 How are you looking for that first job after graduating? I'm Jonathan Pollinger and in this video I'm going to show you five tips on how you can use LinkedIn to get your first job. Let's get into it. So after graduating you're going to be keen to land that first all important job. So in this video I'm going to give you five tips on how you can use LinkedIn to do that. So tip number one is to optimize your LinkedIn profile. So I'm just going to go through my profile here and give you a few pointers on how you can improve your profile. So first off we have the visual elements at the top. So we have a cover photo here. So this should reflect you as a person. You might not be able to have a photo of you in employment if you still haven't landed that first job but anything that reflects you as a character reflects your personal brand is absolutely fine. Then we've got the head and shoulders shot here. So this should be a clear picture of your face. People do like to see who they are meeting for an interview when they're going to be employing them. So very important to get that right but don't worry about it being too formal or professional as long as people can clearly see it as you and it's a good quality photo. So next up is the verification of your profile. So this is a new feature indicated by the shield and the tick here. So this shows potential employers that it is actually your profile that they are looking at and you need your passport and to go through a process to obtain that verification but very much worthwhile doing. Then we have the headline. So here it is worth saying that you are actually looking for your first job after graduating from college or university and it's worth putting in what sort of job that might be and perhaps including one or two skills. You have got a fair bit of space here as you can see and I've actually used all three lines here that are available for that. Another thing you can do is make sure you've got your contact info filled out. So for privacy reasons you might not want to list your phone number but it is possible to put your phone number on here. Make sure that you've got your email so I've got a business email here. Again if you're not currently working that will have to be your personal email but when you do get your first job do make sure you change that to your business email. That would be your primary email on LinkedIn. If you have got a website or a blog or a YouTube channel perhaps or social media that you want to point potential employers in the direction of then you can list up to three websites or web pages in this area here. Now one really important feature is the open to work feature. So you notice on my profile picture I've got a open to work flash here. So if I click on that you will see that I have got a number of things listed here including the job titles that I'm looking for, location, start date and employment type. So do make sure that you have filled that out on your profile. Then a nice little section that LinkedIn have got is what they call the featured section. So you can feature particular content here. So one suggestion is to feature any projects that are relevant for your first role and definitely feature your CV here in this panel in one of these panels. Now it's pretty handy and flexible because you can upload an image file, you can upload a PDF and you can also link to any website or one of your recent posts on LinkedIn. So if we scroll further down the profile if you have got work experience then add that there along with a description, education so you've just graduated so make sure that you've got your college and information related to that. If you're involved in any projects put those in there, any volunteering likewise and pretty important skills this is going to be a section that you're going to be developing over the course of your career but definitely worth putting some in there. Now it's important to get recommendations so this is really powerful thing on LinkedIn so if it is possible to get any recommendations of people that you've done any kind of like project with whether that's paid work or otherwise then do try and get some recommendations there. If you have published anything you can pop that into the publications section there. So those are the few tips on optimizing your profile on LinkedIn. So for tip number two we're going to look at creating content. It's very important to create content on LinkedIn to make yourself visible to employers and also to demonstrate the skills that you've got to offer and you can do this in two ways. You can do it with short form content known as posts or you can do it in long form content known as articles on LinkedIn. So we're on the homepage here on LinkedIn and you'll see that at the top we've got start a post so to create a short form post we just simply click into this box here and then we can start typing, we can add emojis, we can add photos and videos, we can add an event, we can add an occasion, celebrate an occasion, some other options here are a poll, that's quite an interesting one. That one there shows people that you're hiring which is the opposite of what you want to want to do. That one's quite useful because it's for adding PDF documents and the final one is for finding an expert. So at this stage probably not likely to use that one but the main tools here are the ability to write text and to add emojis and photos and videos or perhaps a document there. Once you've done that you can either schedule that using this clock symbol here or you can just post it straight away. So to give you some ideas of what you might post here so you might want to do an introductory post to talk about yourself perhaps to mention your degree and the college or the university that you graduated and talk about what you're passionate about, what you're actually interested in, it might even be worthwhile mentioning opportunities that you're actually looking for. Another idea would be a thank-you sort of type post looking back on your university degree to thank your professors, to thank your co-graduates, mentors and anybody else that made a contribution to your education there and another one would be perhaps skills, particular skills that you're looking for and you might want to relate that to a particular industry where you want to, in which you want to work. So just a few ideas for short form posts there. So to create an article it's actually in the similar area here and you'll notice that we've got to write an article option. So if I click on that I go into this area here where I can choose who I'm writing on behalf whether it's a company or me but clearly want to write as me as this occasion so I'm just going to scroll down to that. So it's going to make the screen a bit smaller to make that possible so just got too many pages that I manage here. They're going to go on to next and then this is the area just expand that so make it a bit bigger for you. This is the area where you can actually write an article, really a sort of long form or even a blog style post here and this is pretty useful to work with actually. You've just got some sort of standard and relatively straightforward formatting options here across the top and you can add a title, you can start writing and then you can add an image or a design at the top here and then when you're ready you can click on next and then what happens is this actually goes out as a post with a link to this article but people can also find it as an article as well. So that's articles to give you a few ideas, three ideas around article topics. So one would be to reflect on your college experience, your university experience, sort of like look back, look at the challenges, what you learned and really sort of talk about your experience there. There is an industry that you're currently interested in. Another idea would be to provide some insights and some thoughts around