July 24, 2024 1 Comment

Use LinkedIn Groups to Enhance Your Job Search

Of all the functions of LinkedIn, the opportunity to join Groups and interact with fellow professionals with whom you share interests is perhaps one of the most useful ways to help you, as a job seeker, to reach outside of your network for new contacts.

Once you have set up your LinkedIn profile, including your photo, profile summary and jobs, and you have connected with the people you know, it’s time to begin using the platform to expand your network further. This is where LinkedIn Groups can become very useful.

As with all LinkedIn functions, the site offers users a detailed guide to setting up and using groups. You can join groups in your professional field (e.g. Sales), or groups related to a personal interests (e.g. hobby electronics).

Participation in groups provides job seekers a range of opportunities, including:

sharing and discussing ideas
gathering information
learning about jobs
making new contacts
showcasing expertise

The easiest way to get started is to explore the Groups You May Like option, where the site recommends groups, based on your profile. You could also search for a specific group. Keep in mind that it is best to seek out groups that are local, where there might actually be opportunities to interact with fellow professionals in person.

Once you have joined and been accepted into a group, make sure to maximise the opportunity. As a group member, you may:

Answer questions or join discussions. This may be an opportunity to show your expertise, as well as learn something new from your fellow group members. Watch your tone and make sure to sound professional — you never know who is reading your comments and following your interactions.
Ask a question or start a conversation. You can ask for opinions, experiences or information. Group members can be excellent resources, when the topic is of interest to them.
Interact with group members. You can connect with fellow group members by responding to their comment or question, by “liking” their comments, and by messaging them privately.
Add group members to your network. LinkedIn makes it easy to connect with someone with whom you share a group. Also, being in a group with someone means that you are more likely to appear in any LinkedIn search done by a member of your group. (This means that it might be worth joining a few of the larger groups, specifically).
Under the Promotions tab (if available on your group), you can learn about events and services offered by group members, or promote your own.
Under the Jobs tab (if available), you can post, read about and apply for jobs.

Preparation for job interviews can be enhanced through group participation — you might be able to gather information which may sharpen your own knowledge in your field, or specific inside information or tips about particular companies.

Finally, if you cannot find a group that represents your particular interests, consider creating a group. Keep in mind though, that administering a group is a responsibility and a time commitment. You will need to recruit members, keep conversation moving and moderate discussions. A well moderated group can be a worthwhile endeavour, to raise your profile on LinkedIn as a competent and informed professional in your field.

July 24, 2024 Leave a Comment

How To Use LinkedIn Company Pages to Enhance Your Job Search

In previous posts about the uses of LinkedIn for job seekers, I have focused its uses for building your professional network, as well growing that network through LinkedIn Groups. Another, often underutilized service, is Company Pages, which provide job seekers with access to detailed in-depth information about potential employers. Companies are listed under “Interests” on the LinkedIn menu.

What information is available on Company Pages?

Company Pages offer job seekers a unique source of valuable information, because it includes data from three sources:

Company description (provided by the company itself) which may include background information, as well as careers/job postings and lists of services.
Insights (drawn from data provided by employees on their personal profiles, as well as their activities), such as employee skills — collected and reported under “Top Skills & Expertise” — plus, lists of those employees who get the highest number of LinkedIn recommendations — reported as “Most Recommended”. Also included is information about how you are connected to staff members, including 1st and 2nd degree contacts (which can be very useful for the job seeker who’s looking to expand their network strategically).
User/customer reviews, provided by your contacts and others.

How to use Company Pages?

1. Start off by searching for companies in which you are interested. You can narrow the search, using these criteria:

Relationship — if you want to identify companies in which you know someone, or can expand your network, by finding those in which you have degrees of connections: 1st, 2nd or 3rd
Location — if you want to identify companies where you would like to work (you can narrow the location down by adding the name of the city, such as “Toronto”)
Job Opportunities — to identify those companies which post jobs on their LinkedIn page
Industry — to narrow down your target industry, e.g. Information Technology and Services, Computer Software, Staffing and Recruiting, Marketing and Advertising or Financial Services, or add other industries — remember that sometimes you can do the same job — such as accounting or administration — in multiple industries
Company Size — if you have a preference for larger or smaller companies
Number of Followers –to identify which companies are more popular or active on LinkedIn
Fortune — to identify companies as rated and listed by Fortune magazine

2. Follow the companies that interest you by clicking on the follow button. Every time the company updates its page, shares information or makes announcements (including posting new jobs), you will be notified on your news feed/home page.

3. Read up on each company — you can gather information, extend your networks and many other uses, as outlined below.

How can Company Pages help with job search?

