Have you heard of LinkedIn’s University Finder app? It’s something LinkedIn released last year that aims to help students determine which university they should attend in order to reach their career aspirations, based on the job they want, the subjects they’re studying, the companies they’d like to work for and where they want to live. The app does this by utilising LinkedIn’s masses of user data, highlighting where people who’ve studied at different institutions have gone on to find employment.
While that functionality in itself is pretty great, it’s also one of the best ways to access LinkedIn’s comprehensive data banks. You see, LinkedIn is pretty guarded with their API. This is understandable – many users don’t want their personal career info to be available to anyone and everyone – but anonymised data doesn’t subvert any privacy restrictions. And that data, being able to sort and sift LinkedIn’s info, can have significant value for more than just prospective university students – here’s a few ways you can use LinkedIn University Finder to better inform your own marketing and outreach efforts.
1. Where to Focus When Building Relationships with Future Decision-Makers
So, the filters of LinkedIn University Finder are:
Based on the selection you make here, the top universities for your chosen career preferences are displayed below:
Pretty simple, right? But access to all that data also means you can gain insights beyond academic recommendations. Let’s say, for example, you were in charge of an up-coming IT company and you wanted to boost your profile in order to attract the best candidates and enhance future business prospects. You could choose the specific area from the study field:
Then the specific location you’re interested in:
And the results will show the most popular universities for your chosen interest in your chosen region:
Now you know, based on actual employment histories, where the majority of students in your area of expertise are studying within this region. Using this, you can work with the relevant universities to establish connections with your business – develop sponsorship or graduate programs, arrange to do talks or work with students. All these efforts can help build connections with your business, boosting brand awareness and, ideally, making your company a desired employment option among top graduates. Even if winning over future employees isn’t your goal, by making connections with future business leaders at this stage, you’re helping establish connections for partnerships when those graduates progress to decision-making levels.
This is a long-term strategy which can help strengthen community and brand awareness and can help you gain an audience within the circles of your target customers, before they’ve reached that next stage.
2. What Skills to List on Your LinkedIn Profile
This is a quietly brilliant strategy, and one I can take absolutely no credit for it. In a recent post on Mashable, Joshua Waldman outlined how you can use LinkedIn University Finder to locate which skills you should list on your LinkedIn Profile to maximise your chances of gaining employment in your preferred industry and role. The strategy (which Joshua has detailed more comprehensively in his post) goes like this:
- Find the schools with the most graduates progressing to the roles and companies you want to work for
- Go to the LinkedIn Pages for those schools and filter their listings by the company and role
- This will then show you what skills those graduates have listed on their profiles, in order of frequency – these are the skills you want to be listing on your profile to increase your prospects (assuming you have the ability to back-up these skills, of course)
Waldman recommends doing this same research with several schools and job functions to get a more comprehensive idea of the skills those who are being employed in the roles you’re seeking are listing. Once you have a spreadsheet of all the listed skills, sort them by frequency of mentions, and you have a list of what you should be including on your profile to increase your chances of getting the role you want. Pretty clever, huh?
3. Where to Target Your Ads
This data also, inadvertently, gives you an insight into where you should consider targeting your advertising. For instance, if you were trying to reach marketing consultants in Melbourne, Australia, LinkedIn University finder tells me that the most likely places those people are employed are:
I could then use this info to target my ads on Facebook or Twitter, or I conduct research into whether I could advertise in their internal publications, find ways to reach them where they’re more likely to see it. Alternatively, it also highlights where prospects are not – if I do a search for people who’ve studied ‘Hair Styling/Stylist and Hair Design’ in the Melbourne area, I find that there’s really not many of them listed on LinkedIn. Not a big surprise really, but if I were considering advertising on LinkedIn and I knew the job titles of the people I was targeting, I could enter that into the filters and work out whether there’s a sizeable enough audience on the platform to focus on.
There are a range of other ways to utilise LinkedIn University Finder’s data – the amount of professional insights available via LinkedIn is unparalleled, and being able to filter the information in a quick and user-friendly way like this can be extremely valuable. If you haven’t used University Finder yet, I recommend you check it out.