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EPISODE 27
 
Optimize your LinkedIn Profile for Job Hunting
 
EPISODE 27
 
 
Optimize your LinkedIn Profile for Job Hunting
 

OPTIMIZE YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE FOR JOB HUNTING

About this episode

In this episode, you will learn how to optimize your LinkedIn profile when job hunting. During this process, you will be able to start answering the question, what do I want to be known for, so you have a goal in mind. You must be able to differentiate you reputation. understand the importance of 360 reviews, and then put both of these into practice to help in your job search. 

There are many common mistakes people make when creating their LinkedIn profile, so we are going to spend some time showing you how to avoid those. Also, we want to ensure you know how to effectively present yourself  to potential employers, and what to list publicly on your LinkedIn profile versus what you would only list on your resume. 

Putting up a LinkedIn profile can either help you get closer to getting your dream cybersecurity role, or it can become the reason that you don’t. So, you must be thoughtful about how you choose to display yourself in your profile. Also, don’t forget to keep an eye on your status, your interactions, and your influences, as they all affect your ability to create a stronger LinkedIn network using your profile.

What you’ll learn

  • Determining the thing you want to be known for
  • What a 360 review os
  • What OSINT is
  • What the anti-algorithm approach is

Relevant websites for this episode

Other Relevant Episodes

  • Episode 15 – Hunt for Jobs Like a Pentester
  • Episode 28 – Five Principles to help you get your Dream Cybersecurity Job
  • Episode 29 – Job Hunting on LinkedIn

Episode Transcript

Kip Boyle: 

Hey everyone, this is Your Cyber Path. This is the podcast that helps you get your dream cybersecurity job. I’m Kip Boyle, co-host with Wes Shriner. We are people who have hired a lot of cybersecurity professionals, and we’re here to share with you what we know. If you want to give us feedback on the show, or if you want us to answer your question on a future episode, go to the show page @anchor.fm/yourcyberpath, and when you get there, there’s a message button, click that and tell us what’s on your mind. So today we’re going to start the episode by asking you, what do you want to be known for? Wes, what do you want to be known for?

Wes Shriner: 

That’s a great question. My neighbors think our family’s a little crazy, right? We’ve got kids of every color, we’ve got lawn tractor races in the backyard, we have peacocks that scream, and one time we had a 40 some high school, we were sleeping in hammocks back there for a week. So yeah, my neighbors, they know me for something. Whatever that be, they’ve decided what my reputation is. And I get to have a little bit of an opinion about what my brand is, my brand is what I put forth, but the reputation is what then I’ve earned by the experiences, the behaviors, the attitudes that others have seen from me. Sometimes we get to choose those things, right? And sometimes our reputation is defined for us, right? We can have a great reputation, like that person brings great ideas to the table or, I love their contributions.

Maybe even they really work well with this team, they have the ability to get things done, they can influence anybody anywhere. And then there’s some reasons maybe you don’t want to be famous for, right? But you might be known for. Maybe-

Kip Boyle: 

You might not even realize it.

Wes Shriner: 

Their lunch always smells like fish, right? They miss their weekly shower, right? They say it’s not my job or they define your job for you, right? Those folks tend to build an infamous reputation and both the positive reputation traits and the challenging traits are ones that we can influence when we become aware of what we’re doing and what our emotional intelligence is in that space.

Kip Boyle:

Right. Now, a few episodes ago, we did a whole episode and reputation. So today we’re not trying to redo that episode, but we are going someplace with this. Today, we’re going to talk about LinkedIn and what its role is with respect to your desire to get your dream cybersecurity jobs. So stick with us, that’s where we’re going, but we got a few other things we want to say first, right? So how do you discover what your reputation is? Right. Well, that’s not easy. And at work, one thing you could do is a 360 review. Have you done one of those Wes?

Wes Shriner: 

I have. A 360 review is 360 degrees in a circle. And it takes a look at those who you work for, and then those who work for you, the people who work with you and your self-assessment to really build a full 360 degree picture of what your brand and reputation are looking like. That same side [crosstalk].