Company pages can provide you useful information at all the stages of job search, from making career decisions, to finding jobs for which to apply, and preparing for interviews:

Employers expect you, as a candidate, to have researched the company and be able to talk about it intelligently in job interviews. The succinct and up-to-date information provided on LinkedIn Company Pages can be a unique source of this data.
Figure out whether you have any contacts in the company, both current employees, as well as former employees you may know (listed under “Insights”), from whom you can gather inside information, referrals and tips for applying for jobs. Perhaps they can also refer you to others, so you can expand your contacts in the company. Keep in mind that people can also be excellent sources of career information, as well. Learning about the top skills and expertise of staff in the company can help you figure out which of your skills are your greatest assets.
Jobs are sometimes posted on company pages with information about who posted the position and whether you have any connections to them. If the company does not post on LinkedIn, it might direct job seekers to where jobs are posted elsewhere on the Internet.

Finally, LinkedIn now offers companies an opportunity to post status updates which provide their followers with opportunities to learn about new developments, as well as interact and engage with the company by responding to the posts. Read more about this here, from the LinkedIn blog (which is always a good source of ‘know-how’ information about LinkedIn).

July 24, 2024 1 Comment

A Senior Executive Looking for Work

We are excited to welcome a guest blogger, Sharon Barney, to share with us her unique perspective on job search. Sharon is a senior executive with more than 20 years of experience leading organizations through transformation. She is contributing to the JVS blog from both the perspective of a job seeker as she is currently searching for a new career and from the perspective of a senior leader who has hired senior staff. Her dream job is a leadership position developing diversity in thought and action throughout an organization. She believes that human resources are strategic assets. She is particularly interested in how we create personal value through online networks.

This blog is about my experiences as a senior executive doing an online career search. I want job candidates to appreciate the many opportunities for personal growth through the process; and especially to maximize the opportunities of online communities and networking. I understand that most people view job search as a bad thing, and it certainly has its downside; however one of the key rules of job search is to stay positive!

JVS Toronto is an agency which runs five employment centres and welcomes job seekers from all backgrounds. The counsellors are excellent, sympathetic and totally honest about how to conduct a career search. I was asked to contribute because of my perspective from both sides of the career search process.

The first workshop that I attended at JVS was about Social Media Networking. I arrived at the Social Media Networking seminar hoping that the process would not be too difficult. The first thing that Karin Lewis told us is that we MUST develop our LinkedIn profile. She went on to tell us that 89% of companies use LinkedIn to recruit and so we don’t really have a choice. Whoa! It was overwhelming!

But, I’m happy to report that developing my LinkedIn presence has been a totally rewarding experience. I recommend that you get your basic information onto your LinkedIn page ASAP.

Once you sign in, LinkedIn will prompt you; so it’s a simple case of answering the questions. Once you get this done, then you can refine your profile, get your picture loaded up, and start networking. The most rewarding aspect is “seeing who you are.” I know this may sound strange, but you have a chance to see everything that you have done professionally and what motivates YOU.

You have to list your work history chronologically. However, if your most recent position is not relevant to your current job search, then highlight your successes in jobs and volunteer positions that are more relevant by developing those descriptions in more detail.

LinkedIn also gives you the opportunity to join groups of like-minded professionals that show the world what is important to you. Joining groups is easy to do. You want to demonstrate to future employers that you are a dedicated professional. Your groups will be shown on your profile as well as any other groups you have volunteered for.

But the most rewarding aspect really has to be the networking.

By having a LinkedIn profile, you create an online professional network that allows you to meet new colleagues and to reconnect with old ones. You will feel enriched when you see what your professional colleagues are doing; and the career possibilities that are out there.

You can start your network by connecting with your email contacts. But this quickly expands through 2nd level contacts. I found colleagues that I had lost contact with. And even more rewarding was that colleagues I had “forgotten” found me. It is so great to get a LinkedIn notice that a friend and colleague wants to connect. It has truly been amazing.

July 24, 2024 Leave a Comment

Keep Your Skills Current: Identify Top In-demand Skills and Ways to Learn Them

Are your skills considered valuable by employers now and into the future? Do you know what careers are most valued? What skills do you need to add and how? Questions about job trends are frequently asked of employment and career counsellors, and answering these questions is never easy. Right now, as we face an even more unpredictable and fast changing economic landscape, those questions have increased and become even more fraught.

Some of us might think that these concerns come mostly from high school graduates, but often they come from career changers of all ages and stages, facing concerns about job instability in a changing labour market, and their ability to adapt to it and stay ahead.

