First, the good news: Employers are expected to hire 10.2 percent more college graduates this year than they did from the Class of 2011, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The bad news? It’s still a really tight job market for young people, with one of every two recent grads either unemployed or underemployed.

How can you be among the fortunate ones? As someone who has guided college students to careers for the past ten years, I can tell you that it takes hard work, persistence and — perhaps most important — the guts to step out of your comfort zone. Here are some tips on how to use LinkedIn to be a courageous post-college career seeker:

1. Show your stuff. While resumes are limited to one page of standard-format, bullet-pointed information, your LinkedIn profile can go way beyond the basics. The information on your resume and profile definitely need to match (job titles, employment dates, key accomplishments, etc.), but think about LinkedIn as an expanded portfolio of who you are and what you can do professionally. Include a well-written, confident summary statement both to explain what you offer to employers and to show your written communication skills. Beneath that, fill your Specialties area with keywords representing all the skills you gained during your college years.

Next, don’t be shy about including all professional experience you have, even if that experience was unpaid or part-time, such as a spring break internship or after-school tutoring. If you don’t have much paid work experience, you can showcase volunteer work, school projects, internships and extra curricular activities.

Add additional sections to your profile in areas where you particularly excel, such as standardized test scores, volunteer work, honors or awards, or a creative portfolio of your visual work.

Finally, collect a few recommendations from professionals who are willing to publicly sing your praises, such as a professor, an internship manager or a boss from your summer job. Just remember to ask each person to vouch for you in specific and professional terms, such as “Robert demonstrated excellent attention to detail and budgeting skills as head of the student government fundraiser,” rather than “Robert is a great person and very smart.” Although it may feel weird, it’s okay to prompt your recommender with a few bullet points of what to include in his or her recommendation (once that person has agreed). And remember that you have to be connected to a person on LinkedIn to request a recommendation (see the next tip for strategies on growing your network).

2. Leverage your alumni network. One of the major benefits of a university education is the vast community of alumni you join when you graduate. Don’t wait another minute to tap into this network now that you’re a part of it. Trust me as someone who graduated from college 16 years ago that I’m always thrilled to receive an email or LinkedIn request from a fellow grad of my alma mater. I love sharing some ideas or guidance in exchange for the good feeling of helping someone whose shoes I was in not that long ago.

To tap into your alumni network, check out LinkedIn Alumni, a tool that shows you where your school’s alumni live, where they work and what they do. Just click on the city where you’d like to live or the profession you’d like to enter and a range of graduation years (you can select all years to get the broadest results or search for recent grads who may be in jobs similar to the ones you want) and you’ll discover alums who meet the criteria you’ve selected. You can also find alums by joining LinkedIn Groups for alumni of your university — simply visit the Groups Directory and search by the name of your school.

When you come across someone you admire, someone who’s posted an interesting discussion or someone who works at a company you’d like to join, gather up your courage and send that person a LinkedIn connection request. Keep your message short, simple and polite: “I recently graduated from ABC College and I’m hoping to start a career in the healthcare industry. I came across your LinkedIn profile and really admire your career path. Would you be willing to offer some advice or ideas on breaking into the field? I would be so grateful for a brief phone call or just a few tips by email. Thank you!”

You can use the above strategy with other contacts as well by connecting on LinkedIn to friends, neighbors, family members, former professors and advisors and other professionals. Upload your address book to LinkedIn and start reaching out. Even people who’ve know you your whole life will view you differently when they interact with you in the professional context of LinkedIn.

3. Engage with employers. When I ask students if they comment on employers’ LinkedIn status updates or respond to recruiters’ group discussion posts, they often say, “No. I don’t want to say something that will hurt my chances of getting hired.” While of course you need to be careful what you say (never criticize the company or share too much personal information), it’s a mistake not to engage with companies that clearly want to engage with you. After all, that’s why they’re using social media in the first place!

First, follow every potential employer by visiting its Company Page. When you see that employer update its status with company news, an article or an event announcement, leave a brief, thoughtful comment. Then, when you apply for a position, you will have a track record of interest and engagement with that employer. It’s like showing up at job fairs and company information sessions on campus — you want to become a familiar face online as well as offline.

