No, LinkedIn’s ‘Open To Work’ banner does not make you seem desperate

Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: Hey there. I’m Sarah Doody, host of the career strategy podcast. Many professionals are seeking more impact, flexibility, growth, and let’s face it, getting paid what they’re worth. But how do you unlock this in your career? It starts with strategy. I’m taking you behind the scenes of what’s working for my career coaching clients. You’ll hear strategies and actionable, yet sometimes against the grain, advice for how you can be the CEO of your career and stop dreading Mondays. Ready to level up your career? Let’s get after it. Welcome back to another episode.

Sarah Doody [00:00:41]: And today, we are going to dive right in and address a really hot topic, which is, does LinkedIn’s open to work feature make you look like a desperate candidate? Now if you’re busy, my short answer is no. It does not make you look desperate. I totally recognize that every time you log in to LinkedIn, you see conflicting opinions about this. Right? Some people say it’s very useful. Other ones say it makes you look desperate. So let’s look at this from a really strategic perspective, so that you can decide for yourself if you are going to use open to work on LinkedIn. Now in case you’re not familiar with LinkedIn’s open to work feature, essentially, it helps you communicate to other people on LinkedIn that you are open to work, and it does this through a couple of things. Number 1, it can add a green banner around your profile photo which says open to work, and it can also tell recruiters that privately.

Sarah Doody [00:01:53]: So to be totally clear, when you turn on open to work there is an option where you make that visible on your profile photo with the green banner, and there’s also an option to let recruiters know and not put the green banner on there so maybe your colleagues or your boss see it that you are open to work. That’s the feature in a nutshell. Now, I know you see a lot of conflicting opinions about this feature on LinkedIn and before we dive into why I think it doesn’t make you look desperate, I want to give you a bit of life advice around what to do when you see these conflicting opinions about this online. A couple of things to think about. Number 1, a lot of people on LinkedIn are trying to give hot takes so that they themselves get a bunch of likes and comments and go viral on LinkedIn. So you always have to assess, like, what is the intention and goal of this person who is telling me Linkedin’s open to work feature makes me look desperate. Another thing I would ask, you to consider is does this person even talk to recruiters and hiring managers? Have they hired themselves? Is this just an opinion that they have formed or do they have the knowledge, the insight, the research to indicate that it does not make people look desperate because there’s a very big difference between people giving hot takes on LinkedIn and people offering advice that is backed in research. Alright.

Sarah Doody [00:03:40]: So let’s dive in. Now, first of all, where did the open to work feature come to be? It happened in 2020, and I wanna read you part of the announcement post that the CEO from LinkedIn made about the open to work feature. Here’s what they said. He said, for so long people were told to keep it quiet if they were looking for work, but we know from our data and our conversations with customers that recruiters want to know who is available. Communities want to know who to support, and members want jobs. So we launched Open to Work, a simple LinkedIn profile photo frame that says just that. You’re looking for your next opportunity. Nearly 2,500,000 members have adopted the open to work banner to date.

Sarah Doody [00:04:38]: Now this is back in 2020. And they went on to say that early results show members with the open to work photo frame are receiving 40% more in mails from recruiters and 20% more messages from people they’re connected to on LinkedIn. That is directly from the CEO of LinkedIn, and we will link to this announcement post in the show notes so you can read it for yourself. So as we just learned this open to work feature was rooted in research that LinkedIn did back in 2020. And I would remind you that if people were not using this feature and if recruiters and hiring managers were not finding it valuable, more than likely LinkedIn would have removed this feature from the LinkedIn platform. Right? They’ve done this already. Remember when LinkedIn had stories? Stories didn’t last very long because no one was using them. So I think it’s safe to assume that LinkedIn’s data tells us recruiters and hiring managers still today find the open to work feature helpful in helping them identify candidates who are more likely to respond to them and engage with them so they, the recruiters and hiring managers, can find and hire candidates faster, which if you’re a recruiter and hiring manager and you can hire people faster, isn’t that the dream? Alright.

Sarah Doody [00:06:18]: So let’s dive into some reasons why you should consider turning on the open to work feature. Number 1, it’s going to give you visibility to recruiters. As we just learned, turning on open to work is helping you signal to other people and recruiters and hiring managers that you are looking for a job. Now if you’re not familiar, there is a part of LinkedIn called LinkedIn recruiter. This is where recruiters and hiring managers can pay to use special features within LinkedIn recruiter to find and manage candidates that might be a fit for roles they are hiring for. And the way that turning on LinkedIn’s open to work feature helps you become more visible to recruiters and hiring managers is because literally inside LinkedIn recruiter, there are options for recruiters and hiring managers to see specifically candidates who have turned on the open to work feature. So the green banner can signal to your peers and non recruiters and hiring managers that you’re looking for a job. But also when a recruiter is in LinkedIn recruiter actively going through candidates and potential candidates, if they wanna only see candidates that have open to work turned on, they can do that.

