On LinkedIn "Top Applicant" Bait

2024-12-13

First: I am not a data scientist, this is not a "study," and I don't claim to have any answers!

I am a software developer who was laid off so obviously I have been spending hours upon hours on LinkedIn applying for jobs. I started to notice some things that didn't really make sense to me, so I started jotting down some notes as I went along. This is my attempt at making sense of these notes.

Also, by the time I began writing this my LinkedIn Premium benefits had ended (surprise: I cancelled), so I can't dig back into most of this or update/expand on the data.

Premium Bait

One of the selling points of LinkedIn Premium is something on the plan matrix that they call "Top choice job." This is access to a new tab on your jobs page labeled "Top Applicant" that LinkedIn describes as "jobs where you’d be a top applicant, based on your chances of hearing back." It's pretty vague language but anything that could potentially help you sift through the junk sounds good when you're unemployed and staring down the thousands of jobs posted to the platform daily.

I ponied up the $40/mo for LinkedIn Premium when I was laid off because it felt at the time like it would reduce the time it would take for me to find a new position. Out of all of the benefits offered this is really the only one I actually used. I don't care about private browsing or who viewed my profile, I certainly don't care to use their AI tools to write for me, and while LinkedIn learning can be great, Columbus Metropolitan Library members can access it for free — even at home — using their library card.

(Apparently I'm in the minority regarding the AI tools. Wired shared a recent analysis by AI detection startup Originality AI that found more than half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated.)

What does it mean to be a "Top Applicant" in LinkedIn's eyes?

In their own words: "LinkedIn Premium members can use the Top Applicant feature to enhance their job search. This feature helps job searchers identify and apply for jobs where they’re considered a top candidate based on their profile information, the job posting criteria, and recruiter feedback on previous applicants to similar jobs. The feature only displays if you’re in the top 50% of applicants for at least one role. This will be determined by the current members who’ve applied for the role and requires at least 10 applicants."

What does it mean in practice?

I would regularly check this tab and apply for any position for which I was qualified but I quickly noticed that these "picks" seemed pretty indistinguishable from the results I would get by just searching for "software engineer." For 3 days I jotted down some basic info on what I was seeing, limiting it to the first two pages of my "Top Applicant" picks, and not doing this on consecutive days. I must have accidentally deleted or copied over an entry so I'm annoyingly stuck with a total of 59 posts instead of the nice round 60 I should have had.

Anyway, of the 59 posts...

12 were reposts
49 were "promoted" posts
29 were already over 1,000 applicants
13 were already over 2,000 applicants

My favorite match was when LinkedIn served me an opening at GitHub for a Software Engineer. This is a job I am qualified for (supposedly, more on that later) but at the time of serving it to me on the first page of my matches...

It was a repost from 3 days ago
In the last 24 hours it had gained 1,453 new applicants
In the x number of times it had been reposted it had amassed a total of 10,631 applicants (seriously, this is not a typo)
It was clearly marked "applied" because yes, LinkedIn knew that I had already applied for this position days before

LinkedIn knew I had applied to that job because after I clicked through the post and applied, I returned to LinkedIn and confirmed in the pop-up "Yes, I applied for this position." LinkedIn want to know whether you just clicked through or if you actually applied. They say it's so they can help me keep track of my application. I'm not sure why they aren't also using it to prevent serving me positions for which I've already applied but... oh well.

Skills Matching

On occasion LinkedIn would show a little "skills match" module on the post. 13 of the 59 positions I saved had this info listed. To be clear, I have spent a fair amount of time entering individual skills into my profile and in fact, I'm pretty sure I'm actually at the maximum allowed number of entries. So here are the 13 skill matches from jobs LinkedIn served me to me as "Top Applicant" picks:

0 of 1 skills match (0%)
0 of 1 skills match (0%)
0 of 4 skills match (0%)
1 of 2 skills match (50%)
1 of 3 skills match (33.33%)
1 of 11 skills match (9.09%)
2 of 9 skills match (22.22%)
2 of 10 skills match (20%)
3 of 5 skills match (60%)
3 of 8 skills match (37.5%)
4 of 10 skills match (40%)
5 of 10 skills match (50%)
5 of 11 skills match (45.45%)

Setting aside the (three!) 0% "matches" here, LinkedIn is telling me I'm somehow a "Top Applicant" for a job where I have 1 of the 11 skills the company wants? Out of all of these my best bet is a 3/5? It paints a pretty dismal picture if these are the positions where I'm most likely to hear back.

Well, remember when I mentioned that 49 out of the 59 posts I'm looking at were paid promos? Would you believe that 100% of these skill match pairings were promoted posts? It seems to me like LinkedIn would prefer to show me a promoted post rather than a good match.

Where is the value?

So I'm paying $40/mo to LinkedIn for them to show me jobs where I'll supposedly stand the best chance of being hired, but nearly every one of those matches I'm served is a paid promo. A paid promo is likely to receive a large number of applicants quickly after posting and we've all heard about the benefit of being an early applicant. If it is an advantage to be one of the first hundred applicants then what can be said of the odds for applicant 5,001? Though even if I do happen to catch the job right when it's posted it's entirely possible that I'm not even a good match skills-wise because even though LinkedIn has a "skills" system in place it doesn't seem like it's actually being used when calculating where I would be a "Top Applicant".