The ONLY Strategy You Need to Find a Job

LinkedIn is a social-professional networking platform. But if you use it this way, it can help you land new opportunities.

Photo by Nathana Rebouças on Unsplash

The world is rapidly changing, especially when it comes to finding a job. I don’t know about you, but these days my LinkedIn feed is filled with people looking for work.

If you’re looking for a job – or just want to keep your options open – you need to approach the labor market differently. You can’t just reach out to an employer anymore and apply for an open position. You have to be more strategic with how you use your time to search for new work opportunities.

That’s because the labor market itself is changing. Instead of workers filling jobs, the market is becoming a pool of talented free agents. While workers can be trained to do a job, free agents are hired for their skills and expertise. Employers and clients don’t want you anymore just because you can complete a task, they want you because your knowledge adds value to their bottom line.

This might not seem like a big deal, but it’s a huge shift in how you are going to look for work in the future. As a free agent, you have to take stock of what your skills are, package them into an offering, and learn how to sell yourself to people who want to buy the expertise you have.

Put another way: if you’re looking for work you’re in a sales role and you might not even realize it. It’s not about trying to justify yourself to a hiring manager. It’s about convincing them that they desperately need you.

Right now, LinkedIn is one of the best platforms to connect people looking for work with companies and agencies looking to hire talent. While LinkedIn is known as a social media platform for professionals, it’s one of the most undervalued tools free agents can use to offer their skills and expertise to the market. Instead of navigating career pages and job boards, LinkedIn gives you direct access to people who can buy your time and talent.

The problem is a lot of people aren’t thinking about Linkedin as a sales platform. They’re thinking about it as just another job search tool. Once you reframe how you approach LinkedIn, you can leverage it to find new work opportunities or advance your career.

This is a brief guide on how to use LinkedIn strategically to find work. Whether you work for yourself or work for an employer, you want to start thinking about ways to future-proof your career sooner rather than later. The best way to do that is to understand your value as a free agent and learn how to use LinkedIn to sell yourself in the market.

LinkedIn isn’t just another social media platform. It’s an opportunity engine.

These days most people aren’t getting jobs just by applying for them. Upwards of 85% of jobs are found through network referrals. That means someone is dropping your name or emailing your resume directly to a hiring manager.

This has definitely been my experience. Almost every salaried job I’ve had has come from someone I personally knew working on the inside to get me set up with an interview. Even the bulk of my freelance work has come from referrals from previous editors I worked with.

Your network is your most important asset as a free agent. While it used to be something you could only build off of person-to-person interactions, LinkedIn has made it possible to build a global network with anyone in the world.

If you’re still looking for new opportunities by scrolling through job boards and filling out online applications you’re wasting your time. You have to shift your mindset. You’re not a worker looking for a job anymore, you’re a talented individual with a skill to sell.

LinkedIn is a marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of talent. The more connections you make, the more opportunities will come your way.

Understanding how to use it to generate opportunities will set you apart from everyone else. It’s not about matching yourself with opportunities that currently exist, it’s about creating new ones.

Below is a process you can follow to do just that. By taking a sales approach and casting a wide net, you’ll increase the size of your network and the number of opportunities that become available to you. While a network takes time to build, it will pay dividends in the future.

Identify Your Goal

LinkedIn is a social media platform that’s become the top spot to look for a new job. But it’s also a place to establish credibility in your field. By positioning yourself as an expert – rather than yet another person looking for a job – you can attract new opportunities to you.

LinkedIn reduces barriers. In the past, you had to go to the right school to pursue a specific career path and then work in a city like New York that has an abundance of opportunities in your field.

Let me use writing as an example to illustrate this. If you wanted to be a successful writer in the past, you had to go to a top journalism school, intern at a publication, take a low-paying job at a newsroom in New York, and slowly work your way up to the top.

If you wanted facetime with a specific editor you had to know which room to be in to make that happen. Those days are over.

Thanks to LinkedIn, anyone can connect with anyone. If I want a byline in The New York Times I don’t need to go to Columbia journalism school and be physically located in New York to make that happen. I can connect with writers and editors on LinkedIn, consistently post about my work, and with enough effort, hopefully pitch an article the Times wants to buy.

Before you start building your LinkedIn profile, think about what you want to get out of the platform. Ask yourself: in five years where do I want to be and how can LinkedIn help me get there?

