LinkedIn Job Search Tutorial 2025 | Step by Step Guide For Beginners

Do you find yourself endlessly scrolling through job listings on LinkedIn, trying to match your skills and experiences with the right opportunities? Well, tune in because in this tutorial, I'm going to eliminate your job search overwhelm and take you through a shortcut to not just find, but secure your next role using LinkedIn. And before we dive in, a quick heads up, if you have not yet grabbed your career advancement toolkit, well, now is the time. This tailored collection of resources comes complete with resumes, cover letters, follow-up job interview templates, video lessons, and comprehensive guides to help you land more interviews and stand out job offers. You can check out the special link in the description below this video for your limited time access. Now, before we jump into it, can you do me a huge favor? Hit that like button and subscribe to this channel if you haven't already done so. We provide insightful content just like this every week here on this channel. Now, we've had the privilege of helping hundreds of thousands of job seekers land their dream job offers, and we wanna do the exact same thing for you. In a world where over 95% of recruiters and hiring managers turn to LinkedIn to discover top talent, missing out just isn't an option. This platform is more than a social network. It's a place for talent, opportunities, and of course, career advancement. Now, remember, the average job listing attracts hundreds of applications. So to differentiate yourself from the competition, you need to elevate your LinkedIn approach. Now, let's get to the heart of this tutorial and reveal the exact steps to efficiently search for and apply to jobs using LinkedIn. Let's jump into our first topic, how to maximize your job search using the power of LinkedIn's Jobs feature. So the great thing about LinkedIn's Jobs feature, and I'm gonna show you guys exactly where to find this and what to do, is that it allows you to search for employment opportunities, but it also allows you to set job alerts for newly posted jobs. We know that applicants that get their application in sooner rather than later are actually considered higher. So employers are more likely to bring you in for an interview the sooner you get your application in. So that's why these job alerts are really important. Now, there's so many caveats to searching online for jobs. I'm gonna talk about those as we go throughout today's session, but again, we're talking about how to use the LinkedIn Jobs feature. Here's what it looks like if you go to LinkedIn, you're logged in, you can be anywhere on the LinkedIn screen, and you're gonna notice the Jobs tab. The Jobs tab's gonna be at the top. It's at the top navigation, or you can simply just go to LinkedIn.com slash jobs. This is going to allow you to do some pretty cool things. If I click on that tab, this is what the interface looks like. Now yours might look slightly different depending on what you've clicked on, what you're searching for, what job alerts you have, but these are the main sections. We're gonna focus on four areas in the Jobs tab. So if you go to the Jobs tab and you see other things, don't look at those except for what I'm gonna talk about today. Remember we talked about optimizing your profile on LinkedIn. You could add 20 different sections to your profile. I taught you seven sections that I want you to add, and we're optimizing just those seven. This is a similar situation. So I've got the Jobs tab up. There's four main areas I want you to look at. The very first one, which is a brand new area, I have it highlighted here, is the Explore with Job Collections. This is brand spanking new to LinkedIn. Now what this is, is it actually is a curated list of jobs across a variety of industries and companies that maybe you weren't aware of during your search. So you'll notice that LinkedIn is now categorizing jobs based on remote. You could do hybrid. You could do IT. You could do finance. It has a lot of different categories. I'm gonna show you in a second why this is so important. Now the next thing after the Explore with Job Collections, and by the way, if you guys can be logged into your LinkedIn account and be following along with me, that would be awesome. I've got Explore with Job Collections. Now this is the funny thing that LinkedIn does. I don't know why it does it, but sometimes it switches the orders of these. So one time I'll go log in and I'll look at the Jobs tab and my Still Hiring is at the top, or my Recommended for You is at the top. I don't know why they do that, but anyway, just know that that Explore with Job Collections is on there and that's a brand new feature. After that is the Still Hiring. That's the other section I want you to pay attention to. These are recommended jobs that you may have missed along the way. After that is the Recommended for You. This is based on your profile. It's based on your search history and it's based on your activity. The number one thing, if you guys want the Jobs feature to work for you, you have to have a fully optimized profile. If your profile contains random skills that maybe you did 10 years ago that you're not doing anymore like me, if it contains anything else that's not targeted to your ideal job, you're going to get recommended random positions. So we need to make sure that profile is optimized and then this section works like gangbusters if you have it optimized. Now the fourth section on the Jobs tab that I want you to pay attention to is the Left Side Navigation. So this allows you to quickly jump to different spots inside of LinkedIn. My jobs, these are jobs that maybe you saved. That screenshot on the right, that is a closeup of that left side navigation. You've got Preferences now, which this is