Sarah Doody [00:08:00]: So if you wanna increase your visibility to those people, turning on open to work can help you be more visible within LinkedIn recruiter. Another reason why it’s helpful to turn on the open to work feature. As much as you might think that just posting on LinkedIn will signal to people that you’re open to work and looking for a new opportunity, anytime you post on LinkedIn it’s not as though everyone you’re connected to actually sees that post. Right? Think of your own experience when you’re on LinkedIn scrolling the feed, you’re kind of just skimming through the posts and there’s a pretty big chance that you are missing posts that people have made just because of the algorithm. Right? So if you just post once and say, hey everyone, I just wanna let you know I’m looking for a new opportunity blah blah blah. There’s a huge likelihood that a very small percent of people you’re connected to will actually see that post. So turning on the open to work feature specifically when it adds that green banner and it’s very public, that is going to serve as a visual reminder many many places within the LinkedIn experience. Right? So if someone is in their LinkedIn messages and you send them a message, if your profile has that green banner, now we’ve all been trained to know the green banner means you’re open to work.

Sarah Doody [00:09:43]: Or if you’re commenting on people’s LinkedIn posts and someone is kind of skimming through the comments and they see your profile with the green banner, that is going to signal that you are open for work. So it’s not just about increasing your visibility to recruiters and hiring managers, it’s also about increasing your visibility when you are engaging on LinkedIn, meaning posting, commenting, liking, etcetera, messaging people in the inbox. Right? Alright. The third reason why you should consider turning on LinkedIn’s open to work feature is that it could help increase the likelihood that people respond to your LinkedIn messages and in mail messages. Now why would it increase? Well, think about it. If you’re a busy recruiter hiring manager and you’re going through your messages on LinkedIn, you want to not waste your time. Right? What I mean is you want to spend your time engaging with people that might be more likely to respond to your messages, to be interested in the opportunities that you might be hiring for. So if a recruiter or hiring manager sees someone in their inbox that has the green banner, they may be more likely to engage with those messages.

Sarah Doody [00:11:16]: Right? Now this is not for sure true for every recruiter on the face of the earth. I’m generalizing a little bit. However, if you think about the qualities of a recruiter or hiring manager, like I said, they’re busy. They’re trying to potentially hire for multiple roles. They don’t have time to waste. They want to engage with people that are not going to ghost them because ghosting happens on both sides. Right? So if you put that green banner on your profile, you may notice that you see an increase in the number of people replying to messages that you are sending to either totally cold relationships with people you’ve not engaged with yet or to more warm relationships with recruiters and hiring managers that maybe you’ve already been communicating with. So if you are on the fence about open to work and you are worried that it’s going to make you seem desperate, I really challenge you to step back and look at the data.

Sarah Doody [00:12:22]: Right? Don’t just believe every LinkedIn post that’s kind of click baity telling you that open to work is bad and desperate and a bad look, etcetera, because let’s face it, many of those individual people on LinkedIn saying that and major news publications out there who have lots of articles about this are also trying to get clicks to their articles so they can make more money from ads or if you’re a person on LinkedIn get more followers, reactions, etcetera. So it’s really important to think about the big picture there. And personally, I think the benefits outweigh any risks to turning on the open to work feature. I would also argue that if someone sees the open to work banner and makes the assumption that you are desperate, maybe you don’t wanna work for that person anyway. Right? Alright. So remember if you, don’t want everyone in the world to know that you’re open to work, there is that option to make it so it’s only being visible, kind of privately to recruiters. And again, we’ll link to this in the notes so you can read a couple of LinkedIn help articles that walk you through this step by step. But if you’re struggling your job search, if you’re not getting interviews, if people are not replying to messages you’re sending, maybe just do an experiment.

Sarah Doody [00:13:54]: Turn it on for like 2 weeks and see if you notice a difference. Chances are you will. Alright. I hope that clears up confusion around the open to work feature, and check the show notes for a couple of other articles and podcast episodes that we have about how to stand out on LinkedIn and how to announce you are open to work. Because here’s the thing, when you turn on the open to work feature it’s going to create a very generic and frankly boring post for you to put on your profile. And because it’s very generic for everyone who turns on the feature, most people tune that post out. Right? If you take 5 minutes to tweak that post, it’s going to help you stand out. So in the show notes, I’m gonna link you to an article about how to announce your open to work on LinkedIn after you turn on the open to work banner.

Sarah Doody [00:14:57]: Alright. That is it for today. If you found this helpful before you go, please hit pause and give this podcast a rating in whatever app you are listening to us on. This helps us reach more people so that they too can have less struggle and more ease in their job search. Alright. That is it for today. I will talk to you next week. See you later.

Sarah Doody [00:15:28]: Thanks for listening to the career strategy podcast. Make sure to follow me, Sarah Dutti, on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. If anything in today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it. Tag me on social media or send me a DM. And lastly, if you found this episode helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with a friend or give us a quick rating on Spotify or review on Apple Podcasts. Catch you later.