LinkedIn, along with a few other career-oriented websites, forms the backbone of general e-recruiting. What sets LinkedIn apart is the ability to network with others. This is especially true for people who work in similar industries. If you wish to maximize the time and effort you spend on the social media site, assess the significance of doing so by considering the following elements.

You Get to Show Off Your Work Without Bragging

In most parts of society, you aren’t really supposed to talk about how good you are at certain things and why you are the best. On LinkedIn, the opposite is true. Your goal is to highlight all your strongest features and assets, as long as you can back them up, of course.

One main component of the site is that you can create a profile that reflects your work history, education and related skills. Let’s take a look at the profile of Joseph Sarcona as an example. Next to his clean-cut headshot, he has displayed his job title of “President of JJS Transportation & Distribution Co., Inc.” This gets right to the point of the role he plays within his company. He also lists his contact information next to the location section so that he can be easily reached.

Explain Yourself and Your Businesses

The more robust your profile, the better. Either potential clients or hiring managers detest spending too much time guessing what you do because job titles can be vague. In his first position, Sarcona details his firm’s services as well as the history of the organization that was able to capitalize on its opportunities.

He uses the next entry of “Managing Partner for Willow Court Capital Management” to describe how his financial expertise in logistics lends itself to a perfect partnership with his current function. He then runs down a brief history of past employment, which is sufficient because it happened years ago. After that, he continues to build his profile by posting his college education and technical skills such as hedge funds, options, capital markets and equity trading.

Use the Opportunity to Network

What good is a company or employee if nobody knows about them? Many successful businesses have beaten out others who have superior products, services and employees just for being more famous. Do not fall into that trap. LinkedIn offers you the freedom to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. The chat message innovation can be a double-edged sword. You may be bombarded by cold emails that don’t interest you, but the opposite can be true as well. Many deals and partnerships have been brokered because someone took the chance to contact the other.

There is generally a panel on the right side of the screen of the desktop version where there are recommended profiles for you to browse. Someone there might catch your interest. One forgotten way to bring like-minded individuals together is the chance to join groups based on similar interests. If you like what Starbucks or Nike are doing, for example, you can follow their pages and read their posts to get ideas that might work for your endeavor.

Although you don’t want to spread yourself too thin, there are certain websites you should be investing your time in. LinkedIn is one of them.