 Are you looking for your ideal job in the financial services industry? I'm Jonathan Ponninger and in this video I'm going to give you five tips on how to land that dream job in financial services. Let's get into it. So in this video I'm going to provide you with some top tips on how you can land your dream job in the financial services arena whether you wanting to work in insurance, financial services or perhaps accounting. So let's look at a few key features first of all on the profile. So you can improve your profile on LinkedIn to make yourself more attractive to potential employers and recruitment agencies. So starting at the top we have the visual elements. So we have the header or cover photo here. So this should reflect your personal brand. Then we have the profile picture itself. This should be a professionally taken head and shoulders shot so people can clearly see who they're likely to employ. Next we have the heading. So you can customize this heading here by including keywords to make yourself more discoverable. Make sure that you specify what area of the financial services industry you want to work in and perhaps your key skills in that area. This new feature here actually called verification. Now you'll see that there's a shield here with a tick in it. So this proves your identity. So reinforces to people that you are authentic. You are who you say you are and indeed you do need your passport to set up this new verification feature, this tick with a shield here. Then we have this extra link that is now possible to add. So you could link this to perhaps a CV or your blog or another relevant website and to add this additional link you can click the pencil symbol on the right hand side here, scroll to the bottom and then click add custom button to add that link. Pretty handy to be able to put that in and you can use capital letters and emojis as you can see. Also just make sure under your contact info that you've got all your relevant contact information here. So potential employers can get in touch with you and one sort of common mistake here is that people add their personal email address here. So do make sure you've got your business email address here. This is known as your primary email address on LinkedIn. So you can continue to log in with your personal email address but just make sure that your primary email address is your business address. Then we have a specific work feature looking for work feature which is open to work. So you can set this up specifying the job titles that you're interested in. In my case I'm a freelancer and you can see that I've got a couple of social media related job titles here. You can set up these other details and these will actually show up for recruiters and recruitment agencies that are looking for somebody like you. So pretty handy feature and on top of that it gives you this little green flash here around your profile picture showing that you are open to work. Next up worth highlighting is the featured section. So you can feature any sort of content here, any sort of media at all. So photos, videos, posts that you've posted on LinkedIn, my newsletter here, even links to websites as you can see. So feature content that will show you off in a positive light to employers. Next up we have the about section or the summary section. So again keywords important here and really sort of tell your story of your career so far and your current skill set. Experience is pretty straightforward sort of make it like your CV. Any projects that you've been involved in you can fill out there. Any volunteering you've been involved with that's an additional section that you'll need to add. By the way to check that you have all the relevant sections you can scroll to the top here and click on add profile section and then review that you have everything that you need on your on your profile. And then finally I would recommend that you get involved with recommendations. So you can get recommendations from your connections and these are really authentic and quite powerful and they are displayed on your profile as you can see here and will stand you in really good light in terms of employers and recruiters that are looking to hire you. So a few tips there on optimizing your profile to increase your chances of getting a job in financial services. So tip number two is to create quality and engaging content. So this is for two reasons. Content makes you more discoverable on LinkedIn so this will help companies and recruitment agencies find you and potentially offer you some work. And secondly it's an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise what you've learned over the years and your thoughts and knowledge and so on. So really good possibilities on LinkedIn both in terms of short form content and long form content so let's get into that. So for short form content otherwise known as posts or updates you can click in the box here at the top and then just literally type in an update here which you could also copy and paste in here and you can add photos and events and also worth noting that you can add documents as well which is quite a good option here. So LinkedIn call PDFs documents so if you've got some financial white papers or something like that you could you could upload those. You can even schedule posts as you can see here but you could also create long form content. So long form content is either articles which are sort of blog posts on LinkedIn or newsletters. So to create both of those you need to select this write article link here. So if I click on that you get into this page and as you can see you can create a header image at the top. You can even use LinkedIn's own tools to do that. Then you can add a headline or a title and then start to write in your content. So you can reference websites, videos, pretty much anything that is on the internet here. So a pretty useful feature and then once you're ready you can click next and publish this and then that also appears on people's news feeds as well. So that's the mechanics for creating both short and long form content on LinkedIn but just a quick word in terms of what that might include. So I think with the short form content it's good for quick takes on current financial topical matters. So there could be some changes in terms of insurance regulations for example or some surveys that are out around insurance that perhaps could have been a recent budget. Could be changes in accountancy legislation anything like that and your thoughts on that. It's good information to share. It's keeping people up to date with news providing them with value and gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your thoughts and your skills around those areas. Long form content you can go into a bit more detail there because you've got more space to work with. So perhaps you could tell the story of a client. So provide a case study of perhaps how you've helped a business move from a loft making business to a profit situation or something along those lines or if going back to the budget example you wanted to provide an in-depth analysis of a complete budget then you could do that. So that's number