tom.ternquist – a place for my things.

So you’ve been to a career fair, applied for a few jobs or internships on CareerNet, and got rid of all those drunken photos on Facebook — now what? Networking. Unless you’re one of the lucky ones to have snagged a job from the fair, you need to be resourceful and know some people. Enter LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is Facebook for professionals, or for college students who want to be known for something besides their beer pong record. The job market may not be as bleak as it was last year, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks it’s a great time to find a job. If you want that dream job, you’re going to need to put in some work, and LinkedIn is a great place to start.

Once you’ve created an account, it’s time to fill out your profile and establish yourself on the site. Standard résumés can be great for putting yourself out there, but LinkedIn profiles can help extend your reach even further. A significant advantage is that your LinkedIn profile is searchable by employers both on the site and even on search engines. Employers can easily do advanced searches to get a fine-tuned list of potential candidates. Likewise, you can search companies and their employees and see what the real deal with a company is.

The advanced search capabilities offer plenty of opportunities to improve the chances of landing a job. Let’s say you are interviewing with a company and you happen to know who the interviewer is. A quick search of their profile can give you insight into their own professional background. Going into an interview with this added intelligence can make things go a lot smoother and make a huge difference.

Probably one of the easiest and best things you can do when you’re just starting out is to add connections to classmates and colleagues in the real-world. LinkedIn lets you search for users on the site and can even import your email contacts and connect you with all your contacts already on the network. Adding these connections may seem just like adding friends on Facebook, but they offer much more to the job-hungry college student. LinkedIn uses these connections to drive the service, removing much of the legwork involved in traditional networking.

LinkedIn is a great place just to learn about companies and different fields and get advice from professionals in virtually any field. One of the most useful features is the ability to know of any employees at a given company that are within a few degrees of separation from you based on your existing connections. Discovering these “inside connections” will immediately show you why networking is so important.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn offers a substantial, easy to use jobs section. Taking advantage of your connections once again, LinkedIn gives you a listing of companies, sorted by your existing connections. When it comes to viewing a job listing, you also see any connections you might have and through whom. Another useful feature of the individual job listing pages are the “Similar Jobs” and the “People who viewed this also viewed” lists, giving you even more help in directing your search.

Even if you have a job or don’t want to use LinkedIn to find a job right now, getting started on the network is a no-brainer. It takes only a few minutes to get started, and if you’re at Cornell you probably know at least a few successful people, so you really should make those connections now while they’re still fresh.