1.2 About LinkedIn
LinkedIn has over 400 million users and has been designed to enable you to build and make the most of a network of contacts. By building a profile, you will be increasing your visibility and building your chances of finding jobs that you want and employers that want to hire you. As with a conventional paper-based CV, expertise (skills) and experience (work history) represent the primary components of your online identity on LinkedIn, and recruiters scan these sections when they are looking out for appropriate employees.
While many social networking sites tend to be dominated by young people, LinkedIn is ideally suited for returners. According to the Pew Research Centre (2015), LinkedIn is the only major social media platform where usage rates are higher among 30- to 49-year-olds than among 18- to 29-year-olds. This means that people with more professional experience are more likely to be on LinkedIn, making it a great place to build networks with others in your field.
Privacy and security
Increasing your online visibility has become more and more important to making sure you are found by potential employers, but you may quite rightly be a bit concerned about privacy and security. As with all social media, understanding and having control over what others can see about you is vital for your own peace of mind, as well as ensuring potential employers are getting the impression of you that you want them to. With that in mind, you are going to start by examining what your privacy options are on LinkedIn. For instance, you can control the level of detail that is available to the general public and how much can only be seen by your contacts (called connections).
In the next activity, when you set up your LinkedIn account, you will consider the privacy settings to ensure you get your profile up to speed before you make it visible to your connections. There are a number of things you can control on LinkedIn to maintain your privacy, including limiting who can view elements of your profile to first connections only. (First connections are contacts that you have agreed to connect with or that you have reached out to and connected with.) You can also set your account so that your photo and full name are not visible to the general public.