Talent Market

Talent Market is a nonprofit whose mission is to promote liberty by providing talent for critical roles within the free-market nonprofit sector

Talent Tip #133: 10 Reasons Your Cover Letter is Terrible (Part 1)

(This month’s newsletter article is the first of a two-part series written by Katelynn Barbosa, who just went on maternity leave.)

 

I’m feeling extra grumpy and salty because I am 37 weeks pregnant, sick of waddling everywhere, and dying for a stiff cocktail. The good news for you is that my current state has put me in the mood to drop some VERY honest advice about a vital component of every job application – the cover letter.

Your cover letter is not something you should be annoyed you have to write. Instead, it is a gift, an opportunity to explain why you genuinely want the job you’re applying for, why you are passionate about the organization’s mission, and why your background aligns well with the opening. Yet so many candidates take this gift and squander it. Oh, let me count the ways…

  1. You don’t address your cover letter to a specific person. Every cover letter should be addressed to a specific individual, like an actual person with a heartbeat, a mother, and a social security number. Why? I’ll make an analogy to online dating. Imagine getting a message addressed to “brown-haired girl in my zip code.” I may very well fall within that category of person but I’d like to be addressed as an individual, you know? And when I get a message like that, it tells me the person just copied and pasted his message to tons of brown-haired girls in his zip code and couldn’t be bothered to put any effort into his message to me. 

    So with cover letters, avoid the “To the Hiring Committee” (who says there is a committee? This isn’t NASA), “To whom it may concern” (anyone who says “whom” in conversation is the kind of person I avoid at parties), or my personal (least) favorite, “Dear sir or madam” (do I look like I have a robust book of corrupt congressmen?). If you can’t find the appropriate hiring person online (I bet you can if you try for just five minutes), address your cover letter to the President of the organization. Hell, address it to an intern. Just don’t address it to the brown-haired girl in your zip code, which is what you are doing when you address it to anyone other than a specific person..
  2. You could take the cover letter you submitted and send it over to Red Lobster for their open hostess role and it wouldn’t require a single change. Read the cover letter you are thinking of submitting right now. Could you take that cover letter, submit it to Red Lobster for that open hostess role, and it would make total sense? Then, your cover letter stinks worse than my incoming newborn’s diaper. You get why, right? If you can submit your cover letter to Red Lobster, it means you didn’t address your interest in the role or organization you’re applying for and made no effort to explain how your background is relevant to the particular position. Although, if you do get the Rod Lobster job, can you hook me up with some of those Cheddar Bay biscuits?
  3. You didn’t follow basic instructions. Writing a good cover letter is hard. Following basic instructions shouldn’t be. And yet! Here is an actual line specifying what we are looking for in a cover letter from a job description we currently have on our website: “Cover Letter detailing your interest in the position and the mission of [organization name] and your salary requirements.”

    So if your cover letter doesn’t discuss why you are interested in the mission of this specific organization (Red Lobster’s is “to be where the world goes for seafood, now and for generations” in case you were curious), why you are interested in this specific position (not the Red Lobster hostess job!), and an actual number that states what your salary requirements are (“negotiable” is useless!), then you have failed to follow basic instructions. 

    Please just follow the instructions. This is the bare minimum, folks. And can you please apply this to regular life too? Stand on the right side of the moving walkway only, wait until it’s your turn to get up before getting your bag out of the overhead bin, and use your blinker when you’re changing lanes. It’s not that hard.
  4. You just repeat your resume in paragraph form. When writing your cover letter, it is vital to remember that I already have your resume. If I just wanted you to re-state in your cover letter what already appears in your resume, I wouldn’t ask for a cover letter at all because I don’t love wasting my own time unless it involves investing hours in a Facebook argument over whether it’s ever appropriate to go without an oxford comma. (It isn’t.) 
    A job description typically lists several qualifications, and your cover letter is your one chance to show that you meet those qualifications. Yet I can’t tell you how many candidates waste vital cover letter space just repeating what I already know from their resume. “Prior to working as a leprechaun at O Danny Boy’s, I was a professional Easter Bunny at Spring Time All the Time.” Oh you mean the O Danny Boy’s and Spring Time All the Time that appear a mere two mouse scrolls below in your resume? Did you think I wasn’t going to see that? Just. Don’t. Instead, tell me WHY your experience working as fictional creatures makes you a good fit for this opening.
  5. You don’t even reference the organization you’re applying for. This goes to my Red Lobster point above. At Talent Market, every role we are filling is with an organization that has a specific mission and cares that the new hire be invested in that mission. If you can’t be bothered to even reference the name of the organization you’re applying for, I don’t have a lot of confidence that you are passionate about their mission or even know what that mission is. And for Pete’s sake, don’t reference your interest in “the company” in any cover letter for Talent Market. We recruit exclusively for nonprofit organizations so when you say “company,” I know you aren’t paying attention. 
    The sad truth is that by just stating the mission of the organization in your cover letter, you are taking it out of the bottom 10% of cover letters I read because I know you at least went to their website and did some base level of research.

