22.03.2024 Today’s Insights from HBR: Optimizing Candidates’ Digital Professional Presence (DPP) on LinkedIn
Dear Students,
Q: What’s one of the most important – yet sometimes the most challenging – roles our coaches can play amongst ambitious international students like you? A: Helping young talent to understand why it’s so valuable to create a powerful LinkedIn profile (and then to use it to initiate and conduct informational interviews – aka “coffee chats”). As the concept of LinkedIn, and Western-style networking more generally, can be quite foreign (no pun intended) to our candidates, they may not immediately appreciate the return on investment (ROI) of the time and effort associated with devising a presence on yet another social media platform.
With over 1B LinkedIn users (at last count), however, the time to craft an engaging profile is now! For all of the reasons highlighted in this article: HBR article on Ways Your LinkedIn profile can Help Boost Your Salary, let’s urge our new grads, and those on their way to graduation, to build and leverage a strong LinkedIn identity, or what the authors call “digital professional presence,” to communicate a personal brand that conveys a perception of being a rising professional worth getting to know.
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Our digital presence impacts how others perceive us. A simple résumé and a list of references no longer captures the essence of our professional capabilities. In this article, the authors explain how the intentional management of our online personas can have a positive and measurable connection to pay. To measure the effects of digital presence on compensation, they analyzed a sample of 1,741 executives who changed jobs between 2004 and 2011. Their investigation focused on whether their digital professional presence (DPP), as measured by the amount of content displayed in their personal LinkedIn profiles, correlated with differences in compensation. They found that a more enhanced DPP is positively linked to compensation — but that the strength of connection varies depending on certain factors: seniority level, race, gender, and geography.
hbr.org
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The sooner our aspiring students begin forging such relationships – even tentatively – the quicker they may reap the rewards of their efforts. Our coaches have enough experience to know this is the case and the influence skills to inspire our talent to get started.
Wishing you an evening where you can be fully “present” – digitally or otherwise!