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When people learn that I work at LinkedIn, I usually get one of two questions:

1. Can you help me find great people for my team?
2. How can I best use LinkedIn to land my dream job?

For those of you who are pondering question #2, clearly there are those who ask question #1 who want to find you. How do you set yourself up so that you are found by the people who might be looking for you?

[Note: for those of you who prefer pictures to words, there's a slide deck at the end of this post]

1. Use LinkedIn to Share Your Story

Your LinkedIn profile is only as good as the work you put into it. You are an asset, and you need to figure out how to market yourself appropriately by determining the right story to tell. Once you have that clarity, you can use the various sections of your profile to bring out what you want to share.

Getting to this clarity is not easy. I recommend tackling this problem by really thinking about why someone you want to work for will hire you. Just as there is no average customer out there, there is no average employer either. Specific companies, teams and people need specific skills and attitudes. Make sure you know who you are talking to and tailor your story accordingly.

Once you have your story, filling out your profile is easy. Just make sure you have a recent profile picture, a headline that summarizes why someone should be interested in you and a summary in the first person that accurately and succinctly represents who you are and what you might be interested in.

2. Grow and Nurture your Network Authentically

At every stage of a recruiting process, your network is invaluable in helping you land your dream job. Whether you are passively open to new opportunities, researching career options, applying for a job, interviewing, or negotiating your offer, your outcomes will be significantly better if you have the right people to help you.

So, connect with those that you know from various parts of your life - your friends, people you know from school, people you've worked with, and even your kids' friends' parents. This doesn't mean that you connect with people you don't know - those connections are not going to be helpful.

A connection is not the goal. You need to nurture your network so that you stay top-of-mind for others when something that fits you becomes available. LinkedIn provides various lightweight ways of letting someone know you're thinking of them. So, download our Connected app (on iOS only right now), congratulate others on job changes, endorse them for skills you know they have and reach out if you find them in the news (try Newsle to make that easy).

3. Learn from Others + Share your Insights

LinkedIn provides various tools to stay on top of industry news and trends. Your LinkedIn homepage is the gateway to finding this information, and you can tailor it by following channels, people or companies.

You can also join Groups - there's a LinkedIn Group for almost everything that you could be interested in. Within groups, you can have conversations with those that share your professional interests and make new connections that could be helpful to you. When you are ready to share your insights, you have a variety of ways of doing so. You can share articles that you've read and your opinion on these. You can also write posts like this one. By doing these things, you will continue to stay top-of-mind for those in your network.

Overall, my philosophy on using LinkedIn is to be proactive rather than reactive. This means that you use the site to build your reputation and nurture your network over an extended period of time rather than engaging when you want a new job and then retreating completely when you are not looking to make a change.

By staying engaged on a more continuous basis, those in your network will remember to reach out when a new opportunity becomes available - whether it's a new job, a consulting gig, an advisory role, or even a chance to volunteer.

I presented this information in a webinar for Harvard Business School alumni recently along with Rishi Jobanputra. The slides from that event are below, and go into additional tactical detail on getting the most out of LinkedIn.

Image from the LinkedIn San Francisco office.

Minal works in Product Management at LinkedIn. She's also a Career Coach at Harvard Business School, working with MBAs and young alums to get the jobs they want.