Did I mention I’m very pregnant? All of this writing is making me tired. I need a nap. I’ll give you the last 5 reasons in next month’s newsletter.

-Katelynn Barbosa

Talent Tip #132: Seven Things Our Data Tell Us About Hiring in the Liberty Movement

This will shock no one to hear, but I’m a bit of a dork – A data dork, if you want to get specific. Give me a glass of red wine and a database and I could be happy for hours. Yes, I am the most fun at parties.

I love digging into the numbers, creating reports, and discovering new things. Specifically, I dork out on understanding what the numbers in Talent Market’s database are telling us and how we can use this data to help our clients and candidates.

So, at the end of last year, I reviewed dozens of reports about our searches, candidates, and clients from our humble beginnings to 2009 all the way through the Great Dumpster Fire of 2020.

What I learned is useful not only for nonprofit organizations, but also for individuals seeking their dream job in the liberty movement.

Here are the seven things our data tell us about hiring in the free-market space that might be useful to you!

1. Fundraising jobs win AGAIN. If I asked you what you thought our most common talent need was, you might have guessed policy. After all, we work in the public policy sphere! Yet, policy jobs account for only 12% of our placements. As much as we love a good policy job, you know what really keeps us up at night? It’s finding fundraising talent for the bazillion development openings we have! In fact, nearly a third of our placements are in fundraising, followed by about a fifth in communications and media. This is good for nonprofits to know, as it explains why it’s always tough to find a good fundraiser. And this is also useful for job seekers, especially recent graduates contemplating their future career paths. If you aren’t sure what field to go into and you want to be madly employable, might I suggest fundraising?

2. The majority (roughly 66%) of the candidates we place hail from outside the free-market nonprofit sector. Wow, right? Lest anyone think we’re just shuffling talent from one free-market nonprofit to another, the numbers tell us otherwise! And this is fantastic news for those of you toiling away in the private sector hoping to land your dream job in the free-market world. It can happen and the data illustrate that point!

3. The pandemic dramatically increased our clients’ willingness to hire virtually. You probably don’t need to see our data to know this is true; you can just look at the dining room table you converted to a desk back in March of 2020 and your insurmountable list of downloaded podcast episodes you used to consume during your daily commute. But the data are fascinating nonetheless. Pre-pandemic, only 36% of our searches allowed for virtual work. In 2020 it jumped to 60%!!! And right now nearly 70% of our current openings have a virtual option!  This is a great sign for those of you who can’t relocate or want to work virtually. We’ll see if this trend holds!

4. Hiring virtually means doubling your candidate pool! On average, our virtual opportunities attract twice the number of candidates that our in-office opportunities attract. Amazing!! So, if your nonprofit is struggling to find talent, going virtual is a good first step to expanding the talent pool. The bar chart says it all!

 

5. More than a third of the candidates we’ve placed have participated in a liberty-oriented program (such as an internship) or engaged with a liberty-oriented networking organization. It’s hard to know exactly what this represents. Does this mean our clients are drawn to those who have a demonstrated passion for liberty? Does this represent candidates’ dedication to the cause? Or does it mean something else entirely? In any case, I suspect it can’t hurt to get involved in the liberty world early and often!

6. Personal referrals, along with Talent Market’s recruiting efforts, are our biggest source of top talent. Stated another way, while we love job boards, LinkedIn, and even Instagram, 73% of the placements we make come to us via our recruiting efforts and word of mouth. This is why we are so very grateful every time we receive a personal referral. Please keep them coming!

