1.How do you get in touch with an individual whose name and location are known but not the email address?
I believe this is a privacy setting that the individual has turned on. He/she does not want to receive invitations from anyone who does not know his/her e-mail address. I don't know of a way around it; possibly a premium subscription?
3.Can you really find jobs using LinkedIn? I am serious about finding a better job and would like to use some contacts for it.
Yes. I've done a lot of hiring (20+ people in the last year alone). In every phone screen, I ask, "how did you learn about our opportunity?" For candidates who weren't personally referred, the answers are always LinkedIn or Indeed.com.
Our internal recruiters also use LinkedIn to find qualified, mostly local candidates who may not actively be looking. Search / recruitment firms are very expensive and typically take 20-30% of the first-year's salary as a finder's fee. It's much more economical to have an internal resource recruit via LinkedIn than to engage a search firm. This is a trend that seems to be catching on, as I've been contacted via LinkedIn by more and more internal recruiters (v. search firms).
Where LinkedIn is absolutely vital for job searching, though, is as an online resume. More and more employers check applicants' social media accounts -- not everyone checks Twitter & Facebook, but they pretty much all check LinkedIn. So make sure that your profile is highlighting the skills & experience that you want potential employers to see.
Absolutely. It's easy to customize a resume for a specific job, to make certain skills stand out for Company A, and others for Company B. That's harder to do on LinkedIn, so employers check.
Make sure your linked in profile matches your resume - I have heard HR folks look for discrepancies.
Yup.
I have used it to see if I know a connection to company or person.
Another extremely helpful way to use LinkedIn. Keep in mind that employers may also use it this way. If you're connected to Suzy Smith and I, as a hiring manager, see that and also know Suzy Smith, I may reach out to Suzy Smith for a chat / unofficial reference. If you know someone at a company, it's to your advantage to give them a head's up that you're applying or in conversations.
What I find most amusing is the "endorsement" I see for others and what people endorse me for. Most are bogus or a guess on people's part for any of us, how anyone knows my skills with a little connection is beyond my comprehension . I seriously wonder why any HR department would take the endorsements seriously.
I don't look at who endorsed or how many endorsements a person has, but I do look at the rank-order of endorsements to see what a person is "known" for. For example, if I have a person who says she is a great statistician, but statistics is way down on her list of endorsed skills behind things like project management, etc., I will more heavily scrutinize and probe around her statistical skills. It's not a red flag or even a yellow flag, but it is a valuable reference point.
