Do This Everyday If You Want To Attract Recruiters

Join Isaiah as he shares the strategies that PhDs must do everyday to get hired into high-paying industry roles

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah explains what PhDs should know about using LinkedIn for their job search
• Next, Isaiah reveals the different metrics LinkedIn uses to highlight people seriously looking for jobs
• Finally, Isaiah describes the 5 strategies to follow everyday in order to procure high-paying industry positions

From This Week’s Show… 

What PhDs Should Know About Using LinkedIn For their Job Search

PhDs should work everyday to land their dream job. You have to attract recruiters on LinkedIn who are looking for PhD job candidates. You spend a lot of time in academia following academic social norms. So, the number one thing you require is to overcome that obscurity. This is something that I know very well, not just from working with thousands of PhDs, but myself. I thought I would be found much easier until reality showed me otherwise.

No matter how many resumes I uploaded, or how much time I spent on LinkedIn, nobody contacted me. But I still saw some employers looking at my page. The question hounded me: why were they not reaching out to me? I could not understand this. If my profile was unsearchable, how did they come across my profile in the first place? I had no idea how  I would show up if I wasn’t even connected to them. 

Later, I found out that there was a separate LinkedIn page called the LinkedIn recruiter or LinkedIn talent insights. Recruiters use the platform to scan for potential candidates. I was showing up and of course they were coming to my profile but they were bouncing away. 

Metrics LinkedIn Uses To Determine Who’s Seriously Looking For A Job

Recruiters were bouncing away everyday. That’s what is called when you bounce off of a webpage or a profile page. This metric shows how quickly somebody bounces off of your page is used by LinkedIn. If your bounce rate is very high, it decreases your visibility. This was all new to me. 

As academics, we really get into the weeds of a particular field. We may know how academia works, but we certainly don’t understand how industry works. This makes it difficult for us to comprehend how a job search for an industry job works. And so we get demotivated pretty quickly. We do something, but it doesn’t yield results. So, we learn to be helpless. It may look like what we do doesn’t matter but that’s not true. We just don’t have the right strategies. PhDs need to learn the rituals that must be done everyday. The little things that you can do everyday matters. 

The number one metric that LinkedIn uses to determine who’s seriously looking for a job in industry, is updating your LinkedIn profile. PhDs have to update your LinkedIn profile a little bit every day. Now, if you’re LinkedIn, you would want to keep all of your big contracts with big companies open. You can do that by making sure that you’re showing them the job candidates who are actively looking for jobs. So they don’t waste their time. 

Update your profile a couple of days in a row, it’s like putting your hand up and waving it on LinkedIn. Then, LinkedIn takes your profile and shows it to the recruiters. 

5 Strategies PhDs Must Follow Everyday To Procure Top-paying Industry Positions

So I want to recommend updating your profile a little bit every day. You could start with your headline then go to your summary. Then go to your experience section every day, this can go on for months, depending on when you need a job. But you’ve to start this extremely early and do it seriously for months.

Make your resume keyword-intensive. You see a job posting, you take your resume template and look at the key words. You must read the job posting carefully, which is a good daily practice in itself. And target your resume to that job. This is so important because it’ll help you start seeing things from the employer’s point of view. 

Reach out to two new people every day. Just do every weekday to start. That’s 10 people, 10 new people a week. On average, if you’re using our networking scripts, you’re going to get 30-40% replying to you. You will have activated a network. You’re having these conversations, which will further increase your visibility on LinkedIn. 

Conduct an informational interview per day. This can be simply by LinkedIn chat or email. Make it about their subjective experience. Always build your rationale. As PhDs you should dominate any rationale based questions. Build rationale for the job you want and stick to it.

Remember you’re selling yourself. This is persuasion. You have to have confirmation bias. You have to tell them I want to work here over anywhere else.

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