What other ways has LinkedIn helped your post-college job search? Please share in the comments!

May inDay was the LinkedIn For Good (LIFG) Foundation’s first Pro Bono inDay, a day focused on empowering employees to use their skills and talents to give back. We thought it would be the perfect opportunity to scale our volunteer trainings globally.

We have always been encouraged to volunteer at different organizations during our InDays and these experiences inspired my colleague Ariana Younai and I to take this May inDay to the next level by organizing an event around non-profits. Along with the support of our coworkers, we created a series of trainings to help jobseekers leverage LinkedIn to manage their careers, recruited our colleagues to volunteer, and worked with a few local nonprofits to conduct the trainings at their offices.

On May 18th, employees hosted four “Connect You: LinkedIn for Good Foundation Workshops” in offices around the globe. Teams and individuals worked with nonprofit staff and their clients to train them on how to leverage LinkedIn to find job opportunities, manage their careers, search for those who are hiring, and position themselves as best they can for today’s job market.  Our goal is to scale this effort by reaching the nonprofits who work with job seekers and then they are empowered to teach the lessons.

LinkedIn employees worldwide were extremely enthusiastic about getting involved. Dublin, London, and New York held successful Connect You workshops in their offices. Toronto, Chicago, Omaha, Australia and Japan are planning to organize sessions in the coming months.

In our Mountain View headquarters, we hosted over 75 attendees from 14 organizations such as Upwardly Global, JVS and Goodwill of Silicon Valley. The attendees learned and experienced LinkedIn’s culture firsthand through an interactive introduction from CEO, Jeff Weiner and a wrap-up from Head of Social Impact Meg Garlinghouse. Our guests found the workshop impactful and especially enjoyed all the 1:1 conversations with LinkedIn employees. Many plan on sharing their new knowledge with other members and organizations in the community.

We are humbled and inspired by all our colleagues who volunteered and helped bring this vision to life. It was amazing to see so many excited LinkedIn employees using their skills for good and are looking forward to future LIFG Foundation Pro Bono inDays and opportunities to continue making an impact in our communities.

Check out the rest of our Photo Album with InDays from across the globe

At the end of the day, not all to-do lists are created equal and the quality of your list is tied to your success. So, does your to-do list need a makeover? Find out how here (right after the infographic):

Best ways to do a To Do List Makeover:

1. Make a list…and put everything on it:  Unless you’re craving the pleasure of the ‘scratch-off’ that comes with completing a task, it’s not likely you’re listing tasks like bathroom break, call mom, shop Gilt, and chat with Jenna in accounting, but the fact of the matter is there’s a lot of our day that we spend dilly dallying.

Most of us need a little down time over the course of the day to take a breath and stretch our legs, but it’s worth finding out if you’re spending an inordinate amount of time on unproductive tasks.  One of my favorite ways of shocking people is to ask them for one week to make a record of all the time they spend on on-work essentials.

10 hours, 20 calls and 15 to-die-for-sales later, it puts the reality of your to-do list in perspective.   You can have non-productive time in your schedule each day, but just be sure to add it to the list. It will quickly become clear why you didn’t get to that report.

2. Build an efficiency routine: Having spent some time on a farm in my youth, it didn’t entirely surprise me to learn that LinkedIn found professionals working in agriculture claim to be most productive: 83 percent stated that they regularly fulfill most of all of their planned tasks. The regularity of routine (due to sunlight, seasons and the fact that if you don’t feed the pig, the grass, the chickens… well, they die) is real motivation to get your to-do’s done and something those of us outside of agriculture can learn from.

With 26 percent of the professionals stating that they are easily distracted, having a regular list of tasks that need to get done each and every day will help not only keep you focused but also ensure you’re able to respond to inevitable diversions of your attention.  For example, if your boss walks by your office and asks what you thought of the latest industry news, you’ve already read LinkedIn Today and can thoughtfully respond; or if someone in your industry backs out of a speaking gig and you happened to connect with the organizer last week, he may end up asking you to come to the rescue.

Starting your day with a list of efficiency to-do’s, including: being up to speed on industry news, contributing to LinkedIn Group discussions and reaching out to key contacts on LinkedIn, is the key to getting the things on (and off) your list done!