7. Throughout our 12 year history, 44% of our placements were located outside the Beltway (and nearly 30% were virtual!). That’s great news for those of you who want to advance liberty but don’t want to or can’t live in our nation’s capital

Talent Tip #131: Six Things the Pandemic Taught Free-Market Nonprofits

I don’t know about you, but I won’t be sad to say goodbye to this year when it ends. Much like your in-laws after a week-long visit, 2020 has overstayed its welcome.

It’s a been a grueling year on multiple fronts, and I think we’re all ready for a fresh start.

But despite its glaring flaws, 2020 did teach free-market nonprofits a few valuable lessons:

  1. Virtual work actually works! – Over the years we’ve given more hype to remote work than Limp Bizkit received back in the day. And with good reason: our virtual searches attract far more talent than in-office searches! Oddly, our begging and pleading with clients to consider virtual hiring didn’t carry quite the weight of a global pandemic, and it was only in the last nine months that many of our clients finally decided to hire virtually. Case in point: only 40% of our searches had a virtual option in 2019, but that percentage jumped to more than 60% this year.
    And the resounding feedback from our clients was that despite their reservations, virtual work is working out just fine! Is it perfect? No. But neither is a long commute, interoffice gossip, and that 220 grit sandpaper in the restroom that the building management calls toilet paper.
    Our clients were excited to learn that staff members can work remotely and still create value for the organization. As a result, many who previously were unwilling to consider remote work as an option at all have told us they won’t return to regular office work or will have a hybrid office/remote set-up from now on.
  2. Virtual work isn’t ideal for every role/organization – Wait…what? I thought I just said virtual work works!? I did. And it does! But that doesn’t mean it’s right for every role and every organization.
    Many of our clients transitioned quite smoothly to a remote environment, but they soon realized that the nature of some work calls for regular in-person interaction. And while video calls are a great stop-gap measure (as long as Jeffrey Toobin isn’t on your staff, of course), they don’t make up for the free exchange of ideas and bonding you get in an office setting.
    As a result, some of our clients have indicated they plan to or have already returned to office work.
  3. Virtual interviewing might be all you need – Needless to say, the pandemic made in-person interviewing very challenging. And as you might expect, most of our clients quickly pivoted to video interviewing. While this was initially looked at as a second-best strategy, some of our clients (especially those that were already operating virtually), ultimately decided that video interviews would replace in-person interviews in most scenarios for the foreseeable future.
    As one client said, “We have been operating as a virtual organization for many years now. We rely on Zoom interviews and phone conversations, and to compensate in part for the lack of an ability to meet in-person during the interview process given our geographic dispersion, we tend to have a range of staff within the organization talk to candidates to ensure that we’re getting a well rounded perspective on their capabilities and potential fit.”  Another client simply put it: “I doubt we will go back to requiring in person interviews.”
  4. A Zoom meeting might be a better option than flying across the country – Before the pandemic, there was an assumption that most important meetings should be held in-person. And for things like conferences, seminars, and programs that focus on networking, that assumption holds. But the pandemic made our clients realize that some meetings could be held virtually (for significantly less time and money) and still be effective.
    As one nonprofit employee shared, “Right before the pandemic I flew across the country for a presentation to a handful of people. Looking back, it should have been a webinar. We would have gotten almost the same amount of value from it and the organizations involved would have saved thousands of dollars each.”
  5. Some donors like virtual meetings – This year many donor meetings that had previously been held in-person were moved to Zoom. No doubt we’ll see a return to in-person meetings in the coming months, but some donors (and weary gift officers!) will welcome the continued use of Zoom, at least on occasion. In fact, one nonprofit leader told me that virtual donor meetings have gone well this year and generally exceeded expectations.
    But he cautioned that it’s incredibly difficult to build lasting relationships when you are solely relying on virtual interactions. So, the key will be utilizing a combination of methods to reach donors. He summarized by saying, “Overall, I think Zoom will continue to be an important tool in the bag for fundraising professionals.”
  6. The liberty movement is tough as nails – When the pandemic struck, I worried we would hit a brick wall and the hiring would stop overnight. That never happened. Sure, things slowed down a bit, but Talent Market has remained incredibly busy throughout the pandemic because free-market organizations never stopped working to advance their missions.
    Our nonprofit clients learned they can (and must) power through even the toughest of times. After all, as we have all learned by watching our governors tell us what we can and cannot do on any given day, a pandemic doesn’t slow the growth of government. And I’m pleased to tell you that a pandemic is no match for the organizations fighting to advance freedom. This year, as trying as it has been, is a testament to the fortitude and resolve of the liberty movement. All of us at Talent Market are proud to be a part of something so amazing!

