When executing our job search, we're all going to have to sell ourselves. This is a difficult process both because we have traditionally been far from the smartest or most knowledgeable person in the room and because selling ourselves means knowing what to sell, which means having done a lot of reflection to determine what you want, what you've done, and what you can bring to any table.
The UMD Grad School's Doctoral Career Navigator course provides modules for many of the topics on this page and many others.
There's more than one LinkedIn. Specifically, besides the free and Premium versions that us peasants use, there are several versions of LinkedIn for employers and recruiters. They use these versions to find you! And you have to opt in to be visible on those versions! (See below.)
LinkedIn has a reputation score called your Social Selling Index (SSI). It's a measure of how visible you are and how effective your "professional brand" is. You can actually get some information on your SSI by going to this link (https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi).
The SSI is like the amplitude of motion of a harmonic oscillator with damping: if you don't drive it, it decays over time, and it also takes time and force to get it going again.
Your SSI also includes the extent to which you're connected to an industry by keywords and connections, so you might be very visible to the data science community but not very visible to the graphic design community. The webpage above won't really give you this info, but it means it'll be hard to be really visible to more than one type of job or one industry.
Being active on LinkedIn through engaging with posts, reposting from your companies of interest, and writing your own posts is also a key part of your SSI and visibility.
All sorts of things matter that are obvious once you know them, including dwell time (how long people spend on your profile) and bounce rate (how often people view your profile but leave immediately).
These are all the little settings that can make a big difference.
Exact names and positions are current as of August 2022, but these change often. Most of the settings below are in Settings and Privacy (S&P), which you can access by clicking the icon with your profile photo in the top bar on the desktop site.
Updating your profile: While making big changes to your profile (such as going through this page), it's suggested to not notify your connections about all the "changes" you're making. Once things are more stable, you want the activity boosts associated with work anniversaries and job changes. Go to S&P → Visibility → "Share profile updates with your network" and turn it on or off appropriately.
Make sure your email is professional: Go to S&P → Sign in & security → Account access → Email address. It's reasonable just to make an address for only your job search. Consider an address like firstname.lastname@gmail.com.
Disable People Also Viewed. When other people view your profile, they see a "People Also Viewed" sidebar; this sidebar contains profiles of other members who were viewed by viewers of yours. In other words, if a hiring manager is looking at your application and checks out your LinkedIn as part of that, and then they later view Someone Else, who applied for the same job, then later, when a different hiring manager or recruiter comes along, LinkedIn will also show them Someone Else, your competitor! On your profile! Go to S&P → Account preferences → People also viewed and turn it off.
Make yourself visible to everyone: Many employers use their own software that crawl through LinkedIn; if you're not visible to people outside LinkedIn or your immediate network, you won't be picked up by these people or software. Take these steps in S&P → Visibility:
Set Profile viewing to "Your name and headline." This way if you're trying to connect with someone and you view their profile, they can see what you're all about.
In Edit your public profile...
Edit your custom URL to something that isn't a random sampling of the keyboard, e.g. www.linkedin.com/in/firstname-lastname
Under the Edit Visibility section, make everything as visible as possible, including your Profile Photo public.
Set "Who can see or download your email address" to "Anyone on LinkedIn" and let connections download your email in data export. Again, you can make an email just for the job search if you have any concerns about this.
Set "Who can see members you follow" to "Anyone on LinkedIn."
Make sure your last name is visible.
Turn on "representing your organizations an interests."
Allow "Profile discovery and visibility off LinkedIn."
Let "Anyone on LinkedIn" discover your profile by email. Doing so by phone is less important.
Let others connect with you, and let the see when you connect with them: Under S&P → Communications → Who can reach you, turn everything on (except "Research invites", which is up to you).
Don't leave people on Read: Under S&P → Communications → "Read receipts and typing indicators", you can turn off when people see you've read their message. Recruiters and employers can sometimes move fast, and if you don't immediately know how to respond to a message you don't want them to see this uncertainty and draw conclusions, so it might be nice to have it off.
Opt in to be seen on LinkedIn Recruiter: See this article for how to do this.
Job seeking preferences: Under S&P → Data privacy → Job seeking preferences, consider all of the options carefully. The "signal your interest to recruiters" option may be particularly helpful to have on.
Here, just a few general rules and ideas; we'll leave specific examples to the resources linked at the bottom of this section.
Fill out as many sections as possible, and don't be afraid to repeat yourself!
Use keywords from the job/industry you're interested in. Find job postings you might like and run them through word cloud services to find the most-used words, then search those word sin the job postings for key phrases. Use these even in your headline.
Put particular care to the headline and about sections, because this is all people see without scrolling!
Your photo should be professional, focused on your face, wearing what you might wear to an interview, and with a relatively clear professional background
Examples and Detailed Guides:
University of Chicago Graduate School (a bit old, but most of the stuff is still good)
Ideally, you have as many connections as possible on LinkedIn, and the more people you're connected to in the field you want to work in or the institutions you want to work for, the better!
If you want to message someone you're not connected to, it's best to have a shared connection if possible to have them introduce you to someone else.
You can use alumni groups and company employee groups on LinkedIn to find people you might have a connection to. Here is LinkedIn's group for the UMCP Alumni Association.
Coming soon.
Coming soon.
See also the Getting More Information section at the bottom of the Explore Careers page of this guide.
More resources:
UMD advertises career fairs and panels for doctoral students on Careers 4 Terps (C4T).
UMD Grad School video on networking and informational interviews
A few tips and guides from Cheeky Scientist can be found here (article), here (PDF guide), and here (podcast)
Coming soon.
More resources:
UMD Grad School videos on preparing for interviews and effective interviewing with the STAR method
Content on interviewing and negotiating from the University of California, San Francisco