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PayScale’s VIP Blog Roundup: Is Your LinkedIn Profile Helping Other People Get Hired?

Topics: Career Advice

Recruiters do not care about you. OK, that sounds harsh. A better way of putting it might be, “Recruiters care about finding stellar candidates, which may or may not include you.” The goal when you’re buffing up your LinkedIn profile is to make sure that it’s driving recruiters toward you, and not toward your friends and colleagues. In this week’s roundup, we look at expert advice that will help you tighten up the leaks in your Linkedin, plus how to deal with a toxic work environment, and which questions to ask in order to start off a new job on the right foot.

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(Photo Credit: A Name Like Shields…/Flickr)

Donna Svei at Avid Careerist: 5 Ways Your LinkedIn Profile Helps Recruiters Source Candidates

Do You Know What You're Worth?

“Recruiters are LinkedIn sourcing omnivores,” writes Svei. “We’ll eat your young to find the best candidates for our clients to hire. Within limits. Just kidding. No limits. Within the bounds of integrity. Just kidding again. OK, within the bounds of integrity, as defined by each individual recruiter. Yep, that’s the real world people.”

In the context of LinkedIn, that means that recruiters will scan your profile not only to see if you’d be a good fit, but to look for leads to other potential candidates. In her post, Svei shows you how to avoid turning your profile into a promotional vehicle for one of your connections.

Sarah Landrum at WomenWorking: 4 Tips for Handling a Toxic Work Environment

Even if you love your job, you’re going to have bad days – maybe even weeks or months. It’s also true that in a long enough career, you’ll have the occasional gigs that don’t really offer much more than a paycheck. Those are the ones you take during an economic downturn or when you move to a new city, but leave as soon as you’re able.

“Working in a toxic environment, on the other hand, is not only difficult to put up with, but can actually have negative effects on your job performance, as well as your physical and mental well-being,” writes Landrum. “A toxic workplace is any job where the work itself, the people, or the company culture causes so much distress that it is unhealthy and damaging to you.”

If you’re stuck in one of these workplaces, Landrum’s tips will help you keep sane until you can move on.

Lindsay Shoemake at That Working Girl: Do These 5 Things During Your First Weeks at a New Job

Starting a new job is stressful, chaotic, and above all else confusing. It’s like traveling to a different country where everyone speaks the same language, but in a slightly different dialect. Technically, you understand what everyone’s saying, but getting the nuance takes a while. (Also, you can never find any of your things, whether physical or digital.)

If you’ve recently started a new job, Lindsay Shoemake can probably relate: she also took a new position recently. Among her tips for adapting:

Ask for an org chart. Before joining my new company, I was a part of a tight-knit team of less than 20 colleagues that I knew very well. Now walking into an office of 900+ employees, learning names and roles is a bit more challenging. Don’t be afraid to ask for an organizational chart of your department which details who reports to who. Not only will this help you learn names and job functions, but you’ll also be able to see what opportunities are above you to work toward!”

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Jen Hubley Luckwaldt
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