“Being first can have a tremendous positive impact on your hiring chances. LinkedIn will help you stand out.”
Andreas, Business Leadership Program Associate, LinkedIn

At the beginning of 2020, LinkedIn published a series of tips in order to be more likely to land your dream job on their platform. Being fast matters. With more than 100 million job applications per month, LinkedIn is a very competitive platform. And this is even more true when you are trying to land a job at a top tech company. 

Job posts of tech companies are often only online for a couple of days. This is because the job post has been already open on their internal job platform for a longer time.

Their strategy is simple: source talent internally, add additional external talent and close the pipeline. You want and should be part of this first pipeline. Only in the case they can’t find the right candidate-fit, they will reopen the pipeline for external candidates.

Being fast is crucial and will increase your chances of getting hired by 4 times.

Even before creating the best resume or learning interview frameworks you have to have a strategy to be amongst the first applicants.

Follow the following four easy tips and tricks to be there:

Your online presence and your LinkedIn profile are one of the first things recruiters will look at. Make sure your profile is complete and contains all information you want to share with a potential recruiter.

The profile can be relatively generic and should contain facts about yourself and the work you have done in the past. It’s an extension on your resume and can be more generic.

In our Preppally course you will learn more about how to set up the best online presence.

Next to having the right online presence, you need to have a resume that’s ready to adapt to the job description of your dream job. Around 40-50% of your resume is ‘generic’ and doesn’t need to be adapted to the job or company you are applying for. Think about things like: your name, picture, past job titles, past companies, languages you speak etc. These things are relatively static and should be in your generic template. 

You need to have this template ready for when your dream job comes online. The goal is to adapt and personalise the other 50% based on the job description. You don’t want to lose time starting from scratch every single time. Have this generic template ready.

Take a piece of paper or open a Google Sheet and write down the type of jobs you want to apply for. For me ‘The Elimination Method’ works best: making a list of all industries, companies and departments I don’t want to work in and looking for the opposite. Especially when you are looking for your first job, I would recommend this to give yourself direction. 

In the next column, you write down all the companies you want to work for. Finding companies you want to work for might be hard. I wrote the following article to help you find companies in tech and how to decide what is best for you. 

This data combined gives you a ‘hitlist’ of jobs and companies you want to look for.

Don’t work harder, work smarter. Instead of checking LinkedIn from time to time, you should set up Job Alerts. Job alerts will allow you to get email notifications on a daily, weekly or monthly basis (read daily – you want to be first). Job alerts are set up per company, job role and location or a combination of the three.

Navigate to the ‘Jobs’ tab on LinkedIn. Add in the search bar on the top of the page the role you would love to apply for. Try to keep it generic. It’s better to receive job alerts for ‘Account Director’ than trying to only receive alerts for ‘Account Director French Enterprise’. Using the latter will make your hitlist a lot smaller.

Make sure to check the location you are looking for. Also here, don’t be too narrow. Use a certain country, state or province. For example: if you would select ‘Dublin’ in Ireland, you wouldn’t see companies like Microsoft, which is 15 minutes outside the city center. In the LinkedIn criteria this is called ‘Greater Dublin’. 

At the company tab, you can now select the companies you want to receive alerts for. I would recommend adding multiple companies, except when you are looking for specifically one company. In the case of the latter, I would remove the job title so you receive all roles at this company and can pick from that list.

If you are satisfied with the parameters you have set, you need to toggle the secret button: job alerts. At the top of your results you can toggle this small button. Toggle it and make sure to set the frequency on daily.

You will now receive a daily email with all the roles that opened up at the companies that you have selected. The mail will only contain the job you want to apply for. Check the daily email in order to make sure you are amongst the first to apply for the role. 

Make sure to update your generic resume template to a resume that fits the job and tech company. Interested in learning how to do this? It’s one of the first sections of our course!

Good luck!