LinkedIn is the world's most popular job-oriented social networking site. It has helped individuals obtain jobs or connect with associates in their wanted career fields. By leveraging their LinkedIn profiles, individuals can highlight skills and tasks, change their job titles, add certifications to their name, and ask for endorsements from connections. Participants in this study found value in making these alterations. They believed it helped them reach their goals, whether obtaining a new role, growing their professional network, or passive job searching. This study also explores the use of artificial intelligence tools to help individuals build their online personas. Although this study has several limitations, it provides a baseline for understanding the importance of an individual's online professional persona when reaching their professional goals.
TopLeveraging Linkedin To Build Your Online Persona
Technological advances make the saying “you can be anything or anyone you want to be” more valid today than ever before. Across social media platforms, individuals are building their online personas to reflect who they wish to be, and this is no different for the professional networking platform LinkedIn. LinkedIn has created a world where professionals can reach out to like-minded career individuals to share their professional backgrounds, thoughts, and networks. Like all social media platforms, the persona individuals build is what they want the world to see rather than who they truly are. LinkedIn has become the most job-oriented social networking site (Md & Abdullah Mohammad, 2023), and there is a reason why – it helps individuals highlight the parts of their professional career that will help them obtain their goals.
While some may see this as a negative and a way for individuals to mislead their network, it can also be seen as a positive. Altering your online identity does not necessarily mean being dishonest. For many, it may mean highlighting parts of your career that better reflect the roles an individual wants. It would mean building a reputation to help sculpt the opinions of others about you. Building a solid reputation is vital since research has shown that companies now cybervett or perform internet searches and background checks through their candidates' social media profiles (Berger, 2015, as cited in Marin & Nilă, 2021).
Social media networks, such as LinkedIn, can also help an individual create an image for recruiters and hiring managers before making contact with the company. Karaduman (2013, as cited in Marin & Nilă, 2021) believes that candidates should utilize their virtual identity as a robust tool. A strong online identity can help increase a candidate's competitive edge and market themselves to the organization (Marin & Nilă, 2021). By leveraging the power of online self-presentation and online reach, LinkedIn can help an individual achieve their career goals by highlighting career focal points, changing titles to reflect roles better, and even utilizing artificial intelligence to generate professional headshots to help an individual look more professional and put together for recruiters and hiring managers. LinkedIn provides individuals a way to develop and post their resumes, network with professional associates, obtain career guidance, publish skills that others can endorse, and find jobs. It can also help organizations find suitable candidates (Md & Abdullah Mohammad, 2023), which makes it more critical for individuals to build a strong professional persona online.
An excellent online professional persona can help build a solid image of the candidate for the organization. However, the opposite can be said about individuals who fail to manage their online identity. An online reputation is essential to an individual's brand (Marin & Nilă, 2021). In 2017, a study was conducted with 2,300 hiring managers and human resource professionals. It was discovered that more than half of employees utilized social media as a screening tool for employees, and 38 percent of employees rejected a candidate based on social media posts of unhealthy behavior (Career Builder, 2017, as cited in Marin & Nilă, 2021).
However, this study was not limited to LinkedIn. The unhealthy behavior posts were found on other social media sites like Facebook. Individuals may present themselves one way on a social media site like Facebook, then alter their identity for another social media site such as LinkedIn. This is because individuals alter their online identities to match the function of the online space, governing interaction, and perceived audience for that platform (Emanuel & Stanton Fraser, 2014, as cited in Moncur et al., 2016). On a platform such as LinkedIn, individuals were likelier to share conservative and factual views versus more personal beliefs on other platforms such as dating websites (Emanuel & Stanton Fraser, 2014, as cited in Moncur et al., 2016).