Canadian Job Trends

Finding the data necessary to answer these questions isn’t easy. To get a sense of labour market trends, present and future projections in Canada, the federal government has put together a Job Trend Analysis website that draws from sources such as the five-yearly census, annual taxes, and unemployment insurance claims. This site is part of Employment and Social Development Canada’s Job Bank, and is worth exploring for anyone who is rethinking their career or wanting to learn more about potential jobs.

However, the site does not necessarily present the entire picture — the information tends to be a little behind the curve, as it takes time to compile and present the data; it’s also, of course, restricted to Canadian data, which is an important limitation at a time when careers and jobs are global and increasingly unbound by geographic limitations.

10 Most In-demand Careers

A new initiative by LinkedIn and Microsoft presents another useful perspective on this issue. Drawing on LinkedIn’s huge database of millions of users, companies, job postings, and skills on their platform, the career platform has compiled a list of the 10 most in-demand jobs in the current (2020) global market, which are most likely to continue to grow in the future.

Based on steady growth patterns in previous years, wages and whether the skills can be learnt online LinkedIn identified the following 10 jobs and skillsets:

Software Developer — programming, storage, networking, security, and deployment; HTML, CSS, SQL, Javascript, Python.
Sales Representative — negotiation, CRM, new business development, B2B, storytelling, social media.
Project Manager — program management, process improvement, project performance.
IT Administrator — manage systems, subscriptions, configuration, and identity; Windows Server, Active Directory.
Customer Service Specialist — customer satisfaction, customer experience, data entry, CRM, admin analysis.
Digital Marketer — social media, content strategy, SEO, marketing channels; Google Analytics, Google Ads.
IT Support/ Helpdesk — troubleshooting, deployment; Active Directory, computer hardware, Microsoft Windows Server.
Data Analyst — data analysis, analytics, visualization; Microsoft Excel, SQL, BI, Tableau.
Financial Analyst — financial analysis, risk management, accounting, analytical skills, data analysis.
Graphic Designer — design systems, layout, colour; Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop.

Best of all, with the limitations of the current pandemic in mind, LinkedIn put together 10 sets of Learning Paths, based on these careers, to offer free online video-based training to users (free until March 2021), provided by industry-expert instructors. Upon completion of each path, users receive a certificate of completion, to share on their LinkedIn profile.

Soft Skills

As we have mentioned in previous blogs, the focus is on a balance between hard and soft skills, including a focus on collaboration, change, diversity and inclusion. To that end, LinkedIn also provides a Master In-Demand Professional Soft Skills set of free online courses, including:

Emotional Intelligence – for enhanced personal performance and effective work relationships
Resilience – bouncing back from difficult situations
Dealing with change — keeping change in perspective and adapting
Critical thinking – rational and effective decision-making, good argumentation and judgement
Relationship building – personal and professional trust
Teamwork – building healthy and productive teams
Communication skills – effective use of meetings, email and presentations
Listening – learning to listen actively
Persuasiveness – being heard, having an impact and getting people to agree
Writing skills – using simple, clear and plain written language to be understood
Creativity – learning to be more fearless and unleash creative thinking

Think through your target jobs and read through descriptions of them in job postings to identify the most valuable skills for your field. Pick a couple (two to three, perhaps) of key skills and focus on them. Remember to mention them in interviews, preferably with specific example of where you have used them in your past.

Other Sources for Learning Skills

Skills training is increasingly available online often at low cost or even free for those seeking an opportunity to enhance their skills. Multiple sources of training, such as colleges, universities and private schools are now offering the flexibility of multiple start dates and greater course choices, as detailed in a previous blog I wrote earlier this year.

Make Sure to Show Off Your New Skills

Don’t forget to add these new skills to your resume, your LinkedIn profile and to mention them in cover letters, when relevant to a particular job.

Whether you’re still in school or already working, it’s never too late to put yourself on the path to a career you love.

Career counselling at JVS Toronto will help you identify your interests, skills, personality and values to build a clear picture of what will make you feel happy and fulfilled in your career. Find out more at jvstoronto.org/career-exploration

July 24, 2024 1 Comment

The Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Job Search

It’s nearly impossible these days to read the news without coming across discussions about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to make everything so easy that it will “eventually take away all our jobs.” Such scary predictions are hard to challenge when AI seems vast and confusing.

So here’s a definition: AI is a field of computer science that focuses on creating technology that can perform tasks that usually require human intelligence. It does so by gathering a large amount of data and “learning” from it. This “machine learning” trains computers to recognize patterns in the data to make predictions or decisions. As a result, it can be used to perform a range of tasks that humans usually do—only quicker and (sometimes) better.

