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Using LinkedIn to Help Others Find Jobs

I like LinkedIn, I really do. If you can get past the recruiters randomly spamming you (and yes, I know they are LinkedIn’s primary source of revenue), the professional network is quite powerful.

As Gary Vaynerchuk and Liz Ryan say, you don’t have any excuses for not finding the right person to reach out to with your sales pitch or job interest.

But recently I was contacted by a former colleague who noticed that I had “liked” one of my other contacts’ job posting. He asked a few questions, applied and interviewed, and got the job. I love matching people up with jobs, but this was easy.

My plan is to search LinkedIn periodically and “like” all job listings posted by former colleagues or other trusted sources, and hope this experience happens again.

Blog for yourself

In my perusal of Twitter, I came across this piece by Dave Winer (the creator of RSS and an interesting, provocative blogger): What I learned from Om and Hossein.

The whole piece is worth a read (it’s short), but here’s the quote that resonated for me:

I write my blog not because I want to write a “good” blog post, or even one that’s read by a lot of people. And my own self is not scattered, it’s right here, and as long as I live it will continue to be here. And my online self doesn’t exist for the benefit of others, it’s here to help my real self develop his thinking and create a trail of ideas and feelings and experiences that I can look back on later.

Blogging for me has always been about the ability to engage with my ideas and experiences, and if others gain from it, the more the merrier. Of course, it’s hard not to check stats and subscribers, etc, etc, but the real win for me comes from when I’m searching for the answer to a question and my blog pops up.