I upgraded to LinkedIn Premium - Career plan - recently to try their exclusive features. I will list top features of premium membership and what it means to a regular user and whether it is useful. This article is written in the context of a professional looking to get hired and not in the point of view of a professional looking to recruit, increase sales or grow business. Here are my findings.
- Who viewed your profile
This feature allows one can see a lot of profile visitors for the past 90 days instead of just last 5 viewers that is provided regularly. However, it does not list people who visited a profile in private mode, or "general profile characteristics" mode, as well as recruiters even if one has a premium membership.
- Top Applicant
This feature allows one to find jobs where the user is in the top X% of applicants. This might be useful to optimize the chance of finding a job where they have good chances. However, this top of X % estimation is limited to the pool of applicants who have applied via LinkedIn.
- Resume Builder
This feature is not up to the mark. When I used this feature, it did not use my latest education in the resume it created. The link to my website as listed in the resume was broken.
- Job insights
This feature allows one to know their standing among other applicants in terms of skills, education, work experience. There are other insights like number of applicants, their seniority and location. However, job insights will only be displayed when there are more than 10 applicants for a job. It is not clear whether the insights provides accurate information in case of organizations that have their own application portal external to LinkedIn.
- Featured applicant
I do not know whether being listed as featured applicant improves one's chances of being shortlisted for an interview. However, this feature is useful only with those organizations that receive all job applications within LinkedIn EasyApply.
- Company trends
This feature displays the information about demographical breakup of workers and hiring trends of an organization. This feature might be useful information while applying to a position.
- InMails
This feature allows one to contact anyone on the network via their messages called InMails. I do not know how useful is it to contact a recruiter who has visited a profile but chose not to get in touch. However, InMails might be useful for getting in touch with possible collaborators before adding them as connections.
- Open profile
This features allows anyone on the network to get in touch even if they are not connected to you. Might be useful for interested collaborators to get in touch with us.
- Learning
I have not used this feature but given resources like Codecademy, Udemy, Udacity, Coursera, EdX, I do not know whether it is really worth the monthly membership.
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