LinkedIn Premium Is Over Again

March 15, 2024

My LinkedIn Premium is over again. I would like to share some observations and conclusions of this recent experience.

In 2023 my smooth career path in one of the oldest companies in my past country was over. I worked for that company for 6+ years. I even started to believe that this was the most stable company in my career; at least it was my personal record of being in the same place.

Unfortunately, stability and death are nearby. In Oct 2023 I got redundant, and my transformation back to the roots of Software Development began. I learned Python and did some amazing things with AI. At the same time, trying to find my new place under the sun, I got a LinkedIn premium subscription, which I am going to remember in this article 🙂

First, I need to draw your attention that there are several kinds of premium (citing the text from the LinkedIn KB):

  • Premium Career helps you get hired and get ahead in your professional life
  • Sales Navigator helps you generate leads and build your clientele
  • Recruiter Lite helps you find and hire talent
  • Premium Business helps you get detailed business insights and further expand your business
  • Premium Company Page helps you make your Page stand out and convert more LinkedIn members into clients for your business. We’re gradually making Premium Company Page available, and you might not have access to it at this time.
  • LinkedIn Learning helps you improve your skills and learn new ones

In my case, I got Premium Career, which gave me access to LinkedIn Learning as well.

Here I should stop describing my life story, and have a look at the list of Premium Career features that I found the most useful, and you – if you are looking for a new job – should use as much as you can:

  1. The job interview preparation
  2. The LinkedIn profile enhancements and resume preparation
  3. Learning with LinkedIn Learning

This is my own list, of course. If you are 100% sure you are the best candidate in the world, and as soon as you turn the “open for work” knob, you are getting hundreds of interview invites, then you do not need the LinkedIn premium at all.

My story was different thought. I turned on “open for work”, and nothing magic happened. I started to send out my 7-paged initially, 3-paged after two weeks, and finally 1-paged CV to open vacancies – no big luck was too. And then, after I got a series of job interviews, quite successful from my point of view, but with no results, I started to think that I should do something more. And here I found LinkedIn a useful tool.

The job interview preparation

Let me start with job interview preparation. Every job interview requires preparation, it is obvious. You can prepare by yourselves, or use guides, and LinkedIn can be one of them. LinkedIn can help even on a basic access level; a premium subscription just opens the sample answers given by other professionals. Moreover, you can have a series of sample interviews to reduce your anxiety.

You can practice answering typical questions, but be cautious. I failed one of my interviews, just because the interviewer started with the question “What was your greatest f^%$$up”. And, of course, as a practicing surgeon, I have some unhappy stories to tell, and I told one of them.

What was really interesting, there was a possibility to record your sample response to the question and analyze how it looks in terms of speech clearness, voice tone, or use of common trash words. The answer was given by the AI, instantly. if you have a premium subscription, you should give it a try!

The LinkedIn profile enhancements and resume preparation

The next feature is good to make your profile look more professional, by having more precise wording.

Of course, if you are applying for some position, your resume should be relevant to this. I guess you may do such a check with free AI tools as well, but why not use LinkedIn?

Learning with LinkedIn Learning

The last useful tool is learning. You may find whatever you are interested in, pass the course, do a knowledge check, and add it to your profile. Very easy.

Not too useful features

And that’s all about useful LinkedIn Premium Career features from my point of view. Now let’s quickly describe the remanings.

I could use InMails too to promote myself or my business, but this was not in my goals. I used this feature in the past, so let’s put it in the first position of the remaining features if we sort them out by value.

On the second place of optional features to use I would put this one, Company Insights. I would probably move it up if I were looking for a C-level position though.

The next feature, Who’s Viewed Your Profile, is interesting, but not necessary. It may give you feedback on the content that you create on LinkedIn, and how well it works against your target audience.

Top Applicant Jobs is another almost useless in-practice feature. The job postings may be re-opened, or rotating, LinkedIn thinks that you are the top candidate for them, but they are not top postings to you.

Finally, See How You Compare to Other Applicants is the really wrong feature, but you need to spend some time to understand what I mean by this. I will be quick.

In practice, the process of finding the right candidate for the right position is not like searching for the best offer in the supermarket for say tomatoes. The HR manager will not wait until all the tomato candidates approach him, to select the best one. His/her choice will be to stop when some critical amount of candidates is reached and select the best one, who fits the requirements. Even if he/she will compare you to the others, your task is not to do the same. You as a candidate should not be the best of them; you should fit the requirements and be the best fit for the role.

Thus, do not spend time on this one, work on your profile and skills, and do not look to other candidates if you are better than they or not.

There are also two other features of LinkedIn Premium, that are too small to be described. The first is an Open profile. Just turn on this checkbox.

..and hide from others’s eyes if you want.

That’s all for today. As usual, AI did not participate here as a writer or assistant, only as a grammar checker. Stay healthy, and be wealthy!