6 Scary LinkedIn Secrets You Don't Know - INFOGRAPHIC

Do you know about these 6 scary LinkedIn secrets? Knowing them can help your career search exponentially.

Scroll to view the SCARY details of each of these secrets.

Understanding six scary LinkedIn secrets can help you make the most of your LinkedIn profile and presence, particularly if you are job seeking.

Scary Secret 1: Recruiters with a premium account can contact your former boss and coworkers through LinkedIn even before they contact you.

Scary truth: Recruiters can contact your former boss and coworkers.
Consider what to do to overcome possible negative references.

LinkedIn premium recruiter accounts contain a feature that allows recruiters to track down people from a candidate's former companies who are on LinkedIn. If you fear that someone from a past job may give you a bad reference, seek to heal the relationship and shore up your reputation with past bosses and coworkers.

Scary Secret 2: LinkedIn sends companies who pay to post job openings on its site the top 24 best candidate profiles for a position whether they are actively job seeking or not. The profiles that are sent are those people whom the system views as being the closest match to the job description. 

To increase your chances of being a top candidate in the "eyes" of the LinkedIn system, make sure the information included in your profile matches the job descriptions for the jobs that you want as closely as possible.

Scary Secret 3: Adding extra job titles into your work history job title boxes will let you show up higher in search. 

Here's what I mean. Say your former job title was "Sales Representative". The title "Sales Representative" is only 20 total characters, but each job title box lets you include a maximum of 100 characters. Use the extra space to truthfully include other job titles that you performed in the position in parentheses behind your real job title, like this:

Sales Representative (Regional Sales Manager | Territory Sales | Retail Sales | Account Executive) 

By filling the title boxes out more fully, you will show up high in Advance People Search results (which recruiters use to find candidates) for all of these titles.

Scary Secret 4: You can send free messages to many recruiters to let them know you are interested in their open positions. That's because thousands of recruiters with a premium LinkedIn account have opted to accept free messages. 

To contact such a recruiter, look for a brown "In" premium account logo after their name. Visit their profile and then if their profile says "Message NAME", click on that button and complete the free pop-up message template. Learn more.  

Scary Secret 5: You can invite to connect or send a message to anyone in a LinkedIn group in which you are a member. This can be useful if you want to get in touch with someone in a group who is a hiring decision maker or who could be influential in getting you in front of the decision maker. 

To invite a group member to connect, go to Interests and then Groups. Scroll through your groups list and select a particular group. Click on the Members tab. Type the target person's name into the Search box or scroll through the list. Hover over a person's group entry until the box turns blue and then click on either the "Invite to connect" or "Send message" option. Learn more. 

Scary Secret 6: You can learn the last name of 3rd degree connections, those who just list their last initial and group members that the LinkedIn system has truncated to just the first name / first letter of the last name. 

To learn the full name, simply type the known information into the Google search box (first name, job title, company name, and city). The person's last name will almost always show up in the Google search results. Learn more.

LinkedIn's secrets can be scary good or scary bad, but knowing how the secrets work is always good, because such knowledge can help you land a great job!

Share your thoughts about these LinkedIn secrets or other secrets you've come across! Pass this article along to others to clue them in on these 6 secret tips. 

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