brand new. I'm gonna show you the Preferences menu in just a second. This is brand spanking new to LinkedIn this year. This is where you're going to find that Open to Work feature and your job alerts. All of that's located there. You have your Demonstrate Skills section, which this section I'm a little bit iffy about because they had some, it's in beta, but they also had some other, like a skills assessment that you were able to take, but they've done away with the skills assessment now. So you can't even do that anymore. So I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that section. You also have an area where you can go and do interview prep if you want. You can go through their resume builder. You can go through job seeker guidance. This is, again, going to be lessons and things like that on LinkedIn from LinkedIn instructors that you can watch. And then you can go through application settings. We're going to just focus on what you need to know right now. Let's look closer at the job collections because, again, this is a new feature and I want you to know how to use it and why it's so important. Now, who's to say that this jobs feature is not gonna be available for us next year, right? There's a lot of things that they have. They roll into the process and a lot of these applications and software companies, software programs, the companies, they roll out features and then if the feature is not working, they take it away and they try another feature. If that's not working, they take it away and they do something different. So this is the feature right now that they're pushing and they want you to use and I want to show you why it's so powerful. So if you're, again, this is me just on the jobs tab. This is just a closeup of what the explore with job collections looks like. Again, we have remote, we have hybrid, we have marketing, IT. It even gives you a category for small biz, which I would definitely check that out. Easy apply, so companies that just have the easy apply feature. It also has companies that are going through their first and second round of funding. So brand new companies. Remember what I mentioned earlier, you don't always have to go for those big companies. Now, we have helped job seekers land interviews and offers at those top companies, Amazon, Google, Meta, Disney, all the big corporations. But again, the ones that are doing the most of the hiring right now are some of those mid-sized companies. So this is what it looks like. Let's say that I clicked on the remote option. Let me show you what that looks like. It's going to take me to the remote jobs that LinkedIn is recommending for me. Now, at the very top, this is brand new. If you guys have not yet seen this, and by the way, it might not be rolled out to everyone yet. I feel like what these companies do is they slowly will find a product and they build out their app or their software, and then they slowly roll out these features. So if this is not yet there for you, it should be within the near future because they're really pushing this right now. So if I were to click on just remote jobs, it's going to give me the remote jobs. Now, the one thing I want you to pay attention to here, this is why this feature is super valuable. You can set alerts right here for just those remote jobs, and you can also save the position for later. Now, keep in mind, LinkedIn is showing me 84 results. That's actually not bad. That's good. If I were to do a general search for a position on LinkedIn, it's going to give me hundreds of thousands of results. So that's why this collection feature is super powerful. I wanna show you really quickly, well, I'll show you that in a second, how to go through setting up a job alert if you don't already have one. But my next question for you is have you used this new job collections feature yet? Have you used this yet? Type yes or no into the chat. The other thing you need to keep in mind as well is that depending on where you are, where your country is or where you're located on the globe, LinkedIn slowly rolls out features to different countries at one time versus another. So you may not see that. That's okay. You're gonna still see a lot of the same things that I'm talking about. Let's look at how to set up a job alert manually. So job alerts are pretty powerful because they notify you right away if a position has been posted by a company based on your criteria. So this is what I wanna show you about just doing a general search. So I can go to LinkedIn. I can do a general search. Again, this is me on any LinkedIn page. I'm gonna use that search bar again at the top and I'm gonna type in the job title that I want. And again, you can do this anywhere on LinkedIn. You're gonna press enter. Make sure you're looking in jobs because you can search in groups, you can search in news articles, you can search posts, you can search all sorts of things, but we wanna search specifically in jobs. Everyone should have this feature. I'm gonna search for project manager. Notice what happens is LinkedIn gives me 230,000 results. So I need to narrow this down. I'm gonna go to the all filters option on the right hand side. I'm going to start filtering down based on my certain criteria. When was the job posted? What's the experience level required for the job? I can even search by company if I want to. I can search by job type. I can search things like onsite and remote. I can search location, job function, industry, yada, yada, yada. There's a lot of things you can narrow your search in on. Here's a quick example of me applying or going through some of these filters. If I go through and I filter down, I'm now going from 230,000 jobs to 22. That's a lot better starting point than those 230. So all you're doing again, let me go back to the screen. All I've done is I've searched for