Connections are interpreted as the key to a successful career and they are your most valuable treasure on LinkedIn, for many reasons. Many people found jobs in recent years through their connections on LinkedIn, your connections network can be a perfect lead-generation source, investors may exist between them, and who knows maybe your next best employees are among them.
Thankfully there is a perfect source to choose the best connections from on LinkedIn. Universities and colleges are full of the most beneficial connections for every industry and thankfully there is this alumni tool for you to narrow down the candidates. Which can be a life and time saver.
Here we are going to talk about how to search alumni on LinkedIn.
But since this tool is not so popular and many of us never even heard of it, you might wonder what the LinkedIn alumni tool is. As cultivate culture states: “The LinkedIn Alumni Tool is a free tool that lets you explore the alumni networks from more than 24,000 colleges and universities worldwide.”
This is perfect for finding the correct connections. Why is that? It lets you filter the candidates in many aspects like where they live, work, or studied, what they do, the skills they have, and the way they are connected to you (in terms of degree).
It is free to use the alumni tool and the exciting thing is that it doesn’t matter if you ever studied in that college/university or not, you still can use the tool to find your target candidate.
How to search alumni on LinkedIn?
You can use this tool in different ways. Depending on what you are looking for.
1. The alma mater
LinkedIn made it too easy to use its alumni tool when you want to find people from your last school you studied in. You just need to click on linkedin.com/alumni to get directed to your LinkedIn school page.
It gets you to the latest university, college, or school page that you have listed in the education section of your profile. For instance, I attended Michigan State University and when I click on linkedin.com/alumni, I get directed to the university’s Linked page.
2. Other schools
What about other universities? Can we still use this tool? Yes, and it is just a piece of cake like the recent one. All you need to do is to open your account and type the name of the university in the search box at the top left corner of the page.
Select the correct page and once you are in, you can see the “Alumni” button in a row under the ‘Follow’ button, alongside with home, about, posts, jobs, and videos buttons.
How to use the LinkedIn alumni filter?
You know where to find it, right? Ok, now let’s see how we can work with this tool, shall we?
Imagine that you are seeking a new role and have some companies in your mind, except you have no idea how you can get into these companies.
We always can apply for different roles in one company (especially the bigger ones) but are there any more effective ways out there?
I mean all of us had sent thousands of resumes here and there in our lives for once at least and never heard back.
There is a better way. As we said your connections are your treasures, building some good relationships with people who are working in that very company has proved to be one of the most effective methods.
This is where the alumni tool comes in handy, you can find people with some specified criteria, connect them and build a connection with them and use them for having an inside referral along with your application for the position you want to get employed for.
Click on the alumni button, in the first search box you can find the initial candidates.
For example, if I want to work in Microsoft, I type the company’s name in that search box, then I can take a look at the filters and try to narrow down the candidates by clicking on the ‘add’ button on top of each filter.
For example, I want to find people who also live in Berlin, Germany, and the ones who studied marketing as well. I just entered these features into different categories and in the end, I get to three candidates but unfortunately one of them is out of my network.
But I can send a personalized invitation (which is why I strongly suggest having a look at their profile before sending them the request, to find your common points) and click on the connect button.
When you know how to search alumni on LinkedIn, there is a huge chance for you to be able to build a very strong network and achieve your goals through them, whether it is to work somewhere, find some good candidates for a position, find some great lead generators, etc. so why not use it?
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