How To Convince Your Dad That He Should Get A LinkedIn
For my first post, I wanted to reflect on a conversation that I had with my dad a couple weeks ago about (if you can't already tell) LinkedIn. Now before I get dive into that here's a little background on my dad: he's in his mid 50s, he got his first iPhone last year, he asked me how to attach a photo to an email last week, and when I tried to explain what Spotify was to him, he got frustrated and had to excuse himself from the conversation. So you can start to imagine how hard it is to convince someone who knows relatively nothing about technology and the social web that LinkedIn is important for everyone, even people in their 50s.
The conversation started out with me asking about a friend who was interning with my dad this summer. For the record, where my dad lacks in technological understanding he makes up for it with incredible ability to form business relations. Anyways, I asked my dad how my friend was doing, if he liked the company, if the company liked him and my dad only had the best things to say about him and said he would want to hire him again next summer. I told him that I wasn't sure if my friend would come back to Atlanta, but that it was an amazing learning opportunity for him and experience that would help him gain traction in the business world in the years to come. But there was one problem: my dad doesn't have a LinkedIn page and neither does his company.
LinkedIn has become the forefront of professional social media sites and it's is the best way to promote yourself professionally on the internet, without a doubt. But for someone who doesn't need promotion (or at least doesn't think he does), how do you make them understand that it's important for them and also for their employees? It is vital because it keeps you up-to-date on industry trends, what's happening in the community, and it gives you some sort of credibility. When I told my dad that having a LinkedIn would give him a certain credibility he went into this monologue about how "his business has more credibility than anyone else he knows" and about how "you could ask anyone in the south about his company and they would know" (this is after two glasses of wine).
Realizing that this argument might not be working, I tried to explain in another way. Having a LinkedIn would help the young people that my dad has hired to advance faster in their careers. When a potential employers see that someone has worked at my dads company, all they need to do is click on the company icon. From there they can see all of the business's activities including accomplishments and who they've worked with. Its fast, its easy, and its extremely informative. If the company didn't have a profile, would an employer take the time to Google it and then read the long (and probably boring) about page to get a sense of a company? Probably not. I told my dad that having a profile would help his young employees throughout the next years of their life when job searching and also give them a certain type of satisfaction. To know that the company you worked for has a online presence is extremely comforting and stabilizing to millennials for some strange reason that I can't explain, but it just is.
It seemed to click at that point that getting a LinkedIn profile for himself and his business wasn't necessarily to help him, but rather to help the young people who wanted to work for him for a summer or out of college. And it may even help more young people find his company and realize that they might want to work for it too.
A week later I did a quick search on LinkedIn and below and behold, my dad had made a profile.
The conversation started out with me asking about a friend who was interning with my dad this summer. For the record, where my dad lacks in technological understanding he makes up for it with incredible ability to form business relations. Anyways, I asked my dad how my friend was doing, if he liked the company, if the company liked him and my dad only had the best things to say about him and said he would want to hire him again next summer. I told him that I wasn't sure if my friend would come back to Atlanta, but that it was an amazing learning opportunity for him and experience that would help him gain traction in the business world in the years to come. But there was one problem: my dad doesn't have a LinkedIn page and neither does his company.
LinkedIn has become the forefront of professional social media sites and it's is the best way to promote yourself professionally on the internet, without a doubt. But for someone who doesn't need promotion (or at least doesn't think he does), how do you make them understand that it's important for them and also for their employees? It is vital because it keeps you up-to-date on industry trends, what's happening in the community, and it gives you some sort of credibility. When I told my dad that having a LinkedIn would give him a certain credibility he went into this monologue about how "his business has more credibility than anyone else he knows" and about how "you could ask anyone in the south about his company and they would know" (this is after two glasses of wine).
Realizing that this argument might not be working, I tried to explain in another way. Having a LinkedIn would help the young people that my dad has hired to advance faster in their careers. When a potential employers see that someone has worked at my dads company, all they need to do is click on the company icon. From there they can see all of the business's activities including accomplishments and who they've worked with. Its fast, its easy, and its extremely informative. If the company didn't have a profile, would an employer take the time to Google it and then read the long (and probably boring) about page to get a sense of a company? Probably not. I told my dad that having a profile would help his young employees throughout the next years of their life when job searching and also give them a certain type of satisfaction. To know that the company you worked for has a online presence is extremely comforting and stabilizing to millennials for some strange reason that I can't explain, but it just is.
It seemed to click at that point that getting a LinkedIn profile for himself and his business wasn't necessarily to help him, but rather to help the young people who wanted to work for him for a summer or out of college. And it may even help more young people find his company and realize that they might want to work for it too.
A week later I did a quick search on LinkedIn and below and behold, my dad had made a profile.
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