Is LinkedIn Premium Worth It for Job Seekers?

What LinkedIn Premium Career gives a job seeker

Premium Career is the LinkedIn Premium plan for job seekers. The Premium Career page lists what each feature does but not most of the limits.

The limits come from LinkedIn's help pages, mainly InMail credits, applicant insights, and Top Choice jobs.

Pricing starts at US$39.99 a month, or US$239.88 a year billed annually, according to the Premium Career page.

Who Premium is worth it for, and who should skip it

Most of Premium's value is in the features that put you in front of a person: InMail, unlimited connection notes, and knowing which recruiter looked at your profile. The ranking features tell you your odds without changing them, so whether Premium is worth it comes down to whether you will do the outreach.

Premium Career tends to pay off when:

• You target a short list of employers and will write to the hiring manager for each one. Five InMails a month is enough for a handful of jobs you care about and far too few for a hundred applications.
• You need more than five personal connection notes a month, for example when you are moving into a new field and have few contacts in it.
• Recruiters already look at your profile and you want to know who they are so you can follow up. A free account shows only the last three viewers.
• You will take the courses. LinkedIn notes that Premium Career is the closest thing it has to an individual LinkedIn Learning subscription, so if you need a specific skill for your next role, Learning alone can justify a month.

It is usually not worth it when:

• You apply widely through search and Easy Apply. Your ranking stays hidden on every job where you are below the top half, and none of LinkedIn's documented filters removes the jobs you already applied to, viewed, or dismissed. HideJobs hides them; see what no LinkedIn plan removes.
• Your profile is thin. Top applicant is based on your profile's role, experience, and skills. LinkedIn lists missing skills as one reason the feature does not show at all, so fixing the profile for free comes first.
• You mainly want recruiters to find you. LinkedIn's Open to Work setting is made for that: LinkedIn says it helps your profile show up in search results when recruiters look for candidates.

How to read LinkedIn's "more likely to get hired" numbers

LinkedIn's Premium pages are full of multipliers. Premium subscribers "are 2.7x more likely to get hired on average" (LinkedIn data from January 2022), and the get hired faster page says they are "3.9x more likely to get hired on average if they apply to a Top applicant job."

The figures do not agree with each other. The Premium Career page says Top choice applicants are "2x more likely to receive a message back from a recruiter," while the get hired faster page puts the same feature at "43% more likely." That page also says Premium members are "39% more likely to hear back after applying," a much smaller figure than the 2.7x for getting hired.

Read these as a description of the people who buy Premium. People who pay for a job-search subscription are usually searching actively, and the pages do not say whether the comparison accounts for that. The Top applicant figure has the same problem: those jobs are, by LinkedIn's definition, the ones where your profile already ranks in the top half, so part of that gap may come from the match itself rather than the subscription. The numbers are LinkedIn's own and are not published with a method you can check.

Applicant counts: what Premium shows and what it cannot filter out

If you want Premium so you stop applying to jobs that are already buried in applications, it does help you see the crowd: applicant insights show the number of applicants and, if you are in the top half, where you rank. LinkedIn adds that the ranking "is not endorsed by the hiring company."

LinkedIn is also inconsistent about what Premium adds to search. Its job search filters help page lists Under 10 applicants among the regular filters with no Premium label ("You can filter for jobs that currently have less than 10 applicants"). The get hired faster page, though, sells Premium's advanced search filters as a way to "find opportunities with fewer applicants," while the plan comparison describes those filters as finding "people who are actively hiring, and jobs where you are a top applicant." Check what your own Jobs page offers before you pay for it.

Either way, LinkedIn's options show you the emptiest jobs, and none of its documented filters removes only the crowded ones and keeps the rest. HideJobs does that with its Deep Scanner, which has a 100+ Applicants option: click Go Scan in the HideJobs side panel, switch the scanner on, tick 100+ Applicants, and click Start Scan. The scanner opens each job on the current LinkedIn search page, one at a time, finds the ones LinkedIn shows as having over 100 applicants, and marks them with a 100+ badge so you can hide them all at once from the panel. It goes by LinkedIn's own wording in the job details, "Over 100 applicants" or "Over 100 people clicked apply."

The scan takes a while and runs where you can see it: the page scrolls and the job details change as it goes. It covers the jobs loaded on the page you are on, so run it again when you move to the next page. If you are unsure whether a crowded job is still worth a try, this guide to jobs with over 100 applicants helps you decide.

What no LinkedIn plan removes from your search results

Premium's advanced search filters narrow a search, but none of LinkedIn's documented filters, free or Premium, removes jobs you already applied to, jobs you already opened, jobs you dismissed with the X, promoted listings, reposts, or companies you never want to see. For a full rundown of what LinkedIn's own filters can and cannot do, see LinkedIn job search filters.

In a high-volume search, that clutter slows you down. HideJobs hides it on LinkedIn's job search pages:

• Applied, Viewed, and Promoted. HideJobs reads LinkedIn's own Applied, Viewed, and Promoted labels on each card and hides those jobs.
• Dismissed. Jobs you dismissed with the X can still sit in your results, and this filter hides them.
• Companies. Click the eye icon next to a company name and all that company's jobs disappear while Companies is on. A "Company hidden" notice lets you undo it.
• Keywords. Hides cards whose visible text, mostly the title, company, and location, contains your words, such as "senior."
• Deep Scanner. Besides jobs with over 100 applicants, it finds reposted jobs and your words in the full description.

The filters work in a desktop browser on LinkedIn's job search and collection pages. With Applied, Viewed, and Dismissed turned on, the jobs LinkedIn marks as applied or viewed, and the ones you dismissed, drop out of the list you work through.

If you try it: timing the free trial and cancelling in time

LinkedIn says Premium plans "may be available to try free for one month". One month is enough to test the outreach features if you plan it:

• Start it when you have a list ready. Have the companies and people you want to contact before day one, so the trial does not go to browsing.
• Send your InMails early. An InMail that is accepted, declined, or answered within 90 days is credited back, so early sends can come back while you still have Premium.
• Decide before the last day. According to LinkedIn's cancellation page, cancelling a free trial ends it "immediately," while a paid plan stays active until the end of the billing cycle. To avoid the next charge, cancel at least one day before the billing date.

At the end of the trial, count the conversations you started that you could not have started for free. If there are none, paid months will not change that.