Is LinkedIn Premium Worth It for Job Seekers?

A lot of job seekers are torn on whether to buy LinkedIn Premium for their job search. While LinkedIn Premium isn’t too expensive (LinkedIn Premium’s current price is $30/month), when you’ve been out of a job or laid off for awhile, every dollar counts.

So, in this post we’ll go over what’s included in LinkedIn Premium, why it’s good for certain job seekers and not for others, and whether LinkedIn Premium is worth it for you.

If you'd like to try Premium, you can get 1 month LinkedIn Premium for free using this link (Using this link also helps support our site at no additional cost to you).

What is LinkedIn Premium?

LinkedIn Premium is a paid version of LinkedIn that unlocks additional features you don’t otherwise get with a basic account. Some of the more notable features include: job application data, competitive intelligence on jobs you apply for, InMail credits, and LinkedIn Learning.

Depending on the competitiveness of the jobs you’re applying for and the particular job search strategy you’re using, you may want to consider LinkedIn Premium or not. Before we determine if it’s good for your situation, let’s go over what you get with LinkedIn Premium and see if you’ll actually use the features that come with it.

LinkedIn Premium Benefits

LinkedIn Premium has a lot of benefits, here are the ones relevant to job seekers from most useful to least useful:

1. Competitive Intelligence
2. Job Application Data
3. InMail Credits
4. LinkedIn Learning
5. Profile View Alerts

1. Competitive Intelligence

In my experience, two of the most important factors to a successful job search are your time management and your morale. Anyone who has been applying to jobs for more than a couple of months can attest to how down the job search