Use These New Tools to Find Better Job Prospects on LinkedIn
When you consider how much each January requires you to re-evaluate your life and look ahead to what’s next, it’s no surprise that it’s an important time for people considering a career change. Finding a new job may look a little different than last time thanks to two new job search features on LinkedIn.
Expanding your job search
Starting today, you can search for open jobs using two more features on LinkedIn that the company says are designed to help you broaden your search to include positions you may not have considered and find a potential position at a company with corresponding values and benefits. with your personal needs. Here are the features:
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Job Collections curate jobs in a variety of categories, such as clean energy and startups, to match your values, interests, and overall work preferences. The Collections feature is located under the Jobs tab and will allow you to group jobs by, for example, whether they offer remote work, have a good parental leave policy, or are sustainability-focused. You can also view job openings in specific industries, such as healthcare, defense and space, and professional sports.
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Preferences features give you the ability to add additional job search preferences, such as location type (remote, hybrid, or on-site), full-time, part-time, or contract, and pay preferences. Jobs that match your preferences will be highlighted in green in job postings. Settings now has its own page, so you can manage it all (and job alerts) in one place.
The Settings feature also allows you to manage your “available for work” status and confidentially let recruiters know that you are potentially available.
How LinkedIn’s new features actually work
In November and December, LinkedIn conducted a study with Censuswide, surveying 1,013 working professionals in the U.S. and more than 2,500 worldwide and finding that 85% of them were considering changing jobs, up 27% from data reported last year. This is… a lot of people, which means a lot of competition. (The data also shows that people are applying for jobs more often, about 16% more per job.)
This morning after launching at 9am I was playing around with the new features on my account. Under the Collections tab, you can choose from hospitality, media, biotech, or a variety of other industries, so I clicked on “games” to see what was recommended. My profile is all about being a journalist with good communication skills, so I’ve been offered positions in copywriting and research that I would never have otherwise encountered in a real job search. In fact, I’ve also been offered writing and related jobs in non-profits, retail, and women-founded categories, so this feature is actually very helpful. In a hypothetical job search scenario, I would almost certainly have a tunnel vision when looking for a job in “journalism” and would not notice any open positions as a technical writer, brand writer, or grant writer for which I am actually qualified.
Since LinkedIn has long allowed users to set their job search preferences by type and pay, there hasn’t been much change here, but I did change my pay preferences to see if it would be reflected in the job postings I was shown. The jobs that matched my various preferences had easily visible green highlights, which I really liked.
Overall, these features can help you find jobs you otherwise wouldn’t have found, but they are only a small part of a broader search. There are still other settings to calibrate—like your location—and things to consider outside of LinkedIn. If you’re looking for a new position, include these features, but also take some time offline to work on what you really want. You can rearrange Maslow’s tried-and-true hierarchy of needs , for example, to evaluate your current job, how well it meets your needs, and what your ideal job would look like. Then create an action plan for the hunt itself, setting goals, tracking progress, and testing yourself throughout the application and interview process to ensure you’re always on the right path to finding the right job. These new tools will help to some extent, but you still have a lot of work to do.