For job seekers and employers, new AI-driven technologies bring a huge and dizzying array of tools that claim to make hiring and job search better and more efficient. It’s important to note that your job search already relies on AI in many ways.

If used thoughtfully, AI can be a helpful tool. But it is important to remember that there are still many ways in which humans are much better at job search than machines.

Let’s look at some of the ways AI is already being used, some of the tools you might want to consider, and when it’s worth relying on human skills to best navigate the job search process and stand out from the competition.

1. Optimizing Resumes and Cover Letters

When you upload your resume and cover letter to a recruiting site, ATS recruiting tools scan, sort, and select those that best match the employer’s specific job descriptions. Some AI tools (such as JobScan and Zety) can be helpful for job seekers to analyze job postings, identify the most suited keyword, and optimize resumes and cover letters. They can help highlight relevant skills and ensure compatibility with the posting, which might improve the chances of the resume and cover letter you have submitted being identified by ATS and forwarded to the employer.

Another use of AI is to help with language, grammar and spelling (I use Grammarly for this – its Chrome extension has a useful free option for checking basic spelling and grammar, regardless of whether you are a first-language English speaker).

Cautionary note: Some AI platforms offer to write your resume and cover letter, often for a fee. But there are some reasons to be skeptical of such offers. Firstly, there’s no reason to spend money when there are organizations such as JVS Toronto that can help with writing a better, more personalized resume for free.

Secondly, you will be required to share a lot of personal information with the app for your resume. That information then becomes the property of the platform, which should raise some privacy concerns for users.

Third, and most important to the job search, writing a resume and cover letter is very useful to prepare you for job interviews. The process allows you to think and sort through your work history and skills and figure out how to describe yourself best.

Finally, text written by AI tends to be impersonal and uninteresting. Employers are also increasingly aware that job seekers will use these tools. It’s possible that AI detectors will soon become part of ATS systems. When this happens, you don’t want to be dismissed as someone unwilling to invest the effort needed to do your job search.

2. Enhancing Job Search Experience

Many job search platforms (Indeed and LinkedIn) use intelligent algorithms to understand and match job seekers’ skills, interests, and experience with job postings in real time. They categorize and rank job listings based on relevance and create a tailored job search experience for job seekers. This is why LinkedIn can impressively recommend jobs to you that you might not have considered, simply based on your profile, contacts, and activities on the platform.

3. Interview Preparation and Practice

An increasing number of online apps and platforms offer AI-based virtual interviews that simulate real interview scenarios and offer job seekers feedback and opportunities to practice their skills.

Cautionary note: These are still in the early stages of development and are not necessarily effective. Also, job seekers should keep in mind that employers rely on job interviews to evaluate interpersonal and communication skills, and despite AI algorithms’ impressive ability to use data and identify patterns, it is not good at understanding the complexities of being human and building relationships. Humans still do that better, and a skilled employment counsellor/coach can do a much better job at helping you figure out how to impress an employer in interviews.

4. Personalized Learning and Skill Development

AI-powered learning platforms (LinkedIn Learning, for example) facilitate personalized skill development by recommending relevant courses, certifications, or workshops based on individual job seekers’ career goals and aspirations. These platforms use machine learning algorithms to analyze user behaviour, assess skill gaps, and provide tailored learning recommendations.

By leveraging AI, job seekers can continuously upskill, often at their own pace, to stay competitive and adapt to the ever-changing job market. LinkedIn Learning is free through many educational institutions and public library systems.

5. Networking and Building Connections

To help you expand your network to people who might be helpful in your career, LinkedIn’s AI-based platform analyzes information (data points) in your and others’ profiles and identifies shared interests and locations. It then suggests connections to people with similar backgrounds or shared professional goals. This can help you expand your network, strengthen relationships, and tap into hidden opportunities. It also enables automated follow-ups, reminders, and personalized messaging to nurture and build professional connections that could help you with your job search.

So, to conclude, it is important to recognize that AI will become an integral part of the job search process as technology evolves. Your challenge as a job seeker is to use the tools available with care but be aware of the risks. Using too much AI to write your resumes and cover letters and prepare for interviews can make you sound more like a machine than a person and won’t necessarily help you stand out. As we face new technology, we all must strive to find a balance between using machines and keeping the human touch — after all, employers are still (for now) human.

Navigating the various things that come with employment search, including understanding the role AI could play in this, can be an intimidating experience. JVS Toronto offers free workshops that can help ensure that you have a resume and cover letter that can beat out AI-driven templates. Not only that, but our 1-on-1 personalized employment services can also help you use AI to your advantage, overcome gaps in your experience history, and help newcomers secure their Canadian experience, among other things! Contact us today to see how we can help you in your job search.

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