3. Conquer the dregs: You don’t need to be an expert to-do-er to know the trap of the dregs. These are the things that you find on your list again… and again… and again because they are either hard, non-essential or are things that frankly, you just don’t want to do.

This is the part of our list that literally and figuratively hold us back from the satisfaction and motivation that come from a clean slate. Write down your dreg list and divide it into the three categories. For the ‘hard’ pile, go to LinkedIn Answers and ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and ask for insight. You don’t need to do it alone, and hard problems are most often solved through group-think – or rather, by someone who’s also endured the same ‘hard’ problem and knows how to solve it.

The non-essential pile should be reviewed by a trusted colleague (this list more often than not really should be in ‘hard’ or ‘don’t want to do.’) If in fact, these are non-essential tasks, so take them off. The ‘don’t want to do pile’ is my favorite. The key to this list is delegation.   Do an Advanced People Search to find someone to take on the task. Whether it ends up being a willing intern or new vendor, your to-do list just got shorter!

In the Bay Area alone, there are more than 240,000 professionals on LinkedIn in engineering and related roles. They use LinkedIn to establish their professional profiles, build their networks and get the insights they need to be great at their jobs. They also use LinkedIn to learn more about companies of interest and their employees. This includes visiting profiles of employees looking for common connections, checking out LinkedIn Company Pages, and following companies using the LinkedIn Company Follow button to keep up to speed with relevant news and career opportunities.

By focusing on companies with fewer than 500 employees on LinkedIn, and activity among Bay Area engineers between January and March, we can surface insights into which startups are attracting the interest of this scarce talent resource.

Three major takeaways stand out for which startups Bay Area engineers find most appealing:

1) “Big data” is big. LinkedIn knows how valuable big data is and our own big data powers this blog post. And it seems Bay Area engineers are looking to embrace similar opportunities, propelling big data companies to four of the top ten spots (Cloudera, Palantir, Hortonworks, & Splunk).

2) Networking matters. Our top 2 tech startups, Arista Networks (hardware) and Nicira (virtualization software), are taking different approaches to transforming networking, but are both red hot with Bay Area engineers.

3) Consumer brand carries over to talent brand. Box, Square, and Pinterest are well-known brands beyond the engineering community, blending strong consumer awareness with a growing employer brand.

Ever changing. Silicon Valley moves at record pace, and since March already both Yammer and Instagram (being acquired by Facebook) have made impressive strides with engineers, so we’ll be keeping an eye on which new companies vie for a place on the leaderboard.

Stay tuned as we continue to mine our data and dig up more nuggets to help better understand how companies beyond Silicon Valley can attract different pools of talent.

If you’re interested in tackling some really big data, and think you can build brilliant products to connect talent with opportunity on a massive scale, we’re hiring.

One of the key design principles that drove the approach for the visual change was to simplify the experience; creating an elegant, delightful and customized experience for news consumption.

Simple and Engaging Interface

One of the core focus areas for LinkedIn Today has been to design a user interface that is engaging and simple to use. The default magazine theme layout creates a nice page hierarchy that allows users to quickly scan and identify the most interesting and relevant news and content.

It also gives users an overview of who’s sharing articles in your network – a great way to find like-minded people. Users can use the “Share” and “Save” buttons to share in their network in a timely fashion and save articles for reading later.

Easier Customization Experience 

You’ll also notice that we’ve made changes across the product experience to offer further customization of news so that members can receive the most timely and relevant news impacting their peers and industry. You’ll see this when you click on the “Customize your news” tab on the right hand module, as well as when you click on the gear setting icon on the upper right corner of the page. Those links will lead you to the news setting page where you can easily follow more industries & sources, as well as change the news email settings.

We know that having access to realtime information and insights can be just the competitive edge you need to deliver a productive meeting as well as help you be empowered for your workday. And we’re thrilled that we’re able to keep coming to you with new ways to make it even easier to be more productive and successful.

As you can imagine, we are continually enhancing the news experience on LinkedIn. In the meantime, we look forward to hearing what you think about the new streamlined experience.