Kip Boyle: 

Three of them.

Wes Shriner: 

Have you? Did you find them helpful in growing who you are and what you understood about yourself?

Kip Boyle: 

Oh, gosh! Immeasurably. It’s not easy though. It’s not easy to hear some of the things that come back on a 360 review, not that people are trying to be mean. I think people understand that you’re trying to get better and they respect that and they want to help, but still, they’re going to tell you some stuff that might not feel very good when you hear it. But how else will you know? That’s kind of where I ended up was like, “If I don’t do this, then this stuff’s going to be hidden to me and I’ll have no opportunity to address it.”

Wes Shriner: 

And I really look at that as a gift, because those people are giving you the feedback to tell you how you came across in an interview. It’s very similar to a 360 review, except you don’t get the feedback, right? That interview, you are very much meeting with your prospective hiring manager and their peers, you’re meeting with the people you’ll be working with and the staff that you may be supporting. It’s a full 360, but you don’t get the privilege of that feedback. So any feedback you get is gold.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah. And a lot of people are nervous about giving feedback, especially if that feedback is going to be difficult, right? Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. That’s not a fun role for people to play, but we’re here to talk about LinkedIn and LinkedIn and 360 degree reviews. I don’t know, the Venn diagram, would there be any overlap?

Wes Shriner:

Absolutely. Because what do I say about myself is what I’m saying on LinkedIn, right? I say about myself at the resume and LinkedIn, and those two pieces are 25% of that 360 review. And so let’s take a look at that LinkedIn profile and what it is we put out there because that’s the starting place for many career discussions.

Kip Boyle: 

Right? Yeah. I think it would be a disservice to yourself. You would be disserving yourself if you didn’t have the best LinkedIn profile that you could make. But what we want to do today is we want to talk about what are the limits of what that profile can do for you and maybe some of the missteps, right? Some things that you might want to think long and hard about before you add it to your LinkedIn profile.

Wes Shriner: 

So the key word for today is thoughtful. This is the place to be thoughtful about your brand, it’s the place to be thoughtful about what you say. What you do put out there will be thought about, and so please be thoughtful in your presentation, right? We’re going to begin by looking at, what does your LinkedIn page say about you, right? This is the one that creates your profile page. And I’m going to say, make it professional. This is easy stuff folks. Represent yourself well, and be thoughtful. You can do a picture. You can do an avatar here. There’s no legal boundaries on what we do with pictures or avatars in the LinkedIn space. So you’re allowed to do that. In fact, I encourage you to be personalized in one way or another, just decide how transparent you want to be on this tool. Get help with a good presentation if you need it, right? Whether that’s a friend or a professional service, get help with presenting well on LinkedIn, right?

Kip Boyle: 

There’s a lot of great tutorials online on YouTube. Some people know what they’re talking about, some they don’t so be careful, but there’s a lot of information out there.

Wes Shriner: 

You can plan your summary statement, right? This one is really important because it follows you everywhere your title and your name goes, right? That summary statement is the first thing people look at, tell it, well, right? This is your story. Probably do it in a first person voice because it’s really you talking about what it is that you like to do, you do well and you want to do in the future.

Kip Boyle:

What I like to see here is I like to see people talking about the problems that they help to solve. I think that puts the right focus on what this person’s value is on the job. So I tend to enjoy the summary statement written in that way. Do you have a way that you prefer to see it Wes?

Wes Shriner: 

I think that’s a great way to go. I have the Venn diagram of the things I like to do, the things I’m good at and the things that I want to do in the future and find that center spot. But I can understand why you would go that way as well. Right?

Kip Boyle: 

I think there’s multiple ways that you could do this and so, yeah, putting that out there. Now, there’s a lot of little stuff, right? There’s a lot of little things that you let a little easy things that you want to take care of on your profile, because that’s going to tell how thoughtful, because that’s the word of the day, how thoughtful you’ve been about your profile. Right? So like one thing that’s super easy is get a custom URL. My gosh, that’s super easy. And when somebody doesn’t have that, it makes me wonder, I’m like, “Why didn’t they get one of those?”

