Welcome to the Just Get Hired Newsletter!

Happy New Year’s Eve to everyone. If you’re reading this today or over the next few days, I assume you are thinking about a current or future job search in 2024. Here’s to your success.

In today’s issue we talk about showing up on Linkedin as a tool in your current or future job search. I’ll walk you through why it’s important and how to get started.

If you want to get more from Ramped beyond this weekly newsletter, do these things now:

• Connect with me on Linkedin here (VERY IMPORTANT for this edition)

• Check out our full Job Search Course here – use code JGH20 (final chance to get a discount for now) to get an exclusive discount for being a newsletter subscriber!

And if you find value in this weekly newsletter, please share with any friends or colleagues going through a job search — you have a unique code at the bottom of this email that you can share to track your referrals (for future prizes!).

Let’s get into it.

Why you should show up on Linkedin

In 2023, I started showing up on Linkedin regularly. The results:

1) Over 1.3M impressions

2) ~5k new connections / followers

3) 100s of valuable professional conversations

Your network = your net worth, and studies show that weak ties (people you’re loosely connected with, like a former colleague, classmate, or Linkedin connection) are actually more impactful in your career on average than strong ties (like close friends or family).

There is no better way to exponentially expand your professional network (and your weak ties) than showing up regularly on Linkedin.

While I’m focusing primarily on posting on Linkedin, “showing up” can also mean:

1) Commenting on other’s posts

2) Sending cold DMs / new connection requests to interesting people

3) Engaging in DMs / conducting informational interviews with new connections

However you decide to show up, I recommend creating a plan and sticking to it. In the next section I’ll show you how.

How you should show up on Linkedin

Before beginning to post or engage on Linkedin, you need to decide who you want to show up to.

In general, I recommend thinking of it like this:

• Write for peers and people more junior than you

• Engage with peers and thought leaders in your space

The result = you’ll show up to leaders, recruiters, and managers in your space.

This is probably a mindset shift for you, as typically at work your goal is to “look good” to people above you.

Tactically, I recommend a cadence that looks like this:

• Engage daily (15-20 minutes) — commenting on posts, replying to DMs

• Post 2-3 times per week (thought leadership content)

• Add 10-20 new relevant connections per week

• Conduct 1 informational interviews with new connections per week

This should take 3-5 hours per week. And if you can do this 30/52 weeks in 2024, I promise your professional opportunities will change.

As you get started, here are three things you should remember:

1) Assume you’ll be talking to no one for the foreseeable future

When I first started posting, I would get literally 5 likes. My coworkers and maybe 2 other people would engage with my posts. Even today, I have some posts that flop and get basically 0 engagement.

I’ve said this in past newsletters: anything worth having comes on the other side of some form of pain.

In this case, the pain is the lack of engagement, the cringe, and the fear of looking foolish because nobody cares what you think.

This can be incredibly disheartening if you don’t focus on the process, instead of the results.

Assume no one cares what you think and that’s ok. Focus on consistency and getting slightly better with each post.

If after a month of showing up regularly, you still aren’t getting any engagement, it means one of three things:

1) You need more connections (focus on growing your audience more)

2) What you’re writing isn’t engaging (conduct research on what stories, topics, etc. resonate with people in your space)

3) How you’re writing isn’t engaging (conduct research on how people organize and write their content like using images, bullets, lists, etc.)

Test and keep improving.

2) Be authentically you

It’s easy to look at what others are doing and say “I need to do that to be successful”.

There’s value in leveraging best practices (as I just mentioned above), but I promise if you show up as close to yourself as possible, it will be much easier to stick with the process.

That means talking about things you actually have done / know about. And writing in a tone / style that is authentic to you.

3) Write for yourself 1-3 years ago

It can feel intimidating to put your thoughts into the world. Comparison is the thief of joy as they say — you look around and ask yourself “why would anyone care what I think?”.

Instead, ask yourself: what would YOU want to know if you could go back 1,2, or 3 years? Write to that person.

I promise there are more people than you think who could benefit from learning from your mistakes and successes from your recent work or educational experiences.

If you’re planning on showing up more on Linkedin in 2024, shoot me a note and tell me what you’re hoping to get out of it and your plan. I’d love to support you.

Here’s to showing up on Linkedin in 2024.

Happy new year everyone,

-Ben