For me, I don’t actually want to be a freelance writer forever. I just do it to pay the bills. What I really want is to be an independent writer and support myself from my writing.

LinkedIn fills both my short- and long-term goals by connecting me with people who buy articles from me now and who will continue to follow my work in the years to come.

Figure out what you want to accomplish. Take a baseline of where you’re at right now and think about where you want to go. Then start looking at LinkedIn as a tool that can help you get there.

Optimize Your Profile

A lot of people treat LinkedIn as a digital resume service. While that isn’t necessarily wrong, LinkedIn isn’t just a place to record your job history.

Think of your LinkedIn profile as a personal website. It’s a place to highlight what you have to offer and gives you a chance to provide links to your work.

The most important real estate on your profile is the banner image right above your profile picture. You have a few seconds to get someone’s attention. What can you communicate in a single image?

My long-term goal is to build an audience. My banner image lists all my Substack publications and there’s a call to action to subscribe on Substack.

You can include whatever you want in your banner image. Here’s another great example of how to leverage LinkedIn to create new opportunities for yourself. Kevin just launched a new copywriting agency.

He strategically showcases his skills in his banner image and includes a list of clients he’s worked with. In a single image you know exactly what he does and you can deduce he’s pretty competent at it.

Take advantage of all the real estate LinkedIn has to offer. Highlight your work history and accomplishments, show off your portfolio, drive traffic to your business, and make it easy for someone to contact you directly.

The less friction there is between you and someone who wants to hire you, the more opportunities you’ll have.

Build a Custom Network

You’ve probably heard the saying if you build it, they will come. The reality is you can build whatever you want but no one is going to come unless you invite them first.

After you’ve tailored your profile to help you reach your goal, you need to go out and invite people to join your network. Build your network around other professionals in your field and economic buyers who can hire you, mentor you, and refer you to future clients.

This is something I’ve had to work hard at. Unlike a lot of writers, I didn’t go to college with the goal of becoming a writer. I wanted to be a spy. My whole network used to be focused around that goal and my life in Washington, DC.

I had to start building a new network from scratch when I left my career in Washington. I got creative and started cold messaging editors and writers asking them if they’d be willing to connect with me. Here’s a message in a LinkedIn connection request I wrote just this morning:

Over time, I’ve slowly built a new network for myself. The more connections I make, the more shared connections that generates. While I still send cold messages to people I don’t know, having a few shared connections makes it a lot easier to ask for a connection request.

Invest in a LinkedIn Premium membership so you can add notes to connection requests. Reach out to people who are in your field, even if you don’t know them. You don’t need to personally know people anymore to be connected with them.

When you build your network you’ll want to build both a horizontal and vertical network. Your horizontal network represents coworkers and peers. In my case, my horizontal network is other freelance writers.

One thing I’ve noticed is some freelancers are really proactive about sharing opportunities with their network or referring people who they think could be a good fit for a role. I’m not one of these people but I’m grateful to the people who go out of their way to do this because it exposes me to opportunities I wouldn’t have otherwise known existed.

Your horizontal network can help you land work in some unexpected ways. Here’s an example of a new work opportunity that recently slid into my DMs. I’m a freelance writer and because I worked in Washington, I take on grant writing projects from time to time. I connected with someone on LinkedIn last year and they recently reached out to me asking if I have time to potentially help a new client of theirs.

Opportunities aren’t linear. You never know how a connection could lead to your next job or land you a client down the road.

You also want to build a vertical network. This represents the direction you’re taking your career in and the people you will need to work with to help get you there.

As I mentioned, I want to become an established writer and eventually publish a few books. While I write a lot of freelance content on personal finances, I’m more interested in the future of work and economics. That’s what I want to be known for.

To get there, I’ll need to start writing for more advanced publications. To do that, I can build a vertical network connecting with editors who work at publications I want to eventually write for. This exposes them to my work now so when I’m ready to pitch an article to them in a year or two, they will already know what I’m about and I’ll have a body of work to help support my credibility.

Build a vertical network that is achievable and makes sense for you. If you’re a founder, you probably won’t have success connecting with Marc Andreesson on LinkedIn, but you can connect with people who work at Andreesson Horowitz. While these connections probably won’t lead to funding right now, it could make it easier when you do a funding round later on in the future.

Look for Economic Buyers – Not Jobs

The biggest mistake people make when they use LinkedIn is assuming it’s just another job search tool. While there are certainly a lot of recruiters and a lot of opportunities on LinkedIn, that isn’t what you want to use LinkedIn for.

