Does your job search mostly center on posting your resume to job boards and waiting for responses?

If so, it’s time to shift your energy to the strategies that yield the best return on investment.

A successful job search campaign begins with identifying the job(s) that will meet your needs and be a good fit, and determining which companies or organizations can provide opportunities for you.

Any professional job search strategist worth her or his salt will tell you that networking is the best way to get a job. If this is news to you, you need to rethink the way you’re approaching job search.

The gold standard in executive networking, LinkedIn, is THE place to reconnect with the network you may have neglected, connect with fresh faces who may lead you to new job opportunities, and communicate your unique promise of value — your personal brand — to employers.

But that’s just part of what LinkedIn can do for you. Have you investigated all the job search resources on LinkedIn?

Along with completing and branding your profile, here are two LinkedIn features you should be taking advantage of:

Your LinkedIn Profile

Before leveraging all that LinkedIn has to offer, you have to set up your home base. If you already have a profile, it may need pumping up to be brand-evident and search engine optimized.

It’s also important to have a 100% complete profile, according to LinkedIn’s guidelines. See Walt Feigenson’s excellent post here, Make Sure Your LinkedIn Profile is 100 Percent Complete.

As you’re building LinkedIn connections, using the two tools below and other means, anyone you invite into your network will first go to your profile to assess whether to connect with you. Make sure what they find in your profile is what they need to know about you and the value you offer potential employers.

For best impact, your profile needs to communicate your personal brand, target and resonate with your target market, and be searchable to attract recruiters and hiring decision makers sourcing candidates like you.

Download my free e-book to learn how to bring it all together, Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile: How to Transform Your Executive Brand, Resume, and Career Biography Into a Winning LinkedIn Profile.

Remember to revisit your profile and re-focus your professional headline, brand promise, and other relevant information if your target changes.

Here are two LinkedIn features that provide company research and market intelligence, and help you connect with people at your target companies:

LinkedIn “Jobs” Tab

You’ll find the tab in the top menu on your profile home page, along with Contact, Groups, Inbox and More…

What you’ll find on the Jobs pages:

Click on the “Advanced Job Search” tab to refine and narrow results using keywords and by location, function, experience level, job title, company, industry, and when listing was posted.

Results yield links to job descriptions (through LinkedIn and/or Simply Hired) and application capability, along with links to the LinkedIn profiles of people who work at those companies.

LinkedIn job posting pages also provide a link to the profile of the person who posted the listing, people at the company you’re already connected to through Groups or your network, and suggested people in your network who may be interested in the job.

The Jobs tab leads you to exclusive job listings found only on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn “Companies” Tab

One of LinkedIn’s most powerful features, the Companies pages provide a wealth of valuable information to gather market intelligence for due diligence on companies of interest and people who work there, including hiring decision makers.

Companies pages are accessed from the same menu at the top of your profile home page. Click on the drop-down menu for “More…” and you’ll see it at the top.

What you’ll find when you search your target companies:

• Company descriptions
• Total number of employees, with the number in your LinkedIn extended network
• Current employees with links to their profiles
• Former employees with links to their profiles
• New hires with links to their profiles
• Recent promotions and changes with links to their profiles
• Popular profiles (most visitors) with links to their profiles
• The right sidebar includes information sourced in partnership with BusinessWeek:
  –  related companies
  –  career path for company employees before and after
  –  key statistics (company size, revenue, locations, company website, common job titles, median employee age, number of males vs. females)
  –  recent company news culled from various sources
  –  stock information.

Smart-networking expert Liz Lynch suggested how to use all this company information in her post at the Personal Branding Blog, The Hidden Goldmine Within the LinkedIn Companies Tab:

• Current employees are invaluable resources for getting a handle on what is happening at the company now and the direction it’s going. Plus, they can be great allies for helping you get your resume to the right people and putting in a good word for you (if they know you, of course!).
• New promotions and changes may be in the market to hire for new positions as they expand their department, replace existing under-performers, or fill their own prior position.
• New hires can hint at where there may be growth opportunities within the company. Even if you can’t speak to them directly, you can get a sense if certain divisions have been on a hiring spree and target them first.
• Recent departures might be more open to talking about the challenges the company is having, which managers might be great to work for and who might be a nightmare (good info to know before you accept a job, right?).

An Executive Personal Branding, Online Identity and Job Search Strategist, Meg is a 20-year careers industry professional and one of only a handful of people worldwide to hold the Reach Certified Personal Branding Strategist and Master Resume Writer credentials, both gold standards.

“I love my work collaborating with savvy corporate leaders and entrepreneurs who know where they’re going, but need help differentiating their unique promise of value in the new world of work and executive job search, and positioning themselves to work their passion. My clients are typically c-suite, senior-level executives and rising stars.”

