Get a job: using Monster.co.uk and LinkedIn

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 - Get A Job, LinkedIn, Monster.co.uk, Social Media, Uncategorized

Get a job: using Monster.co.uk and LinkedIn

Today, I’d like you to play my favourite game: get a job. We will only be using the most popular method of job search used by over 40% of modern job seekers, that of online job boards and social media. The online websites we will be using in this case are the UK’s most popular jobs board Monster.co.uk, and the worlds largest professional Social Network, LinkedIn.

Get A Job: what you need

To play the game (for real – because this is not a game), you need:

• Yourself
• Your Professional CV
• An Elevator Pitch
• A LinkedIn profile
  
• A computer and a phone (with £2+worth of credit)
• Some confidence!

In our example today, we will be searching for part-qualified accountant jobs centred around Harrow on the Hill.

But the principles that I describe here could be applied to any job search criteria globally, using any jobs board or jobs listing service.

Find a job: Monster.co.uk

First step, go to Monster.co.uk. Note that I will do more examples in this series using other Jobs Boards, and sourcing using a local advertising board or newspaper like Gumtree, but lets start with the UK’s biggest jobs board.

Enter your search keywords and location:

• Accountant part qualified
• HA3 0AD, for Harrow on the Hill

We now have 119 results, so lets trim this down. As I explained in What Recruiters Want and Why Recruiters Reject You, recruiters thrive and survive on fresh (meat) and job applicants. So it is not worth looking at anything older than Last 7 days in the present economic climate. We are now down to 47 results.

We seek full time work, so that gets us down to 47 results. Note that there’s a purposeful qwerk in Monsters system, as even part-time jobs are marked as full time: more adverts = more job applicants

At this point, it now gets personal, as it depends on what you are offering an employer and what you seek as to which button you press or select next:

• You could check out all 47 listed opportunities
• You could select an industry or category

One thing I would not do at this stage is check an experience box. Firstly, not all jobs list experience, and secondly it could be illegal for the employer to do so.

The key thing we are looking to do here is separate the employers from the recruiters. Using the fact that your Job Search is predictable by the combined factors of:

• The closer you get to the Hiring Manager, and…
• The more you reduce the competition
• The result will be a greater chance of success in employment

Lets take one employer, and see what we can find.

Taking the SkyTV Financial Controller position (I like that advert – its mentions a number of possible positions),
We could click that large APPLY button at the bottom, or we could use Social Media to get us closer to the Hiring Manager and remove the competition.

Get a job: LinkedIn to Employer

We now move over to LinkedIn. The Sky TV job is listed in their finance section located in Osterley, so we insert into the box in the top right hand search area of LinkedIn under a people search Sky Finance: we now have 4,154 results.

We only want United Kingdom based people, so selecting that criteria in the left hand column takes us to 876 profiles.

Now you have a choice:

• If you are looking to get hired, then you want existing employees
• If you are looking for an Informational Interview, then you want both existing and former employees

On this occasion, lets assume we want to apply for the job, so select from the Current Companies box. Make sure when you check the box that you select all variations of the companies name, so I choose: BSkyB, Sky News and Sky Television. We now have 55 profiles.

From this level of search, we already have four people on the first page of profiles results in the HR team who we could now contact. Further, LinkedIn has ranked the results in what we have in common, in terms of: our connection level; shared connections; shared groups. You could now either:

1. Call Sky directly, and seek one of the four people listed as our target
2. Via one of our common connections, ask for a connection to one of those four people
3. Join a group one of the four people in Sky HR already are members of, and then connect

We could also select the industry of Finance, which takes us down to three people, two of whom are Finance Analysts for Sky in London. Either could be targets for an Informational Interview, or to find out what Sky are like to work for before applying for the job.

Get a job: LinkedIn to Recruiter

Now let’s pick a job advertised via a recruiter. Badenoch & Clark are a recognised global recruitment specialist, and are advertising for a Financial Accountant for a FTSE100 oil and gas company:

Now lets move over to LinkedIn. Rather than using LinkedIn’s drop-down menu to select the company from – which is very useful for certain searches – for job application searches you can get closer to the Hiring Manager. Tap in the keywords form the job advert, in this case: Badenoch Clark Oil. We now have 20 results.

Again, select from the Current Companies box existing employees: we are now down to 6 results:

Any of these people would be suitable targets to call to discuss the job with, rather than pushing that large Monster APPLY button.

Get a job: employed?

Job Searching and job application is difficult and hard, but when so much information is available online, why not use it to your advantage? We know that both of these positions need to be filled, and we know that only 12% of jobs are fulfilled by jobs boards: so why not use information to pout yourself closer to the Hiring manager, ahead of the competition, ad resultantly – employed.

Good Luck!

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One Response to “Get a job: using Monster.co.uk and LinkedIn”

1. Everette Granada Says:
   June 16th, 2010 at 3:13 am

   I appreciate this, Thank You!