Published in Imprint July 16, 2010

Social or “New” media has been hyped as the start of a wildly different style of communication in our lives: one that is more collaborative, responsive, and sharing in nature than the two-way conversations of yesterday.  

The art of networking has not been spared from this radical development.  

LinkedIn is arguably the most popular form of online professional networking, with over 70 million members worldwide as of May, 2010.

As an online job service, LinkedIn has changed the way people meet prospective employers — making it an ideal environment for internet-savvy networkers, like yourself, to look for your next opportunity.

LinkedIn is a social media evolution of traditional job search engines like Workopolis and Monster, where you can post your resume to make it searchable by HR professionals in specific industries.  

The added power of collaborative sites like LinkedIn is that it can be used to communicate and connect with people you meet in business engagements.  By building a network of professional relationships online, you can learn more about people you meet and get introduced to opportunities you never knew were available.

Connecting with people through LinkedIn is very easy: it can be as simple as uploading your entire email address book and clicking “invite all.”  

However, like any other form of networking, an ounce of sincerity is worth a pound of gold. Making your invites a little more personal is a far better strategy because it allows you to subtly remind people where you met them and that you’re interested in who they are.  

That being said, LinkedIn connections should lean towards quality rather than quantity, because every contact you earn makes you more accessible to that person’s entire network.  

This is because LinkedIn operates on shared contacts basis, meaning that you can be indirectly connected with someone by sharing a lot of their same contacts.

 Basically, the more people you connect with, the more people you’ll be exposed to through their connections.  Otherwise, many people will remain invisible to you on LinkedIn because they are “out of your network.”  Adding people onto LinkedIn you have only met briefly is not a bad thing.  

After all, your very best friends and business contacts should already be a phone-call away.  LinkedIn is more about reaching out to people you might not know so well, but want to remain in contact with professionally in case you find an opportunity they might be interested in.

The creation of your profile is probably the most important aspect of the LinkedIn experience, and writing about it here doesn’t do the topic justice.  Suffice to say that your LinkedIn profile has the potential to go far beyond your resume in terms of richness of detail.  

On your profile you can add your specialties, paragraphs describing the companies you’ve worked for, details about projects that don’t fit in resume three-bullet formats, and a clever introduction that sums up who you are to prospective employers.  Don’t miss out on this chance to expand on your traditional resume — it’s what LinkedIn is all about.

Most importantly, ease up on your privacy settings so your profile is searchable.  HR professionals are now using LinkedIn to search for prospective employees instead of the other way around.  Take advantage of this new trend and make your name pop up in searches for new graduates from the University of Waterloo.  You never know what opportunities will come your way, so get linked in… or get left out.