LinkedIn Alumni offers powerful tool to leverage your alumni networks
According to John Hill, 85% of job opportunities will come through someone that’s a 2nd level connection on LinkedIn. John is LinkedIn’s Higher Education Evangelist and last week he came to the Foster School to share tips and strategies for getting the most out of LinkedIn. Although it wasn’t all new to me, John was a great presenter who could really tell a story and make his message stick.
The three big points of the night were:
- Build a network before you need it.
- Build a quality network not a quantity network.
- Dream big.
The rest of the talk was on how to use LinkedIn to manage relationships and help accomplish these big points. He shared several great tips, but I want to highlight one feature that you might not be as familiar with: LinkedIn Alumni.
Here’s a screenshot:
If a fellow TMMBA or Foster alum reached out to me, I’m likely to take the call. Why? Because we have something in common. With LinkedIn Alumni, you can now find fellow alums of your university or b-school AND you can filter by where they live, work, what they do, skills, and several others.
For example, if I was looking at relocating to the Bay area and interested in Google, I can drill down and see that I have 19 fellow Foster alums that graduated in the past 5 years. Or maybe you’re sick of the Seattle rain and ready to move to the islands. In my case, I have 87 fellow alums that I could reach out to in Hawaii.
That’s a pretty powerful tool to help you leverage your alumni networks. Check it out and let me know what you think.