Talent Tip #130: 7 Keys To Finding a Mentor

By Katy Gambella

How do I find a mentor? How do I ask that person to be my mentor? How do I get the most out of a mentoring relationship?

I hear these questions from young professionals all the time. And I can relate because I struggled with all of these things myself.

Striking up a relationship with a potential mentor might seem really awkward, but it doesn’t need to be!  Here are 7 keys to finding a mentor I learned from personal experience. Hopefully they can help those of you looking for one yourself!

  1. Identify a potential mentor.
    First, come up with a short list of people you admire and would like to learn from.  From there, narrow it down to someone who is of most interest to you.Years ago, I sat down to contemplate mentor options. Immediately one person came to mind, and you just might know her name: Claire Kittle Dixon.

    Claire first popped up on my radar when I was participating in the Koch Associate Program and she spoke to our class. It had been about a year since her session, but she had made an impression on me. If you have heard Claire talk, you know she has a gift for public speaking. She is the right blend of entertaining and informative (with maybe a few curse words tossed in…) and I distinctly remember walking away from her session thinking, “damn, I really want to be her when I grow up.”

    But at the time, she didn’t even know who I was. How the heck could I convince someone who didn’t know me to be my mentor?  Well, it’s easier than you think!

  2. Start a conversation.
    Beginning a relationship with your mentor shouldn’t feel like an awkward date invitation: “Um, I’m not sure what you’re doing on Saturday night, but will you be my mentor?”No need to do that! Instead, just reach out to your (future) mentor and ask if you can have a conversation. Tell them you’ve followed their career and admire them, and then ask if they would be willing to connect for 30 minutes.

    Here’s how I approached Claire: I kept an eye out for Claire through four days of State Policy Network’s 2016 Annual Meeting. I was naively hoping I’d get her alone for one minute to talk to her. If you’ve ever been to SPNAM, you’re laughing at me thinking I’d be able to accomplish this task. Not only is Claire never alone, but she is also always surrounded by a lot of “higher ups.” But I didn’t want to totally miss my chance! So, on the last evening of SPNAM in a Nashville bar, I approached her (and the large group of fans screaming, taking selfies, and asking for her autograph). I kept it simple! “Hi! My name is Katy. You spoke to my KAP class awhile back and I’d love to connect with you. Could I have your email?” She happily obliged and I quickly backed out of the conversation. I reached out about two weeks later, asking for a phone call. The rest is history!

  3. Be prepared.
    Make sure you have an agenda for the conversation. Know what you want to say, what you want to ask, and in what order. Most importantly, do ample homework in advance so you can spend your time wisely.With Claire, I made sure to read her bio and LinkedIn page and familiarize myself with her career path. I even pored over the countless pages of advice she had provided on the Talent Market website. I knew that the worst way to make an impression was to waste her time.
  4. Do more listening than talking.
    If your goal to is learn from your mentor, you’ll need to get them talking so you can get busy listening. And in order to do that, you’ll want to come up with the right questions.Now, I was lucky with Claire because she happened to specialize in career change questions, which I had a lot of. But many of you will be looking for something quite different. Your questions might include: How did you wind up specializing in XXX? ? When did you realize that XXX was the career for you? How did you go from managing a team of 2 to a team of 10?  What advice would you give someone in my shoes if my ultimate career goal is X?

    Also, don’t immediately demand they help you. Avoid starting with questions like, “Will you give me feedback on my resume?” and “Do you think I’m on the right career path?” These conversations are better left to when you have an established relationship. Not only will a mentor be in a better position to address these questions (as they will know you better), but they will also be happy to help answer them!

