How to Build an Online Professional Presence Without Using LinkedIn

(This is a bit of a departure but I’m still waiting for my cables to use my MacBook Air and finish the Bicep work.)

On LinkedIn, saw a post by one of my connections -

“ You don’t have to post on websites you don’t like to build your ‘brand’.”

It was so simple and succinct that I went “You know what? Yeah, they’re right.” — And, after 6 years of use, hibernated my LinkedIn account on about October 18th 2023 without warning.

I can’t read outdated opinions about the workforce, see people begging for work to no avail, or horrendous hiring practices, the same advice that everyone is using but no one is getting hired with.

It’s great.

I do miss the head-nod-glance acknowledgements of my connections, who have been greatly helpful, as well as watching animators spoil future Dreamworks projects by having them on their profiles and box office news.

The ROI I was getting from LI was a headache, not a paycheck.

Anyway, that means things had to be adjusted on how to search for work and contracts (fun fact: my longest running contract was not gained through LinkedIn, shock of shocks, but Twitter)

I get a lot less recruiters finding me, but none of those conversations lead to work. If you’ve sent your resume to places like TekSystems or Robert Half, or even listed your resume on sites like Dice, people will find you at a steady clip and email.

Lost a fair portion of the audience for my blog, but that’s one more thing I’m okay with.

How can I build my online presence without LinkedIn?

If you have a portfolio, have it on the your resume.

They can’t find you on LinkedIn if you’re deactivated, but they can find you online — if you tell them where to look.

Find communities.

Slacks and Discords can be a big help. I prefer Slack because I forget to use Discord. The big thing is finding the Slacks and Discords.

Hint: Before you leave LinkedIn, look for educators, people who make courses or follow-along work — they often have off site communities. For example, apply for the Remote POC slack here, and the TechStudySlack over here. Many organizations have them — find one you’re familiar with and scout the site for information.

Get alerts from job boards.

Twitter (yeah) is still fairly good. Threads exists, and Blue Sky…exists!

I will say, the one helpful portion of LinkedIn was the job board. It had its issues, but a lot of job listings, however jank, were listed in a way that was easy to parse.

Google (and Bing) do have a very similar jobs layout if you search ``[technology or field] jobs`` in the main search box [see below] and hit the giant blue jobs banner.

It leads to this page;

See how I have some saved searches.

I’ve seen people give search strings that look for new listings on Greenhouse with mixed results,

Glassdoor and Dice apparently have communities, but I can’t say I’ve gotten them to work. I think Glassdoor has 2 different ones — one in-house, and something called Fishbowl, and Dice just says ‘connect with recruiters’, but I haven’t found individuals, just companies.

Get those email alerts.

If you want to go the ‘would love to connect!’ route, just remember that thousands of people are doing that and you aren’t standing out. Recruiters will still email you — use it there and start a dialogue. Get job alerts from places and actually apply.

…but be careful.

There are some job sites that, to the internet-trained person, simply reek of being a scam. Anything that puts clicking through to a job page without signing up and giving information like email and zip code is probably bunk. Any site charging you a membership fee is probably not telling you anything new.

I’m not your parent, so do what you want, but use your judgement!

Originally published at https://www.runtcpip.com on November 25, 2023.