Wes Shriner:

When you put your name up there, you can put your name up there as Wes Shriner comma CISSP or you can put it up with a certificate or a title that you want to put up there. Or maybe you just want to be a simple name and leave the certificates and titles behind. Both are okay. It really depends on how you want to approach it. There’s not a right answer here.

Kip Boyle: 

The one thing I have seen that you might want to think about is if you have a very common name where there’s a lot of people that have your name, first name and last name, like I’m looking at you, Mike Smith, you might want to think about adding some differentiators to help people know that it’s you.

Wes Shriner:

Yeah. So let’s talk about things that can go sideways if they take away from our page, right? Or if they become more interesting than we are on our page, right. Kip, should I have a background photo?

Kip Boyle: 

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Wes Shriner:

Sure. You can have a background photo. Just don’t make it more interesting than you on your page, right?

Kip Boyle: 

Oh, okay. You’re talking about like a header image at the top, right?

Wes Shriner: 

Yeah, that big header image at the top, right? Or the section down at the bottom. What are your hobbies and fun things and activities you like to do, try not to include controversial stuff that’s going to make you more interesting or be more interesting than you are on your own page. How would you say that Kip? Is that about right?

Kip Boyle:

Yeah. I would maybe also call that like a lightning rod, right? Don’t don’t set up a lightning rod on your page, unless that’s what you want to do, but then realize that if you are going to put something controversial on your profile, realize that there’s a large number of people out there that will use that to define you and that will either make them want to pull you closer or push you farther away, and so that can be a very polarizing effect. Now, if that’s what you want, or if you’re super comfortable with that, because you want to attract people who love this one thing about you and you want to get in really tight with those folks, great. But what I wouldn’t want for you is to put a lightning rod out there and not realize the effect that it’s going to have on people who look at your profile.

Wes Shriner: 

Very much so, right. When I look at the next section, the skills and endorsements, right? That’s something we can manage much more actively and aggressively than we have and I think it really benefits us. Very much, we can choose our top three skills that we want to emphasize. We can bring those skills to the top, we can highlight them and we can ask for endorsements from people that we know and trust to endorse us for those skills, right? If we’ve got redundant skills, then maybe want to clean those up. If you’re showing both, well, security, cybersecurity, information security, InfoSec, and maybe a couple other similar words, and they’re each getting five endorsements each then probably time to hide some of those and consolidate on a single phrase so that you’ve got a focused audience and focus support, right? You’re telling your endorsers, giving them a channel for how to endorse you well, right? Maybe if you’ve got-

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah, and you should ask people to endorse you.

Wes Shriner: 

Well, and maybe you were a really great dishwasher in college, probably time to let that one go at this point. That’s not a skill you need to hang onto anymore. So let’s maybe hide that one or get rid of it so that it’s not emphasized on your page. Let’s keep the skills to the things you want to tell the world you’re good at, and that the world can say, “Yes, you are really good at those things.”

Kip Boyle:

I like that.

Wes Shriner: 

Related to the skills and endorsements, I’m really not a fan of the skills assessments that are out there. When we’re doing cybersecurity, we could maybe measure your Linux or Windows operating system skills, but we can’t really measure your security, your organizational, or discipline skills, your drive, your enthusiasm, this whole skills assessment is not a feature I really am a fan of in LinkedIn and I would say, step past it and it won’t cost you anything when you do.

Kip Boyle: 

This may be something useful to other industries, people pursuing completely different types of jobs. If there’s a specific type of machinery that you need to learn to know how to operate, maybe a skills assessment that would be helpful for you. If you make your living with Photoshop or some other specialized piece of software or something like that, then that might be useful. But just because it’s available to you doesn’t necessarily mean you should be using it. So think twice about that. And currently, I don’t see any use for it for helping me to screen candidates. So I’m with you on that Wes.

