Take Your LinkedIn Profile from Average to All-Star!

“I don’t know what I’m doing on LinkedIn.” I hear this all the time, and it’s often voiced with either resignation or frustration. People tend to look at LinkedIn as a necessary evil, so they throw a few random resume bits up and call it a day. This is a mistake! A 2014 round-up found that 94% of recruiters are on LinkedIn but only 36% of candidates are, 73% of Millenials found their last job through social media and 89% of recruiters have hired someone through LinkedIn.

Before you consider connecting with those recruiters though, you need to have a completed, All-Star level profile, and these tips will help you get there:

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Three Reasons not to Hire a Social Media Intern (And Five Tips if you Hire One Anyway)

Credit: Stuart Pilbrow

It’s the beginning of July, and, judging by the number of ads I’m seeing, it’s time to talk about social media interns. For the purpose of this piece, an intern is defined as “a student or recent graduate who works for a [fixed] period of time at a job in order to get experience.” Hiring interns can be beneficial to both companies and student employees, but, in order to maximize the benefits of the arrangement, the tasks and responsibilities given to them must be appropriate. Too often we hear about interns being hired to learn new skills only to find their days actually being filled with cleaning, fetching coffee or other menial tasks that don’t add value to their resumes. However, when it comes to social media, employers still often take things to the opposite extreme, giving interns free rein to create and/or post on a company’s social media accounts, despite many articles and blog posts warning them not to.

To review what has been said in similar posts elsewhere, hiring a social media intern is a bad idea for three reasons: