 Are you looking for a new job or to change your career? I'm Jonathan Pollinger, social media trainer and in this video I'm going to show you six tips on how you can improve your chances of landing your next role. Let's get into it. So in this video I'm going to take you through six tips on how you can improve your employability on LinkedIn and improve your personal brand to make yourself more attractive to both your current employer and any future employer. So we're going to look first of all at your LinkedIn profile and we're going to use Kareem's profile here as an example and I'm just going to highlight a few points to make your profile make you more discoverable and more attractive to employers on LinkedIn. So we do have a video where we go into more detail and if you look on the top right hand of the screen now you can click and watch that. So just to highlight a few points. So we have the headline here now this should contain some keywords that reflect your role, your skills and your personality. Then we have a link that you can add here. Now this is part of curator mode that you currently need to switch on but pretty soon by default everybody will have curator mode. Very useful to highlight yourself to your current employer and new employers is the feature section. So you can put in some wide range of content here in this section because it supports images, PDFs, websites, pretty much any kind of media that you want to add. Moving further down you have your CV section here that needs to be fully complete and if we go down to the bottom less unknown features such as project section that you can add and most important of all perhaps in terms of demonstrating your credibility and your ability to do your role is recommendation. So do ensure that you reach out to people to obtain recommendations. So that's the first step improving your profile to make yourself more discoverable and to enhance your personal brand. So in this second tip I'm going to take you through how to engage with recruiters and potential employers on LinkedIn. So first of all we need to find these companies so let us use LinkedIn search. So LinkedIn search is a strong feature. Let us imagine that we are looking for a role in engineering so just going to type in engineering there and we're going to get a mixed bag of results here so we've got some content here for example at the top. So we need to filter that down a little bit so we're going to select companies and then we get a list of companies that come up here. I want to be a bit more specific than that so let's say that we are looking to work in London so going to click in London there and click on show results and we're going to get a mixture of different companies and organizations that come up here and let's select CND engineering consultants. So we're going to go over to this business here now to keep up to date with their content it's going to be a good idea to follow them so you can continue to engage with their content and you need to find out a little bit about them as well so you could read the about section probably a good idea to visit their website. Now once you've got a full understanding of this business and you decide it's someone that you want to work then you can go to posts and start to engage with their posts so you can see that with the first post that they've been looks like they've been awarded a new contract here and so we could celebrate that fact so I'm just going to click on the celebrate button here and you'll see that there's a number of comments here as well so if we click on comments there is actually somebody posting here that they're looking for a certain type of type of work I wouldn't actually put that kind of comment publicly here but you can always message the business either via email and it's now possible to message most businesses if they've set it up directly from LinkedIn as we can see from the message button at the top here but if you've got something insightful to add or you want to add your congratulations to this particular post then you can do that let's just have a look at another post or two to see what we've what we've got here so more sort of a company update there no comments on on that one looks like some work that they've done in the past there's we've got a few comments here let's have a look at those yeah not really too much that you can engage with there but if there was an opportunity it's a good idea because it's just putting yourself on the radar of this company cnd engineering consultants finally an additional way to engage is by sharing or reposting so you can do that by clicking the repost button a good idea is to add your own point of view to this so rather than just click repost and then repost again you can repost with thoughts and add your own sort of comment or thoughts on the post that you are sharing so that's how to engage with companies and the same principle applies to recruitment companies on LinkedIn so the third tip is showing you how to build your CV or your resume as the Americans call it and as LinkedIn call it on LinkedIn so we do have a very specific video on this subject that takes you through the steps and all the background information so if you look at the top right hand side of the screen now you can click on the link and watch this video but for this tip I'm just going to point you in the direction of where you do this so we are looking at my profile here and if you go to more you'll see that there's an option for build a resume there so that's your starting point for this process of building a CV and the only thing I would add is do follow step one tip one in this video as in your CV is not going to be good quality if your profile isn't good quality so do make sure your profile is fully optimized before you click the build a resume button in this fourth tip I'm going to show you a handy feature called open to work so this is how you set it up so you go to your profile and you will see a panel here that says show recruiters you're open to work so if we click on that a panel will pop up here and then you can go through the sections and fill them out so first question is to enter what sort of job role job title you are looking for so I'm going to put in social media manager let's say here and then what location whether it's on site hybrid or remote the location that you wish to work in whether you're casually looking or immediately available so I'm just going to hit flexible I'm casually looking and then going to put in full time for the employment type and then you can choose whether you want everybody on LinkedIn to see it or just recruiters so if you were in a current role and you didn't want your employer to see this feature then you would go for recruiters only but if you were not currently working or you were currently freelance then you could just click all linked in members which I'm going to do there so I'm going to click save and now a couple of things happen so one is very obvious in that you now get a open to work flash on your profile picture here so anybody coming across your profile will see that but you're actually also made more prominent in search results when recruiters and others are looking for you so if somebody is looking to fill the position in this case of social media manager then my name is now more likely to come up because I've switched on this feature so that's the open to work feature in this fifth tip for improving your job search using LinkedIn we're going to talk about the job section so it's great that LinkedIn have a dedicated job section and you can access it via jobs and the briefcase icon on the top menu here so if we select this you'll see immediately at the top here we've got some personalized recommendations for me here based on my activity and profile on LinkedIn you can also search for any vacancy advertised by all the companies on LinkedIn by title skill or company and then you've got a number of options down the left hand side here including resume builder which we looked at earlier so let us have a look at this in a little bit more detail if I scroll down here we've got job collections here so you can look by category in terms of nonprofits hybrid etc which is quite helpful and you've also got recent job searches here so you can go back to these if perhaps you're still in the market for looking at for a particular job so a really handy section here dedicated for obviously both recruiters recruit companies that are looking for staff but from your point of view this is great for job seekers so do check out the job section on LinkedIn so in the sixth and final tip on improving your job prospects on LinkedIn I'm going to talk to you about job alerts now this is a really handy feature on LinkedIn where the roles vacancies actually come to you so let's see how this works so we need to go into the job section first of all and we now need to search for a particular role that we might be interested in so let me put in chemical engineers as an example and let's say that we want to work in Manchester so just going to put in Manchester here and go and select that and we get the results coming up here so you may well be interested in these vacancies that become available here but we've had to do a manual search there but if you use the set alert the job alert function here and I'm going to toggle that on I'll now be notified when any chemical engineer vacancies in Manchester become available which is great so you haven't got to keep coming into this area and doing the search manually so to manage your job alerts and you can have more than one set up you can go to the main job section so we're back to the main job section here can go to preferences and then job alerts here and you will see the job alert that I've just set up along with others here so if I wanted to let's say change the some of the criteria here so rather than daily alerts I could switch that to weekly or I could change that how I'd be notified or I can delete that all together then I've got those options there so that's how to create job alerts really useful feature on LinkedIn and that brings us to the end of six tips on how to enhance your job search and career development on LinkedIn by following those tips you'll now be in a better position to find that job that you are looking for please like and subscribe to our channel see you next time