Wes Shriner:

I’m going to keep us moving here because we’re having fun, but we’re halfway through already so I want to keep us running.

Kip Boyle:

Okay, all right.

Wes Shriner: 

The next thing is really, what do I want to say about myself on the public internet about my skills at a specific job or a specific company, right? Sometimes I’m listing the exact company name, where their address is, and then I’m also starting to tell you what specific security tools I worked with at that company. Not sure that’s a good plan, right? If that company is not advertising that they work with SailPoint or CA or whatever their identity management is, then it’s not your responsibility to tell the world what their identity management solution is either, right? So let’s keep that information on the resume where it’s privately delivered to a specific individual for the purpose of job skill assessment, but let’s keep the public open webpage limited to just general information about companies and skills.

Kip Boyle: 

It’s an easy mistake to make, right? Because you think that LinkedIn is your resume and you just don’t really think about, what are you telling other people, particularly people who are trying to learn more about your employer. That’s a great one.

Wes Shriner: 

Open source intelligence is such a growing field right now. In fact, if you haven’t taken the time to learn what OSINT is available to you or about you, this would be a great time to spend a minute on that as well.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah, for sure. So let’s talk about job changing with your LinkedIn profiles. Wes, I know some people as soon as they turned in their notice right to their current employer, they’re out on social media telling everybody that, “Hey, I’m out of here and now I got this great new opportunity, it’s been real. Love you guys, bye, see ya, and they just update that LinkedIn profile, like as soon as they possibly can. How does that set with you. Is that a good idea?

Wes Shriner: 

That’s fine, until you put a picture of your former employers badge on your LinkedIn post. That that badge is not yours to put a picture of on the internet and can easily use to help access that company in the future. So don’t put pictures of badges on the internet, right? That’s the first thing I’ll add. Great posts, tell everybody you love them and you wish them the best, and they get to wish you the best. That’s a wonderful thing, but don’t put pictures of the badges up there. And then for me, personally, my preference is to have a little bit of a lag there between when I have left or started a new company and when I’ve actually updated my LinkedIn actual job title. I tend to leave a little bit of a lag there. It’s it’s not a requirement, it’s my preference, right?

That’s my preference, is to have a little lag. Don’t let that lag go on too long or it just looks like you’re not maintaining fresh data, but a little bit of a lag is okay, at least for me. I would say a good rule of thumb is to keep it current every quarter, even when nothing has changed, right? Keep your LinkedIn current, go through and check it, read every word on there and add three new people to your network. There’s no reason you couldn’t add three new people to your network every quarter. And when you add them, go endorse them for the skills that you know, they’re good at as well.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah. Being generous on LinkedIn in that way is a good idea.

Wes Shriner:

So then we go down to, what do you share and comment and like about, right? What things do you interact with others when you’re… We’ve we’ve done your profile page, now we want to transition to what do you share and comment to like about, right? And I think the easiest rule is, don’t use this for non-business activity. It won’t end well for your business. We do think you can use it for [crosstalk]. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah, I think that kind of goes back to what we were saying about not posting a lightning rod on your page without realizing that you’re going to do that.

Wes Shriner: 

Right. Do it on purpose or just don’t. Do you use it for sharing interesting new information. There’s a whole world of really cool articles out there that I’m never going to have time to read, but if you find one that’s amazing, please share it because I want that one. If it was amazing for you, it’s going to be interesting for me as well. I love it when someone shares great resources that simplify hard topics, because I can write, I can reference those for a long time into the future, right? Use it for recognizing great accomplishments that you or others have done. It’s a great place to recognize someone who’s graduated, written a book, giving a talk, or maybe you went to a conference and learn something amazing you can share.

Kip Boyle: 

Well, you just graduated. I saw your picture on LinkedIn. It looked great. I was really happy to see that you had finally wrapped up your studies Wes, so yeah, I loved it.