As I said earlier, LinkedIn is a platform that connects economic buyers with people who have skills and talent to offer. An economic buyer is someone who needs what you have to offer and has the ability to pay you. That last part is really important

You might not want to hear this but a startup founder isn’t an economic buyer. They may have a great idea and want to work with you but they don’t have any money to pay you. And if they go bust, you might not be able to leverage your work to land your next gig.

If you spend all of your time connecting with people who aren’t economic buyers, you’re going to end up with not a lot of work and a whole lot of disappointment.

Use LinkedIn strategically. Don’t apply for random jobs that may or may not exist, look for people who have the capacity to actually hire you and pay you for your talent.

As a freelancer, I’m constantly seeking out editors and content managers who work with people like me and have the ability to assign work. These are my economic buyers right now. When I’m ready to write a book, I’ll need to add agents publishers to my network. LinkedIn is the best platform to help me do that.

Connect with managers and directors who lead teams, have control over their department’s budget, and have the capacity to work with you. Use your profile to tell them who you are and what you have to offer. If you’re looking for your next full-time gig, ask for an informational interview. If you’re looking for freelance work, offer to work on a project at a discounted rate so you can see whether or not it’s a good fit.

If you’re not sure how to find economic buyers, here’s an example of how you can deconstruct a job posting on LinkedIn to find the right people to connect with:

Leveraging LinkedIn for Job Connections - Watch Video

Post Content Regularly

LinkedIn is the place to build your professional network, but at the end of the day it’s also a social media platform. If you have a skill or talent to offer, posting content on LinkedIn regularly is one of the easiest ways to stand out and stay top of mind for economic buyers.

Like I said, my ultimate goal is to become an established writer so it makes sense that anytime I publish something on Substack, I also share it on LinkedIn. I share links of articles I’ve recently published, milestones I’ve hit, and occasionally, I’ll ask my LinkedIn network to provide thoughts for upcoming articles.

While you can post content that has to do with your field of expertise or what you have to offer, you can also post unrelated content on LinkedIn. This is Eli the Computer Guy. He’s a YouTuber who offers free tech classes to anyone who wants to take them.

Eli regularly posts content about new classes he’s offering and what him and his students talk about during his Tech Office Hours. But he doesn’t limit himself to that. He’s also a runner who’s been losing weight. He posts regular updates showing the progress he’s making.

LinkedIn is a place where people want to celebrate wins and find motivation to crush their goals. It’s not Instagram where people want an aspirational aesthetic and it’s not X where people want to talk politics. People on LinkedIn genuinely want to know what you’re doing so they can support you.

Share posts with updates on professional and personal projects you’re working on. The more you do this, the more you’ll show up in the feed and the more top of mind you will be. This will translate into work opportunities later on.

Stick to It

If you haven’t figured it out by now, most of what you do in life is going to take time because it’s all a numbers game. Your goal isn’t to be right 100% of the time, it’s to increase your chances of being right most of the time.

The best way to do this is by giving yourself as many opportunities as you can. The more people you proactively add to your network and the more posts you publish to engage with them, the higher chance you’ll have at finding one post or one person that can lead you to your next opportunity.

The process of building a network and creating new opportunities for yourself can feel daunting. It takes time but if you stick with it, the results will compound.

Let me use an ecommerce website as an example to put all this into perspective. Let’s say you have a website where you sell coffee mugs. At the moment you only have one coffee mug for sale at $14.99. You want to generate $5,000 in revenue this month. How many coffee mugs do you need to sell?

Answer: 334 or about 11 mugs per day.

Most ecommerce sites have a 1% conversion rate. That means of all the people that come to your website, only 1% will actually buy a mug. You’d need more than 33,000 people to visit your website every month just to sell 334 mugs.

That’s a lot of people.

But what if you added a few more mugs to your inventory? While you’ll still need a lot of people to visit your website, by adding more mugs, you’ll increase the number of opportunities you have to do so.

The labor market isn’t talked about like an ecommerce site but it works the same way. You have to connect with a lot of people before you will find economic buyers who are willing to hire you and pay you.

Spend 15-30 minutes a day sending out connection requests and writing a post to share on LinkedIn. Even if you aren’t looking for a new job today or have more clients than you can handle, invest time into building your network. There’ll come a time down the road when you’ll need to tap into it. The more work you do now, the more it will pay off down the road.