The Open Profile LinkedIn Experiment

I decided to do a little experiment on LinkedIn last month by opening up my profile to show recruiters I’m casually looking for a new job. You can find this setting on your LinkedIn profile, by clicking on the green button named “Open to”, then selecting “Flexible start date, casually browsing”.

This way you don’t get the banner around your profile photo with the #opentowork tag, but you’ll still let recruiters know you can be approached. As someone who works in product management in software development, I got approached about two or three times per week before this setting. This isn’t uncommonly high, I’m sure most people reading this recognize the shortage in that field. I can’t even imagine what software engineers go through every week. I wondered if things would change with this turned on.

Because of the annoying automated bulk messages I keep receiving, I also added this line to my profile:

I decided I wouldn’t respond to anybody who didn’t read my profile. So how did it go? Well, it certainly attracted more recruiters. My rolling average profile views went up from 119 to 167, that’s pretty significant! Note that I only opened my profile for one month, and this average measures over 90 days. So it’s even better than it looks. In this regard, the switch to “Open to work — casually browsing” definitely pays off.