Find out more about Meg at Executive Career Brand, and by viewing her LinkedIn profile and following her on Twitter.

Create a Remarkable Web Presence at Brand-Yourself.com

Once you’ve leveraged LinkedIn to identify relevant job opportunities, it’s time to create a visible web presence around it. Did you know that more than half of employers are more likely to hire you if you’ve spent time developing your personal brand across social networks? To help you do this, we built a platform to manage your online reputation from one central hub. Create your Brand-Yourself account today and see how our tools can help you build, optimize and promote a remarkable web presence that gets you hired.

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I rely heavily on blogging and Twitter to build my own brand visibility and market my promise of value to potential clients. I count Google Alerts as an essential strategy in my personal brand toolkit.

Similarly, when job-hunting you’re in a sales and marketing campaign for your company, namely YOU, in which you’re pitching your value proposition to prospective employers.

Step one in your job search strategy is getting clear about what kind of job you want and where you’ll find it.

Step two – research companies and compile a list of 10-20 that will fulfill your needs, along with key decision makers within each one, which you’ll work on connecting with.

Now that you have your target list, set up an account at Google Alerts with Alerts for the following:

• Your name
• Your blog and website names
• Names of your target companies and/or those you want to be informed about
• Names of key decision makers in your target companies
• Key word phrases relevant to your niche
• Names of your target companies’ relevant products or services
• Names of subject matter experts in your niche
• Names of any people whose radar you want to get under.

When these words or names are mentioned in a blog post or online articles or anywhere online, Google Alerts promptly sends you an email with a link to the web page.

So what’s the big deal and what do you do with all these incoming Alerts?

Practically as it happens, you’ll get the latest news and information relevant to your chosen Alerts.

Not all the Alerts you receive will yield something of value, but many will, and some will lead you to information and sites you never would have found otherwise.

And Google Alerts will lead you to places where you can position your brand value, and hopefully generate interest in you and evangelism for your brand.

For career marketing and job search, use Alerts:

• To keep an eye on market trends and opportunities.
• To provide targeted industry and company research for due diligence, market intelligence, and to position yourself as an informed, engaged candidate in interviews.
• To help you track where your target key decision makers are hanging out, what they’re talking about, and what they’re working on.
• To uncover challenges facing your target companies, aiding you in communicating your value proposition to help them overcome those issues.

Use Alerts for better blogging and tweeting:

• If you quickly act on an Alert, you may be the first responder to a new post on a blog with good link weight. People reading blog comments are much more likely to notice, read your standout contribution, and click on the link you provide in your top-landing comments. And your blog comments build on-brand search results when people Google “your name”.
• Alerts generate ideas for blog posts and tweets.
• Get plenty of fuel for tweets and re-tweets which help build brand evangelism.
• If you receive an Alert on a blog post you’ve written within an hour or two of publishing it, you’ll know Google considers it highly relevant and will be sending other searchers to the post when they Google matching keywords.
• Be notified of relevant sites where you may be able to publish an article or guest blog, building online brand visibility.

In general, Alerts help you:

• Keep apprised of what, if anything, people are saying about you online and who is linking to your blog or website.
• Stay informed of what others in your company and industry are up to.
• Stay informed of the latest trends within your niche and areas of interest.
• Connect with new information, thereby expanding your knowledge base.
• Penetrate new communities of forward-thinking subject matter experts and extend your network.

What have Google Alerts done for you lately?

For more executive job search tips, see my post 2010 Top 10 Executive Personal Branding and Job Search Trends.

An Executive Personal Branding, Online Identity and Job Search Strategist, Meg Guiseppi is a 20-year careers industry professional and one of only a handful of people worldwide to hold both the Reach Certified Personal Branding Strategist and Master Resume Writer credentials.

“I love my work collaborating with savvy corporate leaders and entrepreneurs who know where they’re going, but need help differentiating their unique promise of value in the new world of work and executive job search, and positioning themselves to work their passion. My clients are typically C-suite, Senior-level executives and rising stars.”

Find out more about Meg at Executive Career Brand, and by viewing her LinkedIn profile and following her on Twitter.

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I was commiserating recently with recruiter Jeff Lipschultz, a founding partner of A-list Solutions, about how overwhelming the new world of executive job search can be for those facing one.

With fewer jobs at every level, when faced with a layoff or when considering a career transition, executives may find they’re not in demand the way they used to be. In the past, they were probably approached as passive job seekers by recruiters who slid them into their next great gig. They can no longer rely so heavily on recruiters to place them.

