A sculpture is seen on a terrace outside the offices of LinkedIn in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric ... [+]
LinkedIn just surpassed one billion members, with more than 49 million users visiting the platform each week. The site has evolved in the 20 years since it was established, and although career histories and open jobs are still core to the functionality, there is an increasing focus on the news feed. With more than 2 million posts each day, separating the signal from the noise can be challenging, especially when it comes to understanding how to maximize your presence on the site.
I will explain how recruiters actually use the platform, and in doing so show you how you can become more discoverable: Because the truth is, the easiest way to find a job is for a recruiter to find you.
Recruiters, on average, spend more of our time searching for candidates than we do sifting through inbound applications. Think of it as spear-fishing versus catching fish with a trawler net. We have access to a whole separate version of LinkedIn (it’s called LinkedIn Recruiter, and it’s eye-wateringly expensive). This professional version of LinkedIn allows us to see every single member on the planet. When you search the platform you can see your first, second and third-degree connections. We can see everyone. The whole billion.
Becoming More Discoverable
To make our lives easier, LinkedIn engineers built a range of tools and algorithms to help us find you. Knowing how we use these tools can help you maximize your presence on the platform. At an absolute minimum you should:
1. Upload your resume (you can do this on the “jobs” tab under “application settings”) and be sure to select yes on the “share your resume data with recruiters” toggle
2. Fully populate your career history on your profile
3. Utilize the skills functionality (e.g. if you’re a Project Manager your skills might include Agile, Scrum, Visio, Notion, etc.)
In the early days of LinkedIn Recruiter, everybody used the tool in the same way, finding candidates by searching “title”, “company”, “location” or “keyword.” As the platform has evolved, so has the way Recruiters use it. Today 60% of recruiter searches start with this standard protocol, while the remaining 40% of searches begin with skills. So quite simply if you’re not using the skills functionality, you’re invisible.
Understanding The Recruiters’ Perspective
Across the whole of LinkedIn, the average recruiter InMail response rate is 30%, and that includes folks responding to say they’re not interested. Put another way, 7 out of every 10 messages we send go unanswered. This is true for recruiters in every sector, in every geography. To help us be more efficient in our outreach there are more algorithms working in the background. For every search we perform, LinkedIn shows us subsets of candidates that “are more likely to respond” or that are “engaged with our talent brand.”
To be included in these cuts, you should:
1. Follow the pages of the organizations you you’d like to work at (some corporate pages have additional functionality that allows you to indicate you’d like to work there)
2. Follow employees at the organizations you’d like to work at
3. Interact (like, comment, re-post) with content shared directly by the company, or by the employees there that you follow
Of course simply responding to a recruiters’ messages puts you in the 70th percentile, so it’s good practice to do this even if you’re not looking. You can always refer someone who is, thereby building relationships with recruiters for the future. After all, you never know where we’ll be working next!
Open To Work Feature
Rarely has such a benign piece of functionality caused so much controversy. This past week an article with a quote that said the open to work feature “makes you look desperate” went viral. I must also note that the person quoted in that article also said, “recruiting is like dating.” It isn’t.
The LinkedIn product team built the feature in response to the first wave of pandemic layoffs, and it was designed with the express purpose of removing friction from the job search process.
The feature has two different options that allow you to indicate you’re open to opportunities, and both yield extremely positive results. The first option allows you to notify recruiters only that you’re in the market for a new job. The second option is the green “open to work” banner that is visible to all users.
Depending on where you are in your job search you may want to activate either or both features. The first feature typically results in a 40% uplift in recruiter outreach. The second feature typically results in a 20% uplift in messages from across the LinkedIn community. To double down on the earlier point about InMail response rate, activating these features results in more recruiter messages because the LinkedIn algorithm tells us you’re more likely to respond.
As a recruiter, I can’t imagine any universe where you wouldn’t want to use these features. All of the data confirms they significantly increase your chances of getting hired.
What About Applying To Jobs?
At the most aggregate level, external hires to a company come through three main channels. Year over year the breakdown is almost always the same:
- 50% of roles filled via inbound applications
- 30% of roles filled via employee referral
- 20% of roles filled via recruiter outreach
To maximize your job search strategy, you need to appear in all three groups. Much has been written about the frustration of applying to roles and not hearing anything back, and a lot of that is grounded in truth. The good news is that even just applying to jobs helps the algorithm make you more visible to recruiters from that company, although if it can feel like a thankless task. Once you’ve applied to a company the algorithm categorizes you as “engaged with the talent brand”.
The way to win in this talent market is to do everything you can to make yourself discoverable, and to ensure you’re showing up in every channel.
