1 (Overlooked) Tip To Raise Your Responses 40-70%

1 (Overlooked) Tip To Raise Your Responses 40-70% 1 (Overlooked) Tip To Raise Your Responses 40-70% “I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of filling out numerous applications on the online job posting sites and playing that game. I know I’m getting lost in the shuffle. I’m being told the place to be seen is LinkedIn, but with all the features LinkedIn has, it’s hard to know what gives you the biggest bang for your buck.”   LinkedIn hosts 500 million users, 138 million of whom live in the United States. The platform features 3 million job listings, and a plethora of fancy features presented as tools to help you through your job search. Tools that genuinely help the job hunter definitely get my vote, especially since the typical response rate from the major job boards is a paltry 1-2%. But did you know there are things you can do on LinkedIn that are {gasp!} just regular things â€" no special sauce necessary? Here’s the biggest unTool I see on LinkedIn, which could skyrocket your job search in an instant: the key is the “invite” feature, and what that really allows you to do. Put Yourself In The Recruiter’s Shoes Most job hunters drive the job search from their own perspective: it’s about the role you want, near where you live, in the time frame you need. You network only barely past the point where it suits your immediate interests, then you’re done. You reach out to the people most likely to serve your purposes. Some of those folks respond, however, many do not. So it seems like you’re done. Understand this: when a LinkedIn member has the word “recruiter” in his or her title, that invites automatic, constant bombardment of invitations to connect from folks hither and yon â€" they may be in the recruiter’s field, or they may not be. Their expertise may be what the recruiter deals with, or it may not be. Too often, these requests are the randomest of random, and â€" news flash: the recruiter doesn’t have time for it. They’re All Reading The Same Stuff If YOU aren’t too terribly turned on by an invitation that says, “I’d like to add you to my network on LinkedIn,” then why do you think the recruiter or anyone else would be? The instant, pre-written, pre-formatted, robo-invitation to connect doesn’t excite anyone. Worse, all it does is showcase you as exactly the same as the 1,000 other people who so thoughtlessly invited the recruiter to connect on that particular day. This is why your invitations remain un-responded to. This is why when you go back and check to see how many new recruiter connections you have, the number has either not moved at all, or barely moved into the single digits. And this is the place where most job hunters stop â€" it’s hard to know what else to do at this juncture. But I’m going to tell you what to do from here forward: Strike A Balance Between the Typical Invite And Your Own Value-Added Message An unanswered invitation to connect is by no means the end of the road. Click on the profile of a person to whom you previously sent an invitation. Guess what you’ll find right under their profile picture? Two things: Where there used to be a button saying “connect,” now that button indicates your previous invitation to connect is “pending.” And right next to that is the glorious button that says, “message.” No more sending the standard robo-invitation and hitting a brick wall. No more cramming a 150-character custom message into an invitation. No more using up the InMails you paid for in your premium account. After you invite a person to connect, whether they accept the invitation or not, you can message them directly. Do you know what happens when you message the relevant person directly? Picture this: you're no longer an also-ran in the rat race towards the roles you want. You're no longer a nameless, faceless entity on an ATS resume. You just graduated from the standard 1-2% response rate the job boards offer, to now a 40-70% response rate from a real human being. And Now…It’s YOUR Turn Don’t revert back to the meMeME perspective. This is your opportunity to show that you care about the individual person, the organization they represent, and have some SPECIFIC expertise to bring to the table. {Here’s a pro tip: your expertise is not that you’re “motivated,” ok? Please. Just stop.} Without being confined to a character limit, there’s nothing wrong with opening your message by saying you hope the person is having a great day. Take a half-second to act like a normal human being. Next, show what you know about the company. If you pull this piece from either the “history” or the “about us” pages on the corporate web site, I will jump through the Internet, across space and time, and kill you. Let’s simply avoid all that kerfuffle by you investing the time and effort to uncovering some current, newsworthy information about the company instead. Drop that into your message. Then, spend 1 sentence on the specific set of professional skills you have to offer that could be of interest for the organization at this particular moment in time. Connecting directly with the person you need makes a tremendous difference in your job search being long and arduous, or shorter and more fruitful. Step up and over the ignored invitation to connect â€" the buck doesn’t stop there. Use this strategy to still get your value-laden message through to the person you want to see it. Did you know the simple step to take to make sure you ALWAYS have all the skills required for a particular job opening you have your eye on? We go over that in, “5 Secret Job Search Hacks For The Age 50+ Job-Hunter!” It’s a free online presentation that shows you step-by-step {screenshot-by-screenshot} how to build your LinkedIn profile the right way (not the just-copy-and-paste-your-resume way). Make sure to join us by registering here today.