Dear Expatica “I am not a tourist” LinkedIn workshop participant:

As promised, I send a few short tips which illustrate some of the points I made in the workshop. I hope I am able to cover roughly what I was speaking about during the presentation, but if not, you may always ask a specific question about LinkedIn functionality to the LinkedIn moderators or to me.

The following tips will help you

Expand the number of relevant results you find in a search Find good profiles of people working in roles/industries you’re targeting, so you can ‘borrow’

their key words and phrases

1) First, make a list of the key words and phrases you already know about yourself which are related to

Your degrees/education/certificationsIndustries in which you have worked

Functional areas in which you have workedSkills you have

Languages you speakEtc.

2) Next, use these key words and phrases to search for groups you should join. You can find them by selecting ‘groups’ in the search field in the upper right hand corner of the screen and entering the key word/phrase. You can also join groups related to being an expat, to your home country, your hobbies, interests, alma maters, and former companies. You should definitely join LinkedIn HR. *If you don’t want current employers to see your activity on LinkedIn, you can hide groups on your profile and turn off activity notifications.

3) Good. Now you have joined some groups which will contain the profiles of people who are working in companies, jobs, industries, and roles in which you are interested. You can search for more relevant groups by searching for people who are in the roles/companies to which you aspire and seeing if they are in groups you should be in.

4) Now, start collecting the key words which should be on your profile (if you want to reflect your experience well or would like to turn up in recruiter searches). Go to ‘more’ in the top horizontal menu, and select ‘skills & expertise’ from the drop down menu:

5) Enter the most obvious skill or experience you have into the initial page and then look to the left hand of the results to see relevant skills or experience you might be leaving off your profile. You will also find a list of people who feature that skill prominently in their LinkedIn profile, so they may be a good indicator of which kind of language to use in order to get into that field. Finally, on this page to the right, you will also find a small list of companies with the largest percentage of employees who list this skill on their profile:

6) Now – in order to further focus on which jobs are out there in the Netherlands and at which organizations, start running people searches based on questions like:

“at which industries are the most people with XXXXX for a skill working in the Netherlands?”

Take, for example, “production assistant”. Type those words into the meta search field in the upper right hand corner of the screen, select ‘’Netherlands’’ as location, and you will see the top industries

for Production Assistants in the Netherlands. You can also narrow down location by areas (for example, Amsterdam area or Utrecht area):

7) Since you’ve joined groups related to your functional experience (or the direction you want to go forward) and your industry exposure (or the industries you want to go into), you should now be able to look at the profiles of people who share those groups in common. You can see where they work, their job title, how they describe their activities, and how much experience they had when they took that job.

8) You can also search for companies in the ‘people’ meta field. Once you use the search filters on the right hand side of the screen, you can select for all people working for that company in the Netherlands. In order to target companies which might consider hiring internationals,

you need to take a look at two factors: of the profiles of the people working inside that company – how many are in the Dutch language? How many of the people have obviously Dutch last names (or last names that would suggest they have grown up here, i.e., names of Turkish or Indonesian origin.) If most of the profiles are in Dutch and most of the people at the company are Dutch nationals, you will need to provide a skill or expertise to that company which is difficult to find within the Netherlands in order to be considered for employment if you do not have a work permit (education and salary requirements also apply). If, however, you do have a work permit but do not speak Dutch (but do speak English), look for a company or employer where 1) the clients speak English or 2) your colleagues would be speaking English (even if Dutch), 3) the majority of employees are not of Dutch origin (remember to look into joining expat networking events and LinkedIn groups!) or 4) the company has a compelling reason to need your specific experience/talent.