Using LinkedIn Land Your Next Job And As A Leadership Tool.
- 10 minutes ago
- 5 min read
In an episode of the Zeducation Leadership Podcast, we sit down with Stuart Little, LinkedIn strategist and founder of Agency 8, to unpack why being visible online is really an act of leadership.
Losing a job can knock the confidence out of anybody. Months of applications. No replies. You start to feel invisible, and some days you feel a little useless. Most people in that season do the same thing. They polish the CV again and wait.
Stuart's whole message flips that. Leading yourself starts right there, in the quiet season, before anybody hands you a title or job.
"Leadership is not a right," Stuart told us on the Zeducation Leadership Podcast. "It's something you have to lean right into. It's a choice you have to make."
And the platform most people dismiss is the one that proves it.
Leadership Is a Choice, Not a Title
Stuart doesn't believe leadership follows a straight line. It isn't seniority. It isn't age. It isn't years in the field.
He watched it get rewritten during Covid, when change was forced on everyone at once. The businesses that came through it well looked at their own people differently. They stopped asking what someone's job title was and started asking what else they could do.
"I remember seeing businesses looking at their staff and going, so what are you into outside of work?"
An accountant by day who edits video at night. Two disciplines, one person. The moment a business sees the whole human, the conversation changes.
Know Yourself Before You Write a Word
Here is the step almost everybody skips.
Stay in a role for five years or more and it starts to define you. Someone asks what you do and you lead with the job title, because it feels like the whole answer. Then the role disappears and you're left holding a label instead of a story.
Stuart won't touch a profile until that groundwork is done.
"A lot of people don't take the time to understand themselves personally. What their true strengths are, what their capability is, and how they show up."
Get that foundation right and the rest gets easy. You stop performing a job title and start telling a story people actually engage with.
The CV Is Static. Your Profile Is Alive.
A CV only exists once you send it. Nobody reads it before that. And it needs rewriting for every role you chase.
Your profile works while you sleep. 1.3 billion people are connected globally, around 3.5 million of them here in New Zealand, and by Stuart's read fewer than 5% are properly active at any one time. The room is enormous and mostly quiet.
Then there's the part most job seekers haven't clocked. Recruiters no longer just read a CV and decide. They search you. And the AI tools now embedded in their hiring systems search you too. Stuart's numbers put LinkedIn as the second most used research source for those models, behind only Reddit.
"It's having an asset there that's constantly available, 24/7, 365, doing the work for you."
Whatever is out there is what they find. That is either working for you or against you.
The Gold Is in the Comments
This was the moment I sat up.
Most people treat the platform as a megaphone. Post enough and surely something sticks. Stuart says the real traction sits somewhere far less glamorous.
He saw a post about a guy in the gym coaching a stranger's technique, and left a proper comment drawn from his own experience about how rarely gym staff step in to help. Not "great post." Something real.
That single comment passed 20,000 views.
"You can spend a lot of time and energy on a post and not see that kind of return. What that comment did is bring people to my profile to see what I do."
And comments are searchable now. Anyone can scan yours and read your philosophy, your opinions, what you actually believe. Which is exactly where people look for alignment.
Nothing Is Gifted
The best advice in the conversation was also the least comfortable.
"Be prepared before you need it. Don't wait until you need this thing."
Most people react. The role ends, panic sets in, and they try to build a presence at speed and want results by Friday. It doesn't work like that. Like any investment, you need time in the game.
Stuart's reframe for job seekers is sharp: put yourself in the role before you've got the role. Follow the businesses you want to serve, their leaders and their teams. Learn how they work. Then write from your own experience about the problems they actually have, so that when someone there reads it they think, we need to talk to this person.
He calls it making yourself irresistible to the industry you want to be part of.
And it doesn't stop when you land the job. Your team is watching what you share. Good talent chooses leaders they can see. At the top companies the leader often has a bigger following than the brand, because people want to connect with a human, not a logo.
"Nothing's gifted. These people all have to work for it, irrespective of who you are."
Final Lesson: Get Into It
Don't sleep on it.
Show up before you need something.
Comment like you mean it.
Share the real version of you, not the safe one.
Most people who write the platform off haven't understood how it could work for them yet.
That's the whole gap. Close it.
What Being Visible Looks Like in Practice
➜ Before you post anything, write down your three real strengths in plain words. Not your job title.
➜ Follow five businesses you'd genuinely love to work for, plus their leaders, and just read for a week.
➜ Leave one substantial comment a day, drawn from your own experience, instead of writing one more post nobody asked for.
➜ Apply Stuart's filter before you hit publish: would you say this in an interview? If no, rewrite it.
➜ Give your team permission to be visible too, and back them publicly when they are.
Reflect
❑ If a recruiter searched you today, what story would the internet tell about you, and is it the true one?
❑ Who is already doing the work you want to be doing, and when did you last engage with anything they said?
❑ What is the one thing you know from experience that nobody else is talking about, and what is stopping you posting it this week?
🎧 Want to hear the full conversation?
👉 Watch the episode on YouTube
👉 More stories like this at Zeducation News
Comments