I recently finished Growth Hacking Marketing by Ryan Holiday and learn a lot of things about it. Some of them remembered me the way I found my job in London and how I tweaked my LinkedIn profile to fit the targeted audience.
Back a year ago, I was living in Lyon (France) and was ready for a new adventure in another country. Preparing myself to find a new job, as many people, I started by updating my LinkedIn profile and by doing that, all my contacts could notice it in their news feed.
Working as a developer, it can be common to be contacted by recruitment agencies or HR team from big IT companies. From time to time, some of them dropped me a message for job offers. After my latest updates, it was more and more often.
However all of them were based in Lyon, and I wanted to move to another city. Assuming that agencies filtered by skills and location, I thought « what’s going to happen if I change my location of my profile ?». I will, at least, avoid frustration from receiving job opportunities not designed for me and will « virtually » put my profile available in London. This was probably the real hack.
LinkedIn is really good to measure traction. First I was able to receive daily / weekly emails about how many people visited my profile. At this time, when I shared news on LinkedIn, I could see how many people noticed and interact with it (click on the link, share it, like it or comment it). This was the best tool for me to measure how far my news could be seen.
Two days after changing my location, I had more request to connect than usual. It was mostly from IT recruitment agency specialists, so I’ve added all of them regardless to their details. First of all, I needed to get feedback on my profile and see how it can be valuable in London. It was a way for me to test my profile. On the other hand, I assumed recruitment specialists know each other and if you’re connected to one or two, others will notice you too, which can mean more opportunities.
At the same time, I’ve started translated tech posts I published couple years ago into English. Then I shared them one by one on LinkedIn to attract a bit more contact. A good way is also by interacting with groups : I signed in to iOS Developers Group of iPhone Developers Jobs from this time and shared or comments posts to keep my profile active.
Then comes call.
After couples days I had really good contacts with two agencies and I’ve quickly got interviews on via Skype with final startups. I’ll be honest, my first calls were terrible. The recruitment process was completely different that I get used to have with France. I’ve obviously messed it.
However, it was a good exercise, I knew what they were waiting for and could improve my answers.
For next job interviews I was better prepared and improved my approach to what I was looking for too. However, I’m more confident face to face that remote calls, so I changed the way I worked. I pressured to have more face to face interviews, and if they can have some, I’ll make sure to be there.Â
That’s how, a week later, I was in London, ready for five job interviews. My last one was with Qudini, a promising queue and booking management system for retails.
Back to France and after technical tests, I chose to join Qudini and their team, feeling it was the best fit for me.
Back to Growth Hacking Marketing and following their approach, I can see the parallel between my profile and “a product”. I tested it against recruitment agencies, quite similar to a product / market fit research. LinkedIn and their stats helped me a lot to track every interaction I can have. Finally, the way I iterated  by tweaking my profile to be more relevant for people looking for a mobile developer in London was key.
Thinking about it right now, I feel this year in London started with small changes on my LinkedIn profile.