UVA Career Center

Students have used LinkedIn to do any and all of the following: find and contact alumni, develop their Google Search rankings, set up informational interviews, research companies prior to an interview, learn about their chosen industries, expand their network by contributing to professional discussions, and staying current on news in their future industries.

The first, and easiest, is to search for a person’s name and click the ‘connect’ button. You can also import your email contacts and browse the user directory for potentially interesting contacts. 

Pay careful attention when importing your email contacts to ensure that you aren’t sending email invites to everyone in your address book, and always personalize your connection messages. LinkedIn offers form text that states “I’d like to add you to my professional network,” but you should personalize it to reflect some of the following: 

• Letting the contact know how they met you or why you’d like to be connected
• How you think this relationship would be mutually beneficial 

Anecdotally, LinkedIn users seem to respond more positively to personalized invitations than the pre-populated message. 

LinkedIn is a place to create and manage a professional image of yourself, and that should guide all of your interactions on the site. Keep your focus on connecting to people that you know and have something in common with, strive to personalize your interactions with others on the site, and remember that it’s not a place to air grievances about your job search. Focus your energy on being authentic, helpful, and enthusiastic in your interactions. 

Create a public profile link. Making your profile public gives you a short, easily shareable link that you can include on your resume, cover letter, email signature, and business cards. Making your profile public also improves your Google search results for your name, which can be very helpful if you have a common name, or it can assist you in making the right information about you accessible.

• To get started, Go to  Profile  “Edit your profile” 
• Click the edit button beside "Contact Info" on the initial pop-up window, leading you to yet another pop-up window. Your personal profile URL should appear at the top of this new window. After clicking on your URL, you should be taken to a page with your public profile settings. 
• On this new page, click "Edit URL” found on the right. Type the last part of your new custom URL in the text box. 
• Click Save. 

You can then visit the “settings” page and then choose “edit your public profile” to make changes to the content that is shown online. You can show all of the same sections that are available to registered LinkedIn users, or restrict it further. 

Consider using ALL of the available sections

You already know that LinkedIn offers you the ability to edit a summary section, a section covering your work experience, groups and associations, skills, and recommendations. However, there are even more sections you can use to customize your profile. You could consider adding sections on: 

• Courses
• Honors and Awards
• Languages
• Organizations
• Projects 
• Publications
• Test Scores (certain industries are more interested in this data than others.) 
• Community Service 

Show samples of your work by uploading them to your profile.  LinkedIn allows you to upload written documents, video, and other forms of media to enhance your page

Engage with LinkedIn Groups 

Groups are where the promise of “exchanging knowledge” truly comes to life. You may want to start by joining the University of Virginia Alumni, Students, Faculty, and Staff group which is where students, alumni, parents, and recruiters regularly interact. Beyond that, you could search for groups that focus on your related interests, such as: future career fields, networking in a certain geographic location, and based on your college affiliations As you connect to people, take a look at the groups they’re a part of-that’s a great source of future inspiration. 

As you search for groups, you can see additional data about each group in the results, such as the number of people in your network that belong to the group, and most importantly, whether or not the group is active. LinkedIn Groups all have a similar structure that includes discussion boards, the ability to post and view jobs, and search the member directory. As a student, the discussion boards are a key source of insight into the issues, concerns, and challenges of a particular industry or professional situation, and it’s a great place to observe for a little while. Within each discussion board, you can follow the discussion and receive additional information when others comment, and you can also like the discussion. 

Within each group, we recommend adjusting your update settings to prevent getting overwhelmed. You can do that by choosing “my settings” under the “more” menu in each group.