GeekMBA360

I think LinkedIn is one of the most powerful online career tools. There are so many ways you can use LinkedIn besides making professional contacts.

• Find out company’s attrition rate : I use LinkedIn to search for people who have worked at a particular company, when they started, and when they left. It gives me a good idea of the attrition rate at the company. It also gives me some hints about how well the company is doing .
• Research vendors : My company is considering purchase Microsoft Dynamic Software, but we want to learn more about other companies’ experience of using it. I posted a question on LinkedIn. Within an hour someone answered my questions with detailed evaluation of Microsoft Dynamic.
• Guess who might looking to switch jobs : When someone changes his/her profile frequently, and adds a lot of content to his profile, he/she is probably looking for a job, just had a promotion, or something is going on.
• U se it as resume BS detector : If someone has job title like "tech lead/prod manager" or "marketing manager/project manager", this person is probably trying to make a career transition, and positioning himself a little bit differently from what he has been doing.
• Prepare for job interview : Before I interview with a company, I use LinkedIn to find out my interviewers’ background and experience. I’ll then come up with some shared interests/experience to talk about during interview.

I’m looking forward to the LinkedIn API — there are a lot of interesting business intelligence that can be gathered by analyzing LinkedIn data. It is a gold mine!

Do you have any tricks of using LinkedIn? Please leave a comment.