Three overlooked LinkedIn features to find a better paying job

About 500 million individual professionals now use LinkedIn — some to network and stay connected, but many to look for new job opportunities. Fortunately, that number also includes plenty of human resources professionals and recruiters seeking not jobs, but job candidates.

“Pretty much every company uses LinkedIn these days,” said Peter Vincent, a New York City-based human resources executive. In such an enormous pool, how do candidates and companies find each other? Three recently released LinkedIn products promise to make it easier to match seekers and recruiters, and could upend more than a few professional lives.

One will allow job seekers to let recruiters know they’re open to new opportunities without tipping off their current employers. A second can help determine the true salary range for a position in different cities. The third is a matching service targeted at the exploding freelancer marketplace.

LinkedIn Open Candidates, which launched in October and is free, promises to make it easier to find that dream job without your current employer knowing you’re in the market.

By turning on Open Candidates in LinkedIn Career Insights, your profile will be “flagged by the types of jobs you’re interested in,” Teddy Burriss, who coaches and trains people on using LinkedIn, told me. This includes location, employment level, industry, and company. Employers using what’s called a “recruiter license” can see your profile as open to a job change, but recruiters at your current company don’t see that. It’s like quietly raising a hand that is visible only to those with the right glasses.

Burriss pointed out that few recruiters are currently using the required Recruiter License, but that’s likely to start changing now that 3.8 million members have opted in. Another issue for recruiters, according to HR executive Vincent, is that the best candidates are not always those actively seeking new opportunities. “It would save some work,” he said, “but a lot of us look for passive candidates,” which would be missed in this kind of search.

While LinkedIn promises it hides the Open Candidates “signal from recruiters at your company or affiliated recruiters,” the fine print says otherwise. In fact, the company openly admits that while they “take steps not to show your current company that you’re open, [we] can’t guarantee complete privacy.” That’s both because there really is no such thing as complete privacy and because, as the site says, “there's a small chance that your career interest preferences will be visible to a recruiter at your current employer.”

My advice: Open Candidates has great potential, but it’s not yet ready for prime time. Proceed at your own risk. 

LinkedIn Salary takes on the strong cultural taboo against talking about money, which makes it challenging to know what a fair salary is for any given job. “With LinkedIn Salary,” says the company’s career expert, Blair Decembrele, “we’ve tapped into our network to provide deep insights into salary, bonus, and equity data for specific job titles.” Also factored in are experience, industry, company size, and location. LinkedIn Salary is available only to LinkedIn premium subscribers (monthly fee starts at $29.99) or to those members who share their salary with LinkedIn. (Learn more about LinkedIn Salary.)

LinkedIn Salary has better privacy protection than Open Candidates, since the company says salary data is encrypted separately from identity. It’s not even added to your LinkedIn profile.

Burriss is bullish on LinkedIn Salary, as is Vincent, who found it to be a potentially useful database. Its value, of course, will depend on how much data it eventually includes. LinkedIn says 2 million members have submitted salaries so far.

My advice: Use it. It’s most beneficial for common job titles, because — as Vincent points out — the more unusual a role is, the harder it is to amass data. Vincent also noted that job seekers shouldn’t forget traditional salary surveys, such as those provided by professional organizations and alumni associations. And, of course, use your own network.

LinkedIn Profinder is a matchmaking service for the gig economy. According to the company, the number of freelance members has grown by nearly 50% in the past five years. There are now 60,000 freelancers in more than 140 service areas, including writing, headshot photography, design, career coaching, and bookkeeping and tax filing.  Profinder connects these providers of professional services with the individuals and small businesses that need them. (Learn more about Profinder.)

Answer a few straightforward questions about your project (What is it? What’s the timeframe? Can it be done virtually?) and within a few hours you’ll receive up to five proposals from LinkedIn’s curated list of professionals. As usual, it’s important to read the fine print: “Service providers are not affiliated with or endorsed by LinkedIn.” And as Burriss discovered after submitting ten proposals, this feature requires freelancers to pay a Business premium subscription, which costs $47.99 a month.

My advice: As with any new freelance relationship, due diligence is required. If you’re hiring, ask for writing samples or portfolios, and check references. If you’re the freelancer, be specific about payment schedules, and consider asking for a deposit up front.

These new tools have lots of potential but they are only as good as the individuals who use them. Especially when it’s this early – the new features are still not widely known – we need to balance our excitement over the next great idea with caution against the pitfalls that have not yet been discovered.

Have you used any of these new LinkedIn Products? What’s been your experience? Share here.

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