A lot of hard work is involved in every job, and our employment occupies a significant portion of our time, everyday. Sometimes though, the job is unable to provide the individual with the satisfaction or the excitement that they have been expecting from it.
Professional networking website LinkedIn is a great place to hunt for new jobs, however, contacting them when your boss might be watching can prove to be difficult. To facilitate job hunting under your current employer’s gaze, LinkedIn has come up with a brand new method to let people contact recruiters.
LinkedIn has always been useful for finding jobs but the fear of being caught in the act by the current boss, often proves to be a huge deterrent. After all, you cant expect him to be too happy at the prospect of you calling it quits, right?
On Thursday, LinkedIn released a brand new feature called Open Candidates to take care of this issue. The feature allows members to privately notify the recruiters that they are available and also keeps them from being exposed to their current companies.
According to researchers, almost 77% of professional workers are ready to move on to their next job stint. LinkedIn’s Open Candidates feature will help folks look for jobs while also keeping their adventures a secret.
This is a signal to recruiters that you want to hear from them.
Explains Eric Owski, LinkedIn’s head of talent brand products.
Further comes the process, to use the Open Candidates feature, access the jobs homepage, choose your preferences and then scroll to the section labeled “Let recruiters know you’re open.”
There you can toggle the setting and it will notify the recruiters that you are available and interested in a switch. You can also fill up options regarding the kind of jobs that you are interested in, job type, at what time can you start, location preferences and a short introductory note about yourself. All your details will be open to the target recruiters but will be hidden from your employer or any affiliated companies.
In order to maintain the flow the enrollment, the Open candidates will expire after three months — which means that you will have to re-enroll. It will also provide you with a chance to reconsider your options and make changes, if any. The LinkedIn’s recruiter application also highlights the eligible candidates in a new spotlight tab. Here the company provides recruiters with the pertinent information in a separate section.
LinkedIn is also releasing a careers page that will help job seekers know more about the company. The feature will also help companies highlight their uniqueness through their career pages.
If you think about the way people look for jobs, they encounter one that’s good for them, but the first question after that is what does the company do? Who are they? What are their values? What do they stand for?
Career pages will help people compare and then arrive at the right decision to choose a company. Career pages are divided into click-able tabs providing information about the firm, open jobs and a “life” section that highlights the company culture and vision. It is divided for people in different fields like engineers, designers, salespeople, etc.
Next comes the employee perspective section, incorporating content posted through LinkedIn’s publishing platform by current employees.
It allows companies to tell an authentic story, but with control.
The new career pages are freely accessible for members but not for the companies. The amount is decided by the package chosen, which start at $10,000 annually. More than 30 customer companies including Uber, Apple, World Vision, IBM and Undertone were in the charter group involved with testing this new career page.
In comparison to the early tests, there is an increase of 60% in page views per visitor, with a 175% increase in the number of job views. The new pages are available to you on your desktops. LinkedIn has promised to make them available upon your mobiles as well within a week or two.
With the release of these two features, LinkedIn aims to improve the quality of applicants received by the company, while also providing the former with a more accurate presentation of the company they are applying for. LinkedIn thus hopes to build a long-lasting relationship between employee and employer which will result in a better returns for the former and a successful career for the latter.
