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There are 4 ways to find people Open To Work on LinkedIn:
- The Open To Work Profile picture
- The Open To Work Hashtag technique
- The LinkedIn Recruiter filter
- Sales Navigator Advanced search
Some are free but requires a lot of manual work.
Some others are automated but are way more expensive.
In this post, I’ll cover all the techniques so you can pick the best one for your budget and your use case.
Let’s see all the things that you can do to identify people seeking new jobs on LinkedIn.
The Open To Work Profile Picture Filter
Some people looking for a job display the Open To Work filter on their profile.
But fewer and fewer people choose to do that; it makes you look needy.
It’s like going in a bar with an “I’m Open To Kiss Anybody” sign.
It can harm how other people perceive your value.
Not something you want to do on social media.
The thing is that you can now declare yourself Open To Work without displaying this sign on your profile photo.
This is how it looks on your LinkedIn account:
So if you are manually looking for Open To Work LinkedIn members trying to find people with the filter, you will end up missing a lot of potential candidates.
Plus, a lot of people with a full-time or part-time job don’t want their current employer to notice that they are open to new opportunities.
The option to be visible to recruiters only is a way to receive messages from hiring managers without having all your professional network being aware of your next move.
Now you understand that it’s hard to identify people job hunting just by using the Open To Work profile picture filter.
But how to proceed then?
Well you must use LinkedIn search on LinkedIn Recruiter or Sales Navigator.
The Open To Work Hashtag Technique
If you write: #opentowork on the LinkedIn search bar, you will be able to all the people that have published a LinkedIn post containing this hashtag.
You can click on follow to get these posts appearing in your LinkedIn homepage along with the post of your 1st degree LinkedIn connections.
That way, you get a constant inflow of people looking for their dream job. It’s like a public job board, the dream for any recruiter.
As this is almost a real time job market, you can react super quickly to their post and be the first one to contact them.
If you click on “View job preferences”, you’ll get more details on the type of job application they could be a fit for.
How To Use the Open to Work Filter on LinkedIn Recruiter?
The simplest way to find jobseekers on LinkedIn is to use the Open to Work filter of LinkedIn Recruiter.
This filter will show you who has activated the “Open to Work” option among all LinkedIn members.
However, this Open To Work feature is expensive because this option doesn’t come with LinkedIn Recruiter Lite ($170/month) but only with LinkedIn Recruiter ($835/month)
When you upgrade to LinkedIn Recruiter, you’ll get access to 5 additional filters.
You will be able to see these new filters on the left in the Spotlight section.
Once you have identified these people, you can send them personalized messages using connection requests or an InMail to let them know about your job openings.
LinkedIn Recruiter is a great to tool to get insights on potential candidates work experiences, build your candidate pipeline, get notifications on potential candidates, and optimize your job posting on LinkedIn jobs.
This option can be a solution if you have the budget, but I guess some of you won’t be willing to spend this amount simply for getting this filter.
No problem.
We got you covered with the second option.
How to Find Open to Work Candidates on LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
4 ways to find people open to work on LinkedIn Sales Navigator:
- Use the “Current Job Title” filter
- Use the keyword search
- Find unofficial company LinkedIn pages for jobseekers
- Find jobseekers LinkedIn groups
1. Use the “current job title” filters
This option is as efficient as the first one, but it’s way cheaper.
The only thing you need is a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account.
Yes it can be counterintuitive, but sales Navigator advanced search can be a great tool to find people mentioning a job search on their profile.
Sales Navigator only costs $99/month, and you can even get 1 month free trial.
To find open to work profiles on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we are going to use LinkedIn Boolean search to find people looking for new opportunities.
If you don’t know what Boolean search is, you can take a look at this video:
We are simply going to look in LinkedIn profiles for relevant keywords indicating that people are seeking for job opportunities.
For that we are going to use the “Title Filter” and the “Keyword filter”
The Title filter will look for your keywords into all the current job titles of the LinkedIn members (if there is more than one)
Here is an example:
To get the same results, you can copy-paste this Sales Navigator Boolean search in the Current Job Title filter:
"Open to work" OR ((looking OR seeking) AND (job OR opportunity OR opportunities))Note that you can exclude freelancers from your search results by adding the job title and clicking on the icon. The job title with then turn red (like in the picture above).
2. Use the keyword search
If you want to expand the keyword to all the profile (job titles + job description + about section + headline etc…) you can use the exact same expression on the keyword filter.
You can see that there is no mention of “open to work” or “looking for a job” on the job title.
But if I go to the profile and check the about section, I can see the words “seeking” and “opportunity”
This technique will give you more results, but it will also give you a lot of false positives.
Job title search is safer but will give you fewer results. If you use keyword search, make sure to double-check your results.
3. Find unofficial company LinkedIn pages for jobseekers
Some unofficial company pages have been created to gather jobseekers looking for new positions. You can look for them in the current company filter.
Instead of the company name, they write stuff Like “Looking for a new job”.
When people are looking for a job on LinkedIn, they often link their profiles to this type of company pages.
4. Find jobseekers on LinkedIn groups
Another technique: you can also use the Group Filter to find jobseekers groups on LinkedIn.
- Enter the job title you are looking for
- Add same groups
- Check the results
You will have a list of all the qualified people who are members are jobseekers groups on LinkedIn.
People are frequently posting job offers on these groups so you can also see who reacts to these posts.
That will allow you to see who the active members in the group are who are looking for job interviews.
You can then contact the group members, mentioning that you found them into these kinds of groups.
This can be a good technique for specific recruitments because a lot a LinkedIn groups like this exists for specifics career interests or type of jobs.
How To Reach Out To Open To Work Candidates on LinkedIn?
Once you have your list ready, you might want to export into a CSV and get the emails of the candidates.
You can do that in 2 clicks using the Evaboot Chrome extension.
Here is a video explaining all the process
A little bonus, Evaboot will show in the CSV file who is Open To Work among the profiles you extracted.
Once you have a CSV with LinkedIn URLs and emails, you can start prospecting and getting replies from the candidates.
FAQ
Here, we answer most common questions about open to work and LinkedIn job search.
How do I find candidates without LinkedIn recruiter?
3 ways to find candidates without LinkedIn Recruiter:
- Search for LinkedIn post with the Open To Work hashtag
- Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator advanced search
- Look for profile with the Open To Work filter
- Or search for candidates on job boards like Jooble
Who can see open to work on LinkedIn?
When you indicate that you’re ‘Open to Work’ on LinkedIn, you can control the audience. You can either make it visible to every LinkedIn member or limit it to recruiters only. Selecting the broader audience will append an #OpenToWork badge to your profile photo, signaling your job-seeking status.
