Written by Álvaro González.
Nowadays, LinkedIn has become one of the main sources when searching for a job. It is true, though, that it is not a job search engine, as some webpages such as Infojobs or Infoempleo could be, but it still has a lot of utility when trying to find our dream job.
As we were explaining in our previous post on Tips on how to emphasize yourself in LinkedIn, today we will be learning how to max this social network out thanks to the Groups section, and in the next post we will also be talking in depth about the LinkedIn Jobs section.
What are LinkedIn groups for?
We can find tons of job search groups in this social network for professionals, whether if it’s a highly skilled job or not. This fact is something that depends on our personal profile, and on our labor expectations. In these groups it is always easy to find various job offers from recruitment agencies and consultancies, or even directly from proper companies.
What is different between all these groups?
Groups are diversified. They can either be so by the location where we are trying to find a new job, or even by the theme of it. This is why there are some groups created only to find a job in Spain, for instance Buscar y ofrecer trabajo en España. In addition, there are some other groups created only for different professions or sectors of professional activity, for example, job offers for nurses or engineers are some of the most popular. You can also take a look at our nurses group in LinkedIn, where we gradually post our healthcare job vacancies for countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland or Germany.
How can I become a group member in order to participate?
There are two ways of searching for a group in LinkedIn, and you just have to follow these simple steps:
First option uses suggestions based on your current job, your interests, your contact list…
1. To begin with we need to click on the ‘Interests’ tab, and then on ‘Groups’
2.When we get to the next screen, we then need to click on the ‘Discover’ tab.
Once clicking on ‘Discover’, we will get a list of groups based on different preferences that LinkedIn analyzes, such as our current job position, our interests or our networking.
3.If any of these suggestions may be of interest for you, you can click on the ‘Ask to join’ so your membership can either automatically accepted or that the administrator of the group can manually accept it, as we can observe in the following image.
The alternative option would be searching directly for groups in the LinkedIn search engine, based on different keywords that we can use.
1.Clicking on the left side of the search bar (as we can see in the image) would make a dropdown menu open, where we need to select the ‘Groups’ tab.
2. After clicking on the ‘Groups’ tab, we can now proceed on searching including the keywords that can be of interest for us. In our very example, we have chosen the keyword ‘Recruitment’ in order to find some recruitment agency, or human resources consultancies at an international level. This would be the list that appears to us:
Once we got the list, we can filter it depending on which languages job offers are posted in the groups that we are looking for. In order to join any of them, we just need to click on the ‘Join’ button that appears on the right side of the group, so the membership request can reach the group administrator for him to accept it.
Try to join any of these groups and start looking for a new job. You can also visit our job offers site in LinkedIn and stay tuned.