Today I met with a young woman just couple years out of college to brainstorm how she could use LinkedIn to help find her next job.

Wanting to move away from the nonprofit sector where she has worked since college, she is struggling with how to “brand” herself in her headline on LinkedIn, a professional social media site.  She doesn’t want to limit herself by how she frames her headline, as she is applying for a wide variety of jobs.

I encouraged her to include her major areas of expertise in her headline, for after all, she could use 120 characters in the headline if she wanted to. This expertise could have come from not just from paid positions, but also from internships and from volunteer commitments.

Then another suggestion I gave her was to type those key words of her expertise into the people search and look at the headlines of the people who came up. As you may know, when you conduct such a search, you will get to view 100 profiles in such a search, unless you have an paid account with LinkedIn.

We also talked about searching the companies offering the jobs and looking for connections there, as well as people connected to the people she is directly connected with on LinkedIn.

A couple of books also came to mind, such as Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transfer Your Career by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha.

What kinds of advice would you give to a job seeker in her early to mid 20s who is simply wanting to land her next best job?

Please don’t limit yourself to using social media in a job search. Any other suggestions would be appreciated, I am sure.

Joyce Feustel, Founder

Boomers’ Social Media Tutor

www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com