the job title, and then I'm going to click on all filters at the top, and I'm going to filter down based on what I think I wanna filter for. Everyone's going to be a little bit different. And then notice what happens, it gives me just those 22. Now this could be based on the location. Maybe I want just remote. Maybe I want a specific skillset. And by the way, this is the free version of LinkedIn. I am not using the premium version when I'm teaching you. This is the free version. The other thing I want you to keep in mind with job alerts. So I just showed you how to search for a job. And by the way, you have to click on the set alert toggle at the top of the page. You'll see it's at the top. I have it highlighted in that circle. That allows you to set the alert. Now let's say you wanna manage your alerts or you wanna do something different. What I want you to do is go back to the jobs tab. So we're back to the jobs tab and that preferences menu, which I told you, remember that it's new. In fact, I would love to know if any of you guys are not seeing the preferences tab. I'm curious if that's rolled out. That should be rolled out to everyone, but maybe it's not. If you are not seeing that preferences option in the left-hand side of your LinkedIn menu, let me know. So inside of the preferences tab, I'm gonna just click on that. Now that was just recently changed. It used to be job alerts. I think it was just job alerts, but now they've combined inside the preferences tab. Let me see what you'll get when you click on that. Job alerts are actually in there now. So if you're on the jobs tab, click preferences in that left-hand menu and then go to job alert. This is where if you've set up your job alerts, it's going to show up here. You can click on that arrow to edit your job alerts. And by the way, notice, because we're gonna talk about this in a second, you have that open to work feature. Notice that that's in the preferences as well. And the other thing that's in here, which I don't love, it's asking you to privately indicate your desired pay. I've talked about this before, but I only wanna share information with LinkedIn that they need to know to help me find a job. Like they are gonna want you to share everything and you can if you want, but I would highly recommend keeping track of what you're giving them, what information you're giving them and not sharing everything. Just do the bare minimum. So if I click on job alerts, it's going to take me to all my job alerts. So my project manager job that I just set an alert for, it's in here, I can delete it if I want or I can edit it if I want. Now your page might look just slightly different from mine, depending on your rollout and depending on what you have, but most of you should have at least this, something similar. So if I click on project manager, I can edit that job alert. Let me show you what you can manage with your job alert. You can manage your location, you can manage how often you want those alerts delivered, daily, weekly. You can specify if you wanna email and notification or just email or just notification. And then you can also specify if you want similar jobs recommended to you. When you adjust that, you can just click save and it will take you right back to that previous page. Here's what an email will look like as these jobs are starting to pop up for this position. So, or similar positions, if you have that option selected, it's gonna send you an email. It's like, Heather, your job alert for product manager in United States has been created, yada, yada, yada. It looks like there's one at Lowe's, there's one at the Walt Disney Company, there's one at Google, there's one at Netflix, there's one at PayPal. So I could go in and apply for any of these positions or I can click on the see all job. The thing I want you to pay attention to that's really neat that LinkedIn does is it gives you your connections. How many connections do you have? So it looks like at Google, I have 45 connections. These are people that I would say, oh, I'm gonna go apply for this product manager two position at Google. I need to start getting in touch with these 45 people right away. I'm gonna share a template with you guys in just a second to not only reach out to a colleague, but to reach out to a recruiter. So you're gonna wanna get your screenshotting tools ready because we're gonna do that in just a second. I wanna quickly show you how to analyze a job description on LinkedIn. So there's really two main categories I want you to look at. I'm in my jobs tablet, say I could click on any recommended whatever sections and I can go and look at any of these jobs. I can even be using the job collections and I can click on any of the jobs that it's listing. Most of the positions will look similar to this. So on the left, I have all the opportunities, all the positions, and then on the right, I have the job title. So notice I clicked on still hiring and there's nine positions that LinkedIn is recommending for me. Keep in mind, you need to have your profile totally optimized for this to work. You've got your job description. At the very top, it gives you key details. This is what I really want you to pay attention to. Number of applicants for the position. Some positions even list salary, which is awesome. If the position is remote, onsite, or hybrid, how many employees the company has. Keep in mind, when I mentioned earlier that those mid-sized companies are doing a lot of hiring right now and some of these larger companies that we know are going the other direction, doing layoffs. Look for those mid-sized companies. It will also show you the name of the hiring manager or who the hiring manager or recruiter is, which is a super bonus. Some companies don't even include that. It includes the skills that they're looking for. So