How to Get the Most of Your Job Seeker Subscription

When you start a job search, your goal is to shorten the path between the day you start looking and the day you have an offer letter in hand. Standing out from a sea of applicants is key to compressing the job search timeline.

A completed LinkedIn profile that highlights your skills and strengths is a great start, but you may need to heighten awareness of your talents. Using the tools below, found in LinkedIn's Job Seeker subscription plans, can help to attract the attention of hiring managers and recruiters so you can get hired faster.

Apply for jobs as a Featured Applicant: Desirable positions may draw hundreds of candidates, and busy recruiters likely don't have time to view all the responses. When you apply to jobs on LinkedIn, you can place your profile at the top of the list by clicking the “Featured Applicant” box — improving the chances that your profile will be one of the first ones viewed by an employer. As a Featured Applicant, your name and title are also highlighted to set them apart from other applicants, giving you an extra awareness boost.

Contact hiring managers with InMails: With a basic LinkedIn account, you can only message your 1st-degree connections. A Job Seeker subscription gives you access to InMails, which you can use to reach out directly to hiring managers or recruiters who've posted a job (and follow up on your job application or ask about new opportunities), even if they're not one of your LinkedIn connections. Your message goes directly to the recipient's LinkedIn inbox and they receive a notification email at the email address connected to their LinkedIn account.

You don't need to limit InMails to hiring managers for specific jobs: consider sending them to recruiters at companies you'd like to work for to request informational interviews. Check to see if these hiring managers have LinkedIn connections in common with you — then you can send them a message and reference your mutual connection.

Most jobs are found through people you know, and InMails can help you tap into jobs via your connections and their wider networks. In the message, introduce yourself and explain how you're connected to them, such as a friend in common, and briefly outline your skills and the position you're seeking. Your chances of getting a response to an InMail is 30 times greater than getting a response to a cold call. LinkedIn even renews your InMail credit if you don't get a response within 7 days.

Find out who's checked you out on LinkedIn: You may have noticed the “Who's Viewed Your Profile” feature on your LinkedIn homepage — it tells you who has looked at your profile recently. If you have a Job Seeker account, you can view exact names and companies of these profile viewers (not just company names), providing a view into which companies and hiring managers may have reacted positively to your job application. You can then follow up with an InMail to interested hiring managers or recruiters to see if they need more information about you.

For this feature you can only see names and titles for those people who allow this information to be visible. LinkedIn members with more restrictive privacy settings will appear as “Anonymous LinkedIn User” or with a user's generic profile description like “Industry & Title.”

Share strategies with members of the Job Seeker Premium group: When you sign up for a Job Seeker subscription, you're automatically signed up for an exclusive LinkedIn group in which people trade ideas for more effective job hunting — everything from acing an interview to getting the most out of InMails. The Job Seeker group offers a fast and smart way to get your job search questions answered by peers united by a common goal: finding their next great career opportunity. Note that this group is private and doesn't show up on your profile.

Join the OpenLink Network: Just as you use InMails to contact people outside of your network, hiring managers may want to contact you even if they're not connected to you. Your Job Seeker subscription gives you membership to LinkedIn's OpenLink network, which allows anyone on LinkedIn to send you a message for free, even if they are outside of your network. Plus, you can send free messages to all OpenLink members. To enable OpenLink, go to your profile page, mouse over your name at top right, and click on Settings.

Job Seeker subscriptions offer many other benefits to help you speed up your search — find out more about Job Seeker at www.linkedin.com/jobseeker.