Get prospective employers to see what you’re all about in one click

Half the battle in finding the right employer is cutting through the clutter of other job candidates so hiring companies can see what makes you so darn amazing.

But first you must understand human nature. You know those emails your friends and colleagues send you with a link to a funny video, joke, or something altogether different? The first thing most of us do is -- click on the link. Why? Well, for a few reasons but mostly because we’re curious about what is behind the “curtain”. Want to see for yourself? Then CLICK HERE SO I CAN PROVE IT.

For those of you who were not all that curious or concerned where the link leads, I will just go ahead and make my point. After reading what follows here you’ll be hitting that link in no time.

Consider you are the perfect candidate for a job. You send an email to the hiring company and attach your resume and write something powerful in the text area of the email to compel the hiring manager/human resources to go one step further and open your resume file. They’re busy, distracted, or annoyed they have to go through this process in the first place and are getting pretty tired of reading resumes. How do you spark their interest to read about you?

Imagine that you embed a link, like the one I encouraged you to click on, in your opening line, inviting the recipient to view your profile where, not so coincidentally, your resume is also parked for viewing (at some point you will have to have one of these things). Do candidates get any savvier than you? But more importantly, LinkedIn allows you to showcase what makes you special right from the start.

How do you do it? First thing is to set-up a LinkedIn account. Complete the profile, write about the amazing things you have accomplished, who you’ve worked for in the past, how well-educated you are, and, basically, take advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer. Now, to get to your personal web link, on your ‘Profile’ page you are assigned a “public URL”. That’s the web address to your personal profile. Copy that URL into a Word document. For example, type: www.linkedin.com. Right click on the link and then select ‘Edit Hyperlink’. At the top of the pop-up box, it says: ‘Text to display’. Type in whatever you want. So, www.linkedin.com becomes LinkedIn.

Why you should do this or the problem with resumes.

It’s funny how there are professional resume writers – as a bona fide profession, where skill, talent, and know-how is required – yet the majority of us think we are adept at writing our own resumes without any of the training or skills possessed by, you guessed it, professional resume writers. And that would be OK and perfectly sensible to accept the premise that you may not be the most appropriate person to write your resume except, and here is the problem, many prospective employers expect you to be or, at the minimum, will evaluate you on the quality of your resume when your special skill set may be capping bottles, selling airplanes, or paving driveways. However, having a LinkedIn profile gives you the opportunity to tell someone right upfront that you are the Midwest’s 2009 bottle capping champion or are the person responsible for having sold all of Boeing’s 747 inventory without them even thinking about how well you can write a resume. You can even put your smiling face right there at the top.

Does it get any better or easier than that?