Use The "Open To Work" Option

Intro

Did you know recruiters can search by candidates who are open to work?

That’s one of the many options we have using LinkedIn Recruiter when sourcing for profiles just like yours.

We use this option because it gives us a chance to access more “active” candidates vs. “passive”. An active candidate is someone who wants to find a job soon, versus a passive candidate who doesn’t mind waiting for the perfect opportunity, even if that means months (or even years) from now.

Why Do We Use It

Recruiters do network with both types. Active candidates to fill the roles today, passive for when we do get those roles in the future that fit their needs & preferences, but that’s a conversation for another day.

But the benefit for us searching by “Open to Work” is to fill our immediate roles of today while lowering the candidate pool of qualified candidates.

We are aiming to find Qualified Candidate + Wants Job Now, vs. Qualified Candidate vs. Wants job later.

As you can see here, I’m searching for Java Developers out of certain companies. It’s still a large search at 6.4k candidates popping up.

That same search has 18k total candidates without using the “open to work option”. Meaning I’m 3x more likely to find a passive candidate than I am an active candidate. Remember, my roles need to be filled asap, I can’t afford to keep going through passive candidates while my competition is finding actives, so I am going to switch to the “open to work” option to make sure I find them faster.

Open To Work

You can find the options to put “open to work” when you click on your own profile. You’ll see it right under your profile photo and will look like this.

Settings & Preferences

Here’s what it looks like setting it up.

Note the job titles below. Remember what I have preached in the past. Don’t just settle at the generic titles “Software Engineer”. Get more specific so you show up in more searches easier and faster.

Here are some good examples for a Java Developer to use.

The “Green Banner”

The cool thing is you don’t need to put that green banner on for the world to see if you don’t want to.

The Green Banner let’s everyone see you’re open to work. That can be helpful as an active candidate because there might be people in your network that see it who can reach out to you when they have openings or can refer you to one.

What if you don’t want people to know you’re on the market? You’re still working at your current company and they don’t know you’re looking, or you just don’t want the world to know you’re looking for work?

Check this option out:

You can set the settings so only recruiters (specifically using LinkedIn Recruiter job search platform) can see that you’re open to work. So you only show open to work when I specifically click use the LinkedIn Recruiter search platform and use that setting that I showed earlier.

As you can see, it doesn’t let your company’s recruiters see you’re open to work also.

You can also set your start date as ASAP or casual to let recruiters know your time line.

Call to Action

Put yourself open to work!

And if you need more assistance, here’s half off my ebook as always for subscribers.