Wes Shriner: 

It was a good experience. One of the easiest things you can do is find some relevant influencers and follow them, right? Specific leaders that you’re interested in, what do they have to say, and how can they make me better? In the process you’re learning and growing and so follow some interesting influencers. And then like and comment on the things you want supported. I know this is a funny thing to say, right? “Please like and subscribe, five stars.” But really this is the algorithm voting mechanism inside LinkedIn and if you’ve never been a content creator before, you may not know just how important these interactions really can be.

Kip Boyle:

Yeah. And let me just add a couple of words here about social media marketing. There’s a whole career really, that could be made and a lot of people are making on the topic of social media marketing. In other words, how do you use LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever social media you’re on in order to grow a business or to promote a cause that you care about. Now, you don’t have to do these things, right? We’re not advising you to become a social media marketer necessarily, but if you’re on LinkedIn and you’re seeing other people post stuff and sell things and promote their causes, just know that that’s really what they’re engaged in and so LinkedIn, isn’t just a resume for you. It really is a social network.

Wes Shriner: 

It is. So Kip, Let’s say I’m the starting a job search, right? And I’m thinking I’m ready to pop my head up and look around and kind of be the mere cat above the ground looking around to all different ways and so how do you recommend job searching on LinkedIn? Should I go public? Should I keep it on the down low? What do you recommend?

Kip Boyle: 

Well, if you’re on my team and, and you do an update that you’re job searching on LinkedIn, and that’s the first I’ve heard of it, I’m not happy. I’m not happy at all. So if you want to poke your supervisor with a stick, that would be a great way to do it. You may not like the reaction that you get. So just be aware of that, right? Any job search action that you take on LinkedIn could become very public. And so if you haven’t announced it yet to your supervisor, or shared that with your supervisor, even your teammates, right? Be careful. There’s a couple of different ways that you can job search on LinkedIn, right? You can do a bunch of posting and you can tell the world, “Hey, I’m open to new opportunities. Here’s what I’m looking for. Please let me know if anything like this comes across, that you see it, let me know it.”

You can change the content of your profile so that when somebody looks at your profile without seeing any of your posts, they would also know that you’re looking for a job. Now in a separate future episode, we’re going to talk about a third way that you can look for a job on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn actually has a very powerful job search engine and database of jobs that’s available to you. So if you’re somebody who’s been on LinkedIn for years and years like I have, that kind of snuck up on me, when I discovered it I didn’t realize just how good of a place LinkedIn can be for job hunting. And so we’re going to talk about that in a future episode. And when you’re job hunting, it’s not quite as likely that people are going to know you’re doing it, but you still want to be careful.

Wes Shriner: 

So speaking of job hunting and what we do when we’re on the bench, if you are in the bench and you’re actively looking for your next role, you might want to update your headline to say, “I am looking for my next opportunity,” right? Or maybe your headline says, “Risk analyst looking for FTE opportunity,” right? It’s okay to put that kind of headline.

Kip Boyle:

Sorry on stomping on your Wes. I was just going to say that there’s a setting in LinkedIn. It moves around a lot so I’m not going to try to tell you where it is, but there’s a setting in there where you can tell recruiters, “Hey, start looking at me.” Like you can kind of raise your hand to the recruiters digitally on LinkedIn and they’ll start seeing you more.

Wes Shriner: 

Yeah. And you can do that without changing your headline, that’s in your privacy settings and that will keep it on the more discreet level, understand everything done on the internet is available, but it’s a little more discreet.

Kip Boyle: 

Okay. So we’ve talked about what should go on your page. We’ve talked about what would be a good strategy for the things you share, the comments that you make on other people’s posts, the times when you should be clicking the like button, because remember all of that is completely visible depending on your privacy settings, right? It’s all completely visible. Now let’s talk about the third area, which is your network and by the way, if you haven’t changed the settings, your network, all of it could be completely visible to people. So if that makes you feel a little nervous, you might want to go in and check that, but let’s talk about, who should you be connecting with? So, Wes, you have any thoughts about who I should be connecting with because there’s more than one way to do this?

