I was scanning Twitter this morning when I spotted a question from Adrian Weckler of the Sunday Business Post asking if anyone found LinkedIn useful and what for.
I emailed Adrian the following story of how I used LinkedIn to help me get my current job. I’ve told this story quite a few times now but having finally typed it out, I might as well blog it as well, then I could point ppl to it!!!
My wife is Spanish. She lived in Ireland with me for over 10 years before losing her head completely and saying she wanted to move back to Spain. That was in June 07. We had just enrolled our 4yr old in school for the coming Sept so we decided to give ourselves 12 months to organise the move – that way he’d also finish out his first year in school before we moved (don’t worry, I’m getting there!).
I was involved in a couple of businesses in Cork at the time, but nothing that would move with me, so I knew I needed to cast around for a new job. One that would allow me to work from Spain in English as my Spanish was poor (still is, but that’s another story!!!).
I put the word out on Twitter – but Tweets have a short half-life and that didn’t elicit much response. I also put the word out on FaceBook and I did receive on half-hearted offer of a possibility of a part-time position from a friend (but I think that was more a pity thing, than anything else tbh).
Then I decided to try LinkedIn. I took a slightly different tack there. I had built up quite a decent network there of very well known people in the Web 2.0 space internationally. I went through the list and cherry-picked about 70 of them. I sent them an email saying that I would soon be moving to Spain (this was around March 08), and that as I’d be looking for a new position, it’d be great if they would consider writing a recommendation on my LinkedIn profile.
Within a few short days I had over 20 stellar recommendations on my profile. And four job offers. I interviewed with the four and narrowed it down to two I was really interested in.
Then RedMonk came along, matched the offers, and the rest as they say, is history!!!
Thanks for the inspiration. I currently have to make some drastic changes in my job and even though I know I should be leveraging LinkedIn, I haven’t really too much yet, so thanks for reminding me and showing me this can be a great thing.
P.S. I found your site via a link on alltop.com. So whatever, you’re doing with your RSS feed, you’re doing it right!
That is pretty cool. I have a full-time job also and have been more active on LinkedIn for the past couple of months. I need to polish my “resume” on the site, but I have built a decent contact list. I’m going to take some ideas from your post with respect to asking for recommendations. Some of my contacts are in a position to offer me employment in my field – so it is a great idea.
It is a difficult decision for so many people to actually solicit employment on LinkedIn. When faced with a jury of your peers, admitting you need help can be hard. I love your story, and how it shows when someone uses LinkedIn for what it is supposed to do, it really works…
thanks