that particular industry and keep it personal and talk about why you're looking to work there. And a third idea would be to pen an advice piece to graduates so pass on your experience of what you've actually learned. So something along the lines of title might be three pieces of advice I wish I had known before starting my degree. So just a few ideas there around short form posts and long form posts but really important if you can to start curating some consistent content on LinkedIn. That's tip number two. So the third tip focuses on building your network on LinkedIn. So why is a recent graduate would you want to do this? Well the main reason is quite straightforward. It's that those people that you're connected with might be able to offer you a role or people that you're connected with might know somebody who can offer you a role. But first you need to find these people. Now the best way to do this is using search. Very very powerful feature on LinkedIn. So as an example let's search for the role of chemical engineer. So if we do that we get a number of results that appear on the screen and we've got different categories here. We're concerned with people. So those are the category of jobs which we'll come back to in tip number four but there are some other categories as well but it's people that we're particularly interested in. So let's look at that in more detail and we can do that by selecting the people filter on the top left menu bar there. Now we want to build our network so the best way to do that is to go for second connections because that means that there is somebody in common with the people who are second connections. In other words you both know the same person and you can mention that person when you're connecting with them. So let's click on second and that's going to bring the 282,000 results down to 8,000 results but we can filter a little bit further. We might want to work with this list but let's say that we just want to focus on people in London for example so I can click London there and the results should, there we go, show results should change filter down from 1,000 down to 320. So we can then scan these people here we get a little bit of information we get the name we get the headline and we get their location which should be London because that was the required filter and then we can look at the person in more detail and decide as a chemical engineer whether we want to connect with them or not if that's the kind of industry the kind of role that we're looking for then we might well want their insights. So you can connect directly with them so this means that you get to see each other's content and you have the ability to message one another so this is a direct connection but you can also follow somebody so if I want to connect I can click the connect button there if I want to follow I can just go to more and follow now follow just means that I see their content and that's it no more to it but let's say that we want to connect so what I can do is click the connect button a very good idea to add a note when you're connecting so I can click on add a note and then type in a small message there maybe referencing our mutual connections as I mentioned before so in this case Neil Martin Sally Cope and one other person and then when we've done that we can send off the invite to connect if the person accepts you'll be notified of that and from that time on this case Sarah will move from being a second connection to a first connection so that's how you can find people on LinkedIn and either connect or follow with them so for tip number four we're going to look at the jobs section on LinkedIn so it's really handy that as a recent graduate you have access to a whole dedicated area to help you find a job on LinkedIn so you access this area via the top menu bar where you can see it states jobs so if we click on that there's a number of really useful features in here so first of all there's a panel with suggested jobs which as you can see is based on my profile and search history so they put up a few jobs here and if you want more you can click on show all and then it'll highlight a whole bunch of jobs there and for further details you can just click on any of these roles vacancies and you can see the details there you can save them down to your my job section if you're interested I'll point that out to you shortly or you can apply using easy apply in most cases where LinkedIn will populate your details in the application form so another way that you can use the job section is to actually search for roles so if we search for say an artificial intelligence consultant in Cardiff so a previous search that I've run so I can select that and then up pop some suitable vacancies here works in a similar way I can highlight any of these and get the details on the right hand side so if I'm particularly interested in that kind of search and that kind of role then I can switch the alert on the job alert on you can see that it's already switched on for this particular role so this means that if anything comes up any new vacancies are added to this section I'll be alerted on LinkedIn via notifications and I will get an email pointing that out so pretty handy and similar to the filters that we had on the main search previously you can see that we've got filters across the top to help narrow down our search as well so just going back to the main job section just to highlight a few other features of the section so the my jobs area which I mentioned before this is where your saved jobs are added to so you can see that I've got a saved job in here and other things we've got here are preferences so you can state your job searching preferences here worth going through this little panel and section there little area to help you prepare for interviews some job secret guidance there and this is for recruiters so those two bits there don't don't apply but the bulk bit is for people like yourself recent graduates looking for a new role and it's a really helpful section so for tip number five the final tip I'm going to show you as a recent graduate how to use the alumni feature available on university college and school pages so this is a really handy way of connecting or following with people that went to the same college as you and perhaps have the same career or are working in the same industry that you are looking to work in as a recent graduate so this is how it works so we first of all need the university that you went to so I'm just going to use Cardiff University as an example here and we're going to go straight to their page now part of the page is an alumni section as you can see here on this menu structure along here so if we click on alumni we've got a list of 139,092 alumni people that have been to this college and what's really useful is that we can filter by year and also title keyword or company so let's stick to the example we used for tip number three and put in chemical engineers so this will identify all the people who have been to this college who have a connection in some way with chemical engineering or perhaps they are actually chemical engineers and we've got a list of 71 of those people here so it's worth having a browse of these people because they might be able to give you advice in terms of your career options and who knows they might even be able to offer you a role but you have got that commonality in common the fact that you went to the same college so a pretty handy feature allowing you to find people who went to the same college that you can then follow or connect with so that's tip number five for helping recent graduates to find their dream job hope you found that useful and best of luck with your job search hope you found those tips useful and you should now be in a position to land that first job after your graduation for more tips please like and subscribe to the NILC channel on YouTube see you next time