two tip on how to use content to improve your chances of landing a job in financial services. So for tip number three I'm going to show you how you can grow your network on LinkedIn. So this is important for two main reasons. First of all you can really increase your visibility because you have a larger number of people that are going to be seeing your content on a regular basis a large number of people who are aware of you and secondly it's possible that some of those people or might just need one person will be able to offer you a position a new role in financial services. So you can grow your network both actively and passively and let's talk about actively first. So this involves seeking out somebody that you want to connect with and sending them an invitation to connect. So let's use the search feature to start this process. So if I search for finance services there I get a number of different results coming up including a people section here as you can see and that's the one that we're interested in. I want to delve into that in more detail so I'm going to click people on the top here and get a large number of results here 1.5 million and good idea to drill that down a little bit. So we're going to use one of the filters here connections and select second connections there and then click show results and then that's going to come down to 29,000 bit more of a manageable number there. Now filtering by second connections is useful because it means that in this list here these people know at least one person that I know on LinkedIn so you have that person in common if you like and you can actually make reference to that when you send your invitation to connect. So let's look at this list let's click on this Sarah Fain here and we can see she's head of content and analyst finance shared services and if we want to send her a connection request she has follow button here as the default but we can go to more and then click on connect we want to add a note and then we can type in a note there explaining why we want to connect because we're looking for work in financial services and then click send you'll know that you haven't actually got much space to work with only 200 characters here and also recently LinkedIn have taken to limiting the number of personalised invites on notes that you can send but you can only send a connection request without sending a note although that's not not ideal but if you can send a note do send a note so that's an active way of connecting with a person on LinkedIn. So the second way is to encourage a person to contact you if they've got an available position so you can do that by essentially putting yourself on their radar so in this case you might just want to follow the person so we could click the follow button and then we can start to see Sarah's content in our news feed so just going to short circuit that by finding some content here so if we look at a post here about invoicing and e-invoicing and a particular event if we had a comment about this event then we can question about it we can make a comment underneath here that's going to make Sarah a little bit more aware of us and we could also like or react to this particular post or we could even repost it so all of these things put yourself on the radar of a potential employer who then may well contact you with a position. So tip number four is kind of an extension of tip number three and involves connecting with people that went to the same college or university as you or even school so you can use the alumni feature on LinkedIn to do that to find relevant people and then to connect with them to improve your job prospects in financial services so let's see how we can do that so first we'll need to find the company page of the school college or university you went to so as an example I'm going to use Cardiff University here now as I mentioned there's this handy alumni feature that schools colleges and universities have so you can see that section here alumni and if we click on the page you'll see that it is searchable which is really useful because we can type in any keywords here so we could type in accounting or financial services or let's put in insurance so it's going to key in insurance here and get some results up so these people are connected with insurance as you can see in all these cases here at the top row these people have the word insurance in their job title so if you wanted to connect with any of them LinkedIn are making this really easy by providing the connect button here and it's a handy way of getting in touch with them once you've made the connection then you can explain why you're doing that because you're looking for work in the area and can they help and that should improve your prospects of getting a job in financial services so tip number five concerns a specific job feature on LinkedIn that helps you find work now this is located on the top menu bar you can see there's an icon here that says jobs so let's click on this and check what it's all about so initially you get some jobs that are recommended for you at the top here records a record of your recent job searches some jobs where you might be a top applicant it's a new section here called job collections where jobs are grouped under job sort of like types so hybrid jobs for example or remote jobs is another option as you can see here and so on the left hand side you've got my jobs which records those jobs that you've saved that you're interested in your job search preferences you can take a bit of a test to demonstrate your skills there's an interview preparation area that helps you guides you before preparing for an interview you can even create a resume or CV from your LinkedIn profile there is guidance on finding jobs you can watch a video to help you do that and there are some application settings there essentially this area is a database of jobs where and vacancies that employers and recruitment agencies have published them to which for you it's searchable so you can search but you could also set up alerts as well which is pretty handy so let's type in an example of a role so if we put in something like insurance broker here in the top so we get a number of results here that's that come up that we can that we can browse but bit like the main search there are a number of filters here that you can narrow down your your search by using those filters and the alerts feature is here so if we wanted to set an alert to get notified when any insurance broker job becomes available in the UK but 103 results here at the moment that I can just click slide that over to set alert and then I will now start to receive alerts both on LinkedIn and in my email for those vacancies so pretty handy so all things considered the jobs section on LinkedIn is a very useful mechanism that helps you find work in the financial services arena so that's the five tips hope you found the video useful thank you for watching after watching this video and picking up those five tips should now be in a great position to land that dream job in financial services for more tips please like and subscribe to the NILC YouTube channel see you again next time