  5. Don’t worry about labeling your relationship.
    Hopefully, one conversation with your mentor will lead to another…and another…and another. But at no point along the way do you need to label your relationship.Indeed, Claire did not even know that I considered her my mentor for several years until she hired me and I referenced her being my mentor. Her response, “I’m your mentor? I had no idea!” So, cast aside trepidation you have about whether a person will “be your mentor.” Instead, focus on starting a conversation with that person and see where it leads.
  6. Remember this is a two way street.
    Your mentor wants to get something out of the relationship too. Because your mentor will almost certainly be more experienced than you, it might be difficult to see how they could possibly derive value from the relationship.However, don’t underestimate the impact you can have as a mentee. Mentors want to give back. They were once in your shoes and they want to help people get where they are now. Seeing a mentee accomplish the goals you helped them with can be hugely satisfying for a mentor, too.
  7. Follow-up and show gratitude.
    It goes without saying that you should thank your mentor for each and every conversation you have. But you should also show gratitude in the long-run. Let your mentor know the positive impact they are having in your life. And keep them posted on the big decisions that relate to the conversations you’ve had.Before I wound up working full-time for Claire, she helped me with many things in my career. I always followed up with a thank you email, called her to let her know how things worked out, and just kept in regular contact over the years. That made all of the difference in the world. And, you just never know when you might be able to work with your mentor someday even if it doesn’t necessarily involve getting a job. I invited Claire to speak to a seminar I was planning, and it was great that I was in a position to just call her up and ask her to participate!

So, go forth and find yourself a mentor! While I can’t promise you’ll get your dream job from your mentor (thanks, Claire!), you can make huge strides in your career with your mentor’s help!

Talent Tip #129: On Mai Tais, King Beds, and Resumes

By Katelynn Barbosa

Imagine you are planning a vacation to Maui (unthinkable in these times, I know) and browsing hotels online to decide where to stay. As you browse you have three predetermined requirements: You absolutely must have a king bed. (Your husband is a broad shouldered guy who splays out during his sleep like someone at the end of an unsuccessful parachute jump.) You also need to be located close to where many of your activities are planned. Lastly, you have to have an ocean view. There are other things you’d also like, but those three factors are your dealbreakers.

You are about to book at the Maui Wowee Hotel, located in the exact area you want to be that has free fancy breakfast every morning, Mai Tai happy hour from 4-6 every night, a private beach, and gorgeous ocean views. But, you notice the website doesn’t mention king beds so you disqualify the Maui Wowee Hotel and end up booking elsewhere.

When you get to Maui, you learn the Maui Wowee actually does have king beds, the fancy breakfast features four different types of bacon, and the Mai Tai happy hour is real and it is spectacular. Feeling like a sucker for paying $15/drink from 4-6, you wonder how they didn’t mention their king beds front and center on their website, or at least make it readily apparent somewhere?

Enter the experience of a hiring manager reading resumes and cover letters!

If your resume doesn’t make it clear that you meet the hiring organization’s qualifications, they are going to move on from you like you’re the king bed-less Maui Wowee Hotel.

The good news is that when it comes to hiring, organizations don’t hide what they are looking for. You never have to guess! Everything is always (at least if you are looking at Talent Market’s website) spelled out in the job description, bullet point by bullet point.

So, your job as an applicant is to address, bullet point by bullet point, either that you have the qualifications and experience that they want or to explain why they should consider you even though you don’t have it. This requires you to tailor your resume for every single job for which you apply.

And it certainly means you must do so for every cover letter you write. This might sound about as fun as a four hour delay sitting on the tarmac, but it is absolutely essential if you want to put your best foot forward and score an interview.

Case in point, we worked on a policy opening that called for five+ years of experience in a particular policy area. One candidate’s resume showed only two years of said experience. The organization decided to take a chance on the candidate and interview him anyway as a more junior candidate. Come to find out the candidate actually had more than five years of experience in that policy area, but failed to make that clear in the application package. This candidate had the good fortune of getting through the process despite leaving out critical information, but most in his shoes do not!

Here are three rules to follow when trying to clearly spell out your experience in your resume and cover letter:

  1. Display your experience in clean, straight forward bullet points. (Paragraphs in resumes make my eyes bleed.) And you can craft bullet points on your resume that correspond directly to bullet points in the job description. Could life get any easier for the hiring manager!?
  2. Volunteer experience can be as vital as paid experience. An experience does not have to be paid for it to go on your resume!  Take the example of an opening that requires grants writing experience, which you have never done in an official work capacity. If you write grants on a volunteer basis for Hugs for Halitosis on the weekends, the hiring organization doesn’t care how you got that experience as long as you got it somewhere. Experience writing grants is experience writing grants regardless of whether you got paid to do it in American dollars or grateful smiles and a line thanking you in the HFH February newsletter. So treat that volunteer grants writing experience as you would any paid experience and list it as a separate work experience on your resume.
  3. If you don’t have the experience stated in a bullet point in a job description, address the elephant in the room in your cover letter. This is a perfect example of where cover letters are tremendously useful. To go back to the grants writing experience example, say you don’t volunteer writing grants (you volunteer for Hugs for Halitosis by planning the HFH Fall 5K). The next best thing you can do is to explain why that lack of experience shouldn’t disqualify you. Maybe you haven’t written a grant but you have tons of experience writing in a variety of different mediums, many of which are similar to the writing style required of grants, you have long sought to build your career writing grants, and this is your dream organization to work for. Say that in your cover letter! Grasping the nettle and addressing the experience you’re missing (which the hiring manager will absolutely notice) will show you have carefully read the job description, are respectful of what the organization is looking for, and will make a much stronger case for your candidacy than simply omitting it and remaining silent on the topic. 

At the end of the day, always keep in mind that when a hiring manager is reviewing applications, unless they know you personally, all they have to go by is the resume and cover letter that you submit. If you have awesome experience that isn’t included in those documents, the hiring manager has no way of knowing that. So, it is paramount that your application materials demonstrate that you have king beds and free Mai Tais…er…meet all of the requirements in the job description!

Talent Tip #128: Talent Market Answers Your 10 Biggest Questions About LinkedIn

Even the most prolific posters on the ‘book, the most abundant tweeters in the Twittersphere, and the most inexhaustible Insta users (we haven’t gotten any
queries from TikTok folks just yet) still come to us with burning questions about one social media outlet: LinkedIn.

After all, it’s the only social media site that should look more like your resume than a complete photo journal of you doing goat yoga or the arugula and beet salad you made for Thursday night’s dinner.

So here are Talent Market’s answers to the ten most common questions we get about LinkedIn:

