On LinkedIn’s Help site, you will information regarding use of the platform’s “Open to Work” feature, including this video:

The feature is supposed to assist you in your job search on LinkedIn, allowing recruiters and the connections in your network to see that you are open to new opportunities and/or are currently looking.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, the “Open to Work” feature does not specifically influence hiring managers towards reaching out or add any sort of gain or step over the competition. Although there is empirical data that shows how the feature can both positively or negatively impact a jobseeker’s results, it is still simply a notice to all that you are open to new employment opportunities.

Legal recruiting expert Susan Tien believes its a good idea to enable the feature if your looking for a new job, but is quick to remind us that experience and skills still matter significantly.

“I have never run a search selecting for people who are Open to Work since I am evaluating on experience and skills,” she wrote in her article “LinkedIn’s Open to Work Badge: Yes or No?”. “

Still, others believe letting others know through the banner that you are looking for new opportunities is a bad idea. Nolan Church, CEO of Continuum and a former Google recruiter, believes that using the “Open to Work” banner on LinkedIn is the biggest red flag on LinkedIn as it is a sign of desperation.

“Recruiting is like dating,” he said. “You have to make the other side feel like you’re exclusive.”

To Church, the banner signals to hiring managers and recruiters that you will take any job, making the recruiter feel like it is desperation. “You have to create desire,” he said. “For better or worse, it’s just how humans are wired — when you look desperate, people don’t want you.”

Here is the problem with that reasoning: it is a competitive job market, prices are going through the roof, annual raises are not. New families are struggling to find their first home because prices for homes are beyond their reach. The last fifteen years have truly showed that the economy is walking over broken glass with bare feet, and there seems to be no reasonable solution to clean the wounds and put a decent pair of boots on those feet. Whether you consider the banner a sign of desperation or not, the fact of the matter is that people are desperate.  

If you are one of the thousands seeking new opportunities for any reason, the “Open to Work” feature can certainly be a tool in your belt, along with your educational credentials, your experience, your personality, your network and growing skillset. It is both the opening and conclusion of your call to action to your network, recruiters and hiring managers to connect, investigate your credentials further and see, literally, how you both can help each other. But it is up to you to show them that you are the whole package.

*Note

Earlier, Nolan Church said that recruiting is like dating. You have to make the other side feel like you’re exclusive. I certainly agree that, throughout the interview process, you as the seeker need to make the other side believe that you are exclusive; that they are lucky to even be entertaining the idea of hiring you, so much so that they need to ask, as one of my district managers puts it when interviewing good candidates, “why the heck do you want to work here?”