Since its launch in 2003, LinkedIn has evolved from a mere social networking business platform into a veritable structure of complex service professionals and businesses accessible through a variety of web and mobile applications.
Whether you’re using LinkedIn to build networks, find jobs, hire talent, market your business, or sell, LinkedIn has a lot of value that you can tap into.
However, some of LinkedIn’s most powerful services and features are only accessible through LinkedIn Premium, the subscription-level variant of the site.
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LinkedIn’s four premium levels
There are four levels of LinkedIn Premium:
- Career – $29.99/month: For professionals looking to accelerate their careers by increasing their chances of being found by employers and hiring them for competitive positions
- Business – $59.99/month: For professionals looking to expand and grow their network with the connections that matter to their business
- Sales navigation – $79.99/month: For businesses and sales professionals looking to build customer relationships and expand their network of potential customers
- Recruiter Lite – $119.95/month: For businesses and employers looking to find and hire high-caliber talent that matches their goals for their company.
While Sales Navigator and Recruiter Lite can certainly be useful for professionals, these are more enterprise-grade premium services that a company would allow employees to take advantage of. LinkedIn Career and Business are services for individual professionals to avail through their own means.
Even so, out of 39% of LinkedIn users are paying for LinkedIn Premium, according to Kinsta.com, it’s easy to assume that LinkedIn Career is the most popular service people will upgrade to, based on price and need. As such, we’ll focus on exploring this LinkedIn Premium option in more depth here to help you understand if it’s worth spending $30 a month.
LinkedIn Career
What you got with LinkedIn
If you spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, you know how comprehensive a professional network you can build just by connecting with people you know or with people who are related to your network. You can also find specific job listings through extremely precise searches including advanced filtering.
In essence, LinkedIn offers a powerful two-in-one service that combines the best features of a professional-focused social media platform with job search functionality and the best job listings. found on sites like Glassdoor. So why would you start paying for LinkedIn Career?
What you get with LinkedIn Career
With LinkedIn’s free access already going strong, you might be wondering what LinkedIn Career can do so much better. In essence, LinkedIn Career is like the “basic” LinkedIn in steroids.
Candidate details
For starters, LinkedIn Career provides anonymous, in-depth insights into how you compare to other candidates for jobs you’re interested in.
Instead of blindly applying for jobs, LinkedIn Premium’s competitive intelligence will help you understand how much better or worse you are than others (e.g. you’re in the top 10%) based on on your experience, skills and current job. It will also tell you what seniority level other candidates currently hold, their education, and their position.
Gaining this competitive insight through LinkedIn Premium puts you ahead of other candidates by helping you understand who and what you’re up against. By measuring your competitiveness against others, you can more effectively determine which jobs to apply for as well as understand what kind of strategies you need to incorporate to highlight your strengths or Reinforce highlights in case you secure an interview.
Expand ‘Profile Views’
One of the cool things about LinkedIn that sets it apart from other social media platforms is that you get alerted when someone views your profile. Depending on preference, people can keep this information:
- Public, allowing others to see their name, role, company, etc. when they view the profile
- Private, by covering their names and restricting others from seeing only the company and their roles
- Anonymous, hide all disclosures
How you choose to let others see you when you view their profile also determines what you see when others view your profile. However, regardless of whether you choose to make it public or private, LinkedIn only gives you a limited history of profile views, i.e. how many people last viewed your profile.
While this can certainly help, it’s not as useful as what LinkedIn Premium offers, which is unlimited profile viewing history. You can go back weekly and monthly to see who viewed your profile.
You can also dig deeper to see from which companies a lot of people may have viewed your profile, what views are considered “interesting” and whether you are being viewed by someone who can help. whether you secure a job or not, such as a recruiter or hiring manager.
Higher Education
LinkedIn is more than just a place to connect with others and find work; It’s also a great place to learn. People are constantly sharing expert advice based on their experiences or through curated content like articles, videos, ebooks, etc that sheds light on important aspects of the industry, roles, and attributes professionally.
However, it can be difficult to take this information and extract specific information that is applicable to your current goals or career path. After all, the content people are sharing isn’t really relevant to you.
That’s where LinkedIn Career helps. A standout feature called LinkedIn Learning gives you an easy way to learn specific things based on your career, skills, and goals through content created by experts.
As you learn new things through in-demand courses, you can add new skills to your resume to increase your chances of landing an interview for a particular job or to help you accelerate your career, today, promotion is often about your ability to continuously learn and improve.
InMail Heaven
LinkedIn is all about networking, but it’s also vulnerable to abuse. If you’re a regular user of the platform, you’re probably used to having influencers or other professionals unrelated to or solely related to your industry or interest ask to connect, with The goal is to increase their follower count, put their content on your feed, or text you if your messages are blocked with people you don’t connect with. These connections are not really useful and just add clutter to your network.
With this inefficient practice, LinkedIn cleverly limits the ability of users to send messages to others unless they are connected or unless the user has enabled messaging from people they are not connected to. However, LinkedIn Premium offers a gateway through InMails. InMails are powerful in that they let you message anyone, even when you’re not connected.
This is powerful in that it gives you the ability to reach out to everyone — employees, hiring managers, recruiters — that are related to the job or company you’re interested in. As you probably know, connecting personally with others increases your chances of getting an application reviewed, securing an interview and landing a job in today’s extremely competitive job landscape.
Furthermore, LinkedIn still manages InMails to ensure they are not abused. You are given a limited number of InMails per month to use; however, these InMails will also accumulate from month to month for 90 days, and you can also purchase additional InMails if needed. In short, you’ll be armed with an ideal number of InMails that can be used to help you improve your job search or your networking.
Do you need LinkedIn Premium?
Ultimately, whether or not you need LinkedIn Premium to help you advance your career is a personal decision based on your financial circumstances and the level of need you have as an individual. If you haven’t had much luck for a few months in regards to securing your next dream job, it’s well worth it to invest in the technology that gives you an edge.
Interestingly, LinkedIn gives you a free one-month trial of Premium to see if it’s for you. It’s the perfect time for a trial period to determine if LinkedIn Career — or any other Premium service for that matter — is what you need to excel.
Don’t assume that paying for LinkedIn Premium will automatically change your results. These are the tools; You must be willing to learn to use them proficiently. However, once you do, you will most likely see a difference in the results. Give it a try!