So much has changed in just the past year or so. Several factors deeply impact landing an executive job today − personal branding, the need for a strong online footprint, the rise of social media, the fact that recruiters and hiring decision makers source candidates on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, and, of course, the current state of the economy, resulting in much more competition in the job market for fewer top-level jobs.

Jeff shared his advice on connecting and working with recruiters in a Q&A with me on my Executive Resume Branding Blog, “Working with Executive Recruiters”.

Senior-level executives who come to me for help are all at sea when it comes to understanding what they need to do first, what they shouldn’t do, and that they need to build a different kind of job search strategy.

Here are 6 tactics that will help you get a handle on and excel in today’s new world of executive job search:

1.  Personal branding to differentiate and strategically position you.

In brief, personal branding links your passions, key personal attributes, and strengths with your value proposition, in a crystal clear message that differentiates your unique promise of value and resonates with your target audience.

One of the many powerful things about branding is that it generates chemistry for you and helps hiring decision makers connect you with and see you in the jobs they’re trying to fill. Branding shows them how you make things happen.

2.  Portfolio of career marketing communications for your personal brand toolkit.

An executive resume, career biography, covering letter or email message, and reference dossier are must-haves.

But you may need other documents such as a Leadership Initiatives Profile, Achievement Summary, One-page Networking Resume, Performance Milestones, Product Launch Chronology, Project Management Highlights, Technology Skills, Training & Certifications, Speaking Presentations, Publications, Patents, Commitment to Community Service, etc. Name the document to fit the content and target.

Get ready to transform these documents into your online identity-building strategy.

3.  LinkedIn profile and strategy.

Did you know that recruiters and hiring decision makers routinely search LinkedIn for talent and even have special applications designed for that purpose?

If you do nothing else online, you have to have a great LinkedIn profile. But don’t stop there. Get busy making connections, joining clubs, and leveraging all this site boasting over 45 million professional members has to offer.

Go back to your executive resume and career biography and copy relevant content into the appropriate sections to create your LinkedIn profile. Download a copy of my FREE E-book, “Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile: How to Transform Your Executive Brand, Resume, and Career Biography into a Winning LinkedIn Profile”. The book takes you through building a branded profile, step by step.

Optimize your profile and make it searchable using the relevant key word phrases hiring decision makers will be looking for in candidates like you.

Once your profile is together, be sure to include a link to it in your email signature and at the top of your resume, along with contact information.

4.  Tap into the hidden job market with targeted industry and company research.

Take advantage of all that’s available online about your target companies and industry. Go to the websites of companies of interest to you and spend some time on sites such as Hoovers Online, Forbes lists, and Dun & Bradstreet for a wealth of in depth data.

Track down warm leads at companies, identify the challenges they’re facing, learn about the company culture, and pinpoint how you can have an impact.

Circumvent the gatekeepers by identifying and connecting directly with top decision makers at companies through LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other online social networks.

Your research also arms you with market intelligence, serves as your due diligence for companies, and positions you as an informed, engaged candidate in interviews.

5. Face-to-Face Networking Strategy

Along with online networking, in-person networking is still one of the best ways to land a job. This strategy is not a “new rule”, but one that can be approached in a new way.

Many executives neglect their networks when they’re not job seeking − a serious mistake. You’ll need to revive your connections and once again start practicing “give to get” networking.

Leverage the Internet employment portal Job-Hunt.org to connect or re-connect through professional associations & societies, company, military & government alumni groups, and networking & job search support groups.

6.  Online personal brand-building and online brand identity management.

What will recruiters and hiring decision makers uncover when they Google “your name”? Checking out candidates’ online presence before even considering or contacting them is pretty much standard practice now.

If they find nothing about you online, you probably don’t exist to them. Conversely, if they find information that discredits you, you’ll probably be out of the running. You’ll need to run damage control and start building up accurate, on-brand results to push down the negative ones.

Here are a few places to build a presence online and increase the number of positive search results associated with you:

■ Create a Google Profile and other online professional profiles.

■ Blog in some way − your own blog and/or guest blog and comment on other relevant blogs.

■ Create key word-rich profiles on Twitter and Facebook and get busy leveraging all they have to offer.

■ Write book reviews on Amazon and other online book sellers.

■ Publish articles and/or white papers online.

For more strategies, see my series of blog posts, Top 10 Best of C-Level Executive Job Search Strategies

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Spend just a few minutes on Meg’s Executive Resume Branding Blog (http://www.executiveresumebranding.com) and there’s no mistaking her crackling writing, marketing savvy, and talent for personal brand positioning. Meg’s blog reflects her personal brand and is a vibrant platform for her to offer advice and share trade secrets, gained over 20 years in the careers industry.

© Copyright Meg Guiseppi, 2009. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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