  1. Do I need a LinkedIn profile?
    If you’re a professional who is not in the Witness Protection Program, you should probably have a LinkedIn profile. Can you survive without it? Of course. But a profile can help you in myriad ways (see #2!), so it’s a good idea to have one.
  2. How is LinkedIn beneficial?
    First, it is one of the best professional networking tools out there. With just a few clicks, you can find almost anyone you want and learn more about their professional background. You can search by name, location, employer, school, group, and more. The site will also keep you informed about friends and associates who have switched jobs, gotten promoted, gone back to grad school, moved across the country, etc.
    Second, LinkedIn can be an incredible resource for job seekers. Not only do employers post jobs on LinkedIn, but they also actively recruit for talent on the platform.
    Third, LinkedIn is a great place for sharing professional insight and resources. You can find valuable posts and articles on any work topic imaginable.
    Lastly, LinkedIn is a great resource for finding allies, partners, and contractors who can provide valuable skills to you and your organization.
  3. What information should I include in my profile and how long should it be?
    Your LinkedIn profile should contain all of the information you want your professional network to see, which will probably include the information on your resume. But remember you can add more detail if you want, as the one-page resume rule is out the window for LinkedIn profiles! Are there specific skills or experience you want to highlight? Are there items you had to cut from your resume that might be attractive to a potential employer? Do you want everyone to know you got second place in a logrolling competition and are now Vice President of the Log Rollers of North Dakota? The world is your oyster!
  4. Do hiring managers inspect candidates’ LinkedIn profiles? If so, what are they looking for?
    YES! You should operate under the assumption that all potential employers are going to check out your LinkedIn profile. So, make sure it’s Deion Sanders level ready for prime time before applying for jobs.
    Hiring managers might visit LinkedIn to confirm that the information there is consistent with what they see in your application. They also might want to learn more about you. What does your network look like? Do you and the hiring manger share any common connections? What other experience do you have that isn’t included in your resume?
  5. What are the biggest mistakes people make on their LinkedIn profiles?
    -Outdated work history. Having up-to-date information is especially important if you are on the job market. You never want a potential employer to be confused about your current situation.
    -Incorrect contact information. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve tried to reach out to someone about a job opening using his/her LinkedIn contact information only to find the information is out of date. Talk about missed opportunities!
    -Inconsistency. Make sure your job titles, dates of employment, and work history are consistent with your resume. Otherwise, people may think you are trying to hide something.
    -Unprofessional picture. I recently saw a LinkedIn profile pic in which the woman was wearing a flowered halo and longingly touching a tree in the forest. You could almost smell the pachouli. As appropriate as this photo choice is for someone auditioning for a role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s suboptimal in pretty much every other context. Lesson? Invest in a professional headshot! I promise it’s worth it. Or, at the very least, use a semi-professional photograph of yourself (i.e. no flower halos).
  6. Is there any value to the endorsed skills and recommendations?
    Let’s be honest: the endorsed skills section has more fluff than Mike Lindell’s My Pillow. Case in point, 94 gentle souls have endorsed me for “research”. I may have some mad skillz, but research is not one of them (unless you count looking up a contact’s connections on LinkedIn, of course). Since most people recognize the endorsed skills are questionable at best, this section likely won’t provide much value for you.
    As for the recommendations, they tend to carry a bit more weight since they require a modicum of effort on the author’s part. But there’s also an awareness that recommendations can be written by people who may not really understand your skills and experience and/or are tit for tat (Bob, write me a solid recommendation and I’ll do the same for you). Finally, the weight of a recommendation is directly tied to the reader’s knowledge of the person who is giving it. For instance, if a hiring manager sees that the CEO of a major think tank has given a glowing recommendation for Bob, that might be impressive. But a recommendation given by Bob’s former frat brother whose last work experience with Bob was planning a blow-out kegger….not so much.
  7. Should I accept all connection requests that come my way?
    No. LinkedIn connections aren’t like Pokémon; you don’t have to catch them all. People who send random connections remind me of the networkers who think that if they collect 20 business cards at one happy hour, they are doing it right (spoiler alert: they aren’t). Curate your connections on LinkedIn so that your feed will be filled with people you genuinely want to be in your network. That way, when you sign into your LinkedIn, it will be filled with information that is useful and applicable to you. And, this isn’t a competition. Once you reach 500 connections, your profile will just read “500+” to the world anyway.
  8. What about LinkedIn messages? Do people read them? Should I send them? 
    The best answer is that people almost never read their messages with the same frequency that they read email. Given that, if you want to get in touch with someone, the best strategy is to email them directly. LinkedIn messaging should only be used as a last resort if you cannot find the person’s email address.
    If you do message someone on LinkedIn, understand that this is NOT the preferred method of communication for most professionals. In fact, you’ll probably end up annoying a hiring manager if you message them on LinkedIn instead of emailing them directly. Or, perhaps most likely, they may never even see your message! So, proceed with caution!
  9. I see that some people have an introductory paragraph in the “About” section. Do I need that or should I just launch into my experience as I would with a resume? There are no hard and fast rules here. If you would like to have one, go for it. A quick overview of yourself isn’t a bad idea on your LinkedIn, but remember just to be yourself and to keep it brief.
  10. How often should I log into LinkedIn?
    For any platform to be useful, you have to put time into it. If you are on the job hunt and actively seeking opportunities and connections via LinkedIn, sign in daily. But, for those who are just keeping up with their network through LinkedIn, once a week or so is probably plenty. Like most things, you get out of it what you put into it. Also, be sure to adjust your settings so that you receive email notifications about LinkedIn activities. That way you don’t have to sign in on the reg.

P.S. Keep the questions about LinkedIn coming! But please don’t send us questions (or photos) about goat yoga!

About Us

Claire Kittle Dixon

Claire Kittle Dixon
Executive Director
Claire has more than a decade of experience in the talent development field. She…
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Katelynn Barbosa
Director of Talent Engagement
Katelynn started her career in the Koch Associate Program and then litigated at the Institute for Justice…
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Katy Gambella
Director of Network Engagement
Katy began her career at the Institute for Humane Studies and later joined the Cato Institute…
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Stephanie Keaveney
Network Engagement Manager
Stephanie’s career started at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal…
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Wait, You’re a Nonprofit?

Talent Market is a nonprofit. We’ll wait here while that sinks in. We know it’s a crazy concept, but it’s been working like a charm since 2009.

Talent Market’s mission is to promote liberty by providing talent for critical roles within the free-market nonprofit sector.

We provide free consulting and recruiting services to free-market think tanks, policy organizations, research centers, and capacity building institutions dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government and free enterprise. (We do not work in politics, nor do we work with organizations that address social issues.) Talent Market believes that the road to prosperity is paved with freedom and that the success of our movement hinges on the talent that will take us there.

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