notice right below the recruiter's name, I can now see the key skills that they have listed that they want that person to have. I can now take those skills and I can say, oh, I've got to get those skills on my profile. And remember, I showed you yesterday how to add skills, including the skills section, plus I gave you a screenshot of how to add it to your about section, which you can add up to five, and then how to add it to each position, which you can add up to five. Those skills should be on your profile. Now, the next thing that you want to look for, and we're gonna talk about the apply versus the easy apply button, is below that you'll have apply and save. Let me mention this too, because I don't have this section highlighted, but notice it says craft a message to the hiring team with AI. If I click on that message tab and I don't have LinkedIn's premium version, I can't have them help me with a message using AI. I have to purchase their premium version. Bypass that, go to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT the right questions to help you with that message. So don't feel like you have to purchase into the premium version of LinkedIn. Now, after that, the very bottom part is your job description. Now, the reason why I am breaking this down for you is because when I talk with you in just a second about recruiter spam and fake job postings, fake job postings don't always have all this great information. So that's what you really want to be paying attention to. All the clues that you need are going to be located in that job description. If you have a job description and you can now take that job description and pop it into ChatGPT and say, hey, can you extract the top five to 10 key skills this employer is wanting for their ideal candidate? Here's the job description for the position. Give it the job description and it's going to give you a nice list of five to 10 key skills that you know you now need to go in and sprinkle into your resume, sprinkle into your cover letter, sprinkle into your LinkedIn profile and really build your interview stories around those. I wanna share some templates with you guys. I'm gonna share two of them. So this is your reaching out to a colleague template. This is going to streamline the entire process for you. So take a screenshot of that. This is where we're gonna say, hey, give the person's name, hope you're doing well. I recently found a job opening at blah, blah, blah, the company name. It aligns perfectly with my skills and aspirations. I'd like to hear about your experience at this company. How do you find working there? Any insights you can provide about the company culture, the team dynamics or the work environment would be greatly valued or of great value. However you wanna mention that. And then you'll go on to say, I'd appreciate any guidance that you can provide, like perhaps put in a good word for me with the hiring team. And then you could say your recommendation would mean the world to me. So that's a template that you're going to use if you wanna reach out to someone that works for a specific company, which I'm going to tell you time and time again, this is the direction you wanna go. You always, if you can find a company that you know someone that works there, your chances of landing a position with that company increase dramatically. I'm gonna share with you guys tomorrow, Mark's story. He was one of our Academy members who was a VP at Disney 20 years and was just laid off with all their round of layoffs. Well, it wasn't just, time goes fast, but one of their big rounds of layoffs. And one of the number one things he did is he tapped into his network from day one. And that's one of the reasons why he succeeded like he did. Now here's another template for you. I'll take my face off here in just a second as well. So you can see that and let me read that one to you. So this one is if you wanna reach out to a recruiter. So going to say, hi, so-and-so, my name is, give your name, I recently applied for the whatever position with the company. So remember you guys, LinkedIn asks, hey, use our AI assistant to compose a message. You don't need to do that. This is the template that you can use. And if you even need to go and write this template in and then go ask chat GPT to help you with it and make it even better than you can. We're going to say I applied for this position. I've heard so many great things about the company and I know without a doubt my skills and expertise in the area of, and mentioned those area or your skill or any sort of accomplishment that relates to the position will be a great asset to your organization. If I can provide additional information to move the hiring process forward, please let me know. So again, you guys have that as an option so you don't have to use LinkedIn's AI assistant. So quick question for you. What job title are you going to set a job alert for? Or if you already have a job alert, what job title do you have a job alert set for? And it's pretty easy to do these job alerts. I know sometimes people are like, ah, I'm so confused, there's so many options, but I basically gave you the exact steps to take to set up a job alert. So what job alert will you set up in LinkedIn? While you're sharing the job alert you're going to set up on LinkedIn in the comments below this video, don't forget to grab your copy of the Career Advancement Toolkit for some stellar video lessons, templates, guides, and instructions to help you land your next big career opportunity a lot faster. The special limited time link is in the description below. And for even more LinkedIn strategy, click or tap the video on this screen. And if you enjoyed this tutorial, be sure to tap the like button and subscribe to this channel for more videos just like this. And I'll see you in the next one.