your opinion on it and start a discussion.

Seen an article or view point shared on LinkedIn? Comment on it, create some debate, share your expertise and your passion.

As I said earlier though, it all has to be authentic. You can't force people to create and share content, you can’t tell them what they can and can’t post on their profile or their updates.

It has to be real or people won’t believe it and they won’t believe in you or your organisation.

Get some insight from the experts

Have you ever wanted to get a view point from somebody outside of your team or had a question that nobody in your company had the answer to? Ask your LinkedIn network, you’ll be amazed what you find.

I asked the below question on LinkedIn and got a stack of suggestions via both the comments and InMail.

I could have spent hours trawling Google to find some good case studies. But instead I asked the question on LinkedIn and got more than links to case studies. I got some real in-depth thoughts from the people who’d been there and done it, much more than I’d ever have had just searching the web.

Networking & Opening Doors

I can’t talk about LinkedIn without talking about the massive benefits of networking.

My network is great, the people in it are truly awesome. Some of the people in my network I’ve never met and most likely never will. But there are others who I have met for the first time and others who I am going to meet for the first time, all thanks to LinkedIn.

A strong network can really open doors. Below are just some of the doors that have been opened for me personally via LinkedIn:

• Invited to speak at and take part in a number of events and conferences related to my industry
• Discovered a Slack community of over 1,600 recruiter type folk to further bounce ideas around and network
• Found an angel investor to start a business

The world of work is changing faster than it’s ever been.

It’s getting more and more difficult to attract talent.

We all have to keep ourselves up to date with the latest in our industry. To do that we need consume more content than we ever have before, we need to seek external fuel more so than ever.

If you don’t, then you’ll find yourself becoming irrelevant very quickly.

LinkedIn helps (not solves!) us to achieve all of this. So why aren’t you and your teams using LinkedIn?