Wes Shriner:

A couple of theories on this, right? Some people will say, “Connect only with the people you are confident will support you and your work, who you have a long history with.” And then there’s another theory that is, “Connect broadly and when those you can on the way,” right? And I think that’s going to really depend on who you are in your personality, right? You go with what is best for you on that one? I can’t tell you the answer, but I can say a rule of thumb is you need to have at least 50 connections. You can do that. You can pick 10 people from the last two years and 10 people from the two years before that, that you’ve worked with and get to 50, you can do that. Then you can join some groups of like-minded folks.

Kip Boyle: 

So why is 50 so important? Ah, because that gets you group entrance.

Wes Shriner: 

Well, it does, it gets you some group entrance. It also establishes you as a consistent user and player on LinkedIn, as opposed to possibly a fly by night profile. It establishes your profile as being more, more valid or more accurate than maybe an identity theft profile of some sort.

Kip Boyle: 

Great, great advice. Love it. Let me say something about who you should connect with. There’s a whole group of people on LinkedIn called LIONs. Have you heard of that Wes?

Wes Shriner:

I have. Those are LinkedIn open networkers.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah, that’s right. And so when LinkedIn was first launched, many, many years ago, one of the things that happened was there was a whole bunch of people, early adopters, and they believed that connections on LinkedIn should be very, very permissive, that anybody should be able to connect with anybody without permission, without invitations and so on. And these are people who just believe that everybody should be connected with everybody and maybe more of a Twitter ethos right than what LinkedIn is now, but you’ll still run across people like that. But I will tell you this, we do know from research, from data that your second degree connections or your loose first degree connections can be a tremendous source of new opportunities for you. So I know some people are very against connecting with people that they don’t know, but I want you to think about connecting with people that you don’t know, because it’s going to reveal opportunities for you in the future. That’s just the way human networks work.

Wes Shriner:

So Kip, I had a post recently that went viral. It was my graduation post, and I have so far 72,000 views of that post. It’s just amazing and interesting to me because that’s not really a goal of mine to have high views or any of that. It’s also generated 86 new invitations for a connection on LinkedIn. We got to think about how we accept or decline those invitations. And part of it’s going to be, are they obvious fake accounts? Are they data miners? We can take a look at that and see, “oh, well, that’s just a sales person networking from another side of the country who doesn’t have any interest in my business or my organization. They’re just using me to look at my network to see who they can talk to in my network.”

That’s not somebody that I need to network with, right? If it’s a fake account, I’m not going to network with it. And I may have networked with a few of those on the way, but not intentionally, right? Another one is I get sometimes invitations with inappropriate pictures as their profile. I’m just not interested in that. That’s not a good for me. That’s not good for my reputation, and so I just let those go as well. Don’t be fooled, take the bait, stay with the people that look like healthy contributors in the industry.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah. And one of the ways you can determine whether you should accept a connection request from somebody you don’t know is how many connections do you have in common. So if I see somebody I’ve got 91 common connections with, and I’m not connected with them yet, I probably should be open to connecting with them.

Wes Shriner: 

Indeed. So we talked a little bit about endorsements, skill endorsements, they’re cheap and easy to give in your network, you can also give endorsements. In fact, you can be generous with them. You can endorse a person for four or five things in one shot. It takes less than a minute to endorse them for five things and there’s no penalty, right? There’s no penalty if you endorse them for something that they are mostly good at, but not aces at. And there’s always a win for them in that you’re telling the world that they’re reasonably good at this skill. And in the same way, reciprocate. If someone’s endorsed you, then please go back and endorse them as well. That’s only appropriate when we’re talking about who did, who’s doing things well at work and endorsement are of skills or some of the currency we use.

Kip Boyle: 

And that includes writing recommendations, yeah. I was just going to say let’s talk about writing them.

Wes Shriner: 

So recommendations are hard. And we can write a recommendation. Sometimes it’s worth checking with the person first to see what they want to be recommended for or what they want the reputation of brand to be about, and sometimes it’s just a blanket recommendation that says, “I’ve worked with this person and they’re solid and I want them to carry my stamp for as long as they would like,” right?

Kip Boyle: 

Yep.

Wes Shriner:

My advice to a young person in their career, who is trying to figure out how to build their profile in LinkedIn, how to build their career in their profile in this industry, start writing recommendations for some folks but don’t do the I scratch your back, you scratch mine method of if I endorse you Kip then you endorse me and we both get endorsements. That’s going to be very transparent on LinkedIn. It’s very transparent because they put them right now, just on the left and on the right so you can see, well, is this a mutual endorsement or is this a one-way a recommendation? What does it look like? My suggestion said would be, if you’re just getting started, have a group of three of you and, and person A recommends person B and person B recommends person C and person C can recommend person A. And that way each of those recommendations can be sincere, they can be applied and it’s not obvious to the algorithm that we plan this a little bit to grow our careers.

Kip Boyle: 

That’s a great recommendation. It’s kind of the anti algorithm approach.

Wes Shriner: 

So that brings us to the ends of when you do build a network, choose your network wisely and then recommend and endorse appropriately so that you’ve got an interactive network. Of those 86 people that have sent me invitations, I’m not just going to accept their invitation and say, “Thanks for reaching out to me, bye.” I’m probably going to choose several of them to engage in a conversation and build a relationship with so that in the future we can help one another and we do have a basic understanding of who we are and how we’re positioned to move this industry forward and hopefully forward together.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah. When I get a connection request and I think that the person on the other side is very interesting, I will accept the request, but then immediately send them a note, thanking them for connecting with me, but then asking them, “Hey, what’s a super interesting problem that’s front of mind for you that you’re working on right now?” And then I share what mine is so that I can immediately open up a warm dialogue with them. And it often doesn’t go very far past that, but what it does do is it kind of sets a tone for future interactions we’re going to have with each other, because there’s going to be a message history on LinkedIn. And when that person comes back to me, they’re going to go, “Oh yeah. He asked me about that problem that I was working on.” That was cool, right? It’s going to feel better. So that’s a technique that I use that I think makes a difference.

Wes Shriner: 

That’s a great tip Kip and I think with that tip, we should probably wrap it up because we’ve covered a lot of ground today. I do want to summarize it. LinkedIn as a useful tool, but it is not your job search. You’ll need to do more. I want to remind you that being thoughtful is the word of the day. If you aren’t thoughtful, you might not create the image you want projected. And then lastly, I would say, be an eager learner. You’re growing yourself. And hopefully you’re growing those around you and you can use LinkedIn as a place to reflect that growth as you go. You’ll be glad you did and your prospective employers might just see that too.

Kip Boyle: 

This has been a very good episode. Listen, so as I said before, we’re going to have a feature episode where we’re going to talk about how you can hunt for jobs on LinkedIn. So that’s coming up. But that’s all we have for this episode, right? So listen, as we close it out, I just want to remind you that if you’ve heard about Steve, Steve was and still is a former student of ours. He went and took our master class called How to Get Your Dream Cybersecurity Job as told by hiring managers. And he did that back in April and before he even finished all the lessons, he got his dream cybersecurity job, and his story is very inspiring. I invite you to check it out. And so if you want to hear about Steve, go to yourcyberpath.com/steve, S-T-E-V-E, and hear about how this course changed his working life. So until next time, remember, you’re just one path away from your dream cybersecurity job.

Headshot of Kip BoyleYOUR HOST:

Kip Boyle
Cyber Risk Opportunities

Kip Boyle serves as virtual chief information security officer for many customers, including a professional sports team and fast-growing FinTech and AdTech companies. Over the years, Kip has built teams by interviewing hundreds of cybersecurity professionals. And now, he’s sharing his insider’s perspective with you!

Headshot of Jason DionYOUR CO-HOST:

Jason Dion
Dion Training Solutions

Jason Dion is the lead instructor at Dion Training Solutions. Jason has been the Director of a Network and Security Operations Center and an Information Systems Officer for large organizations around the globe. He is an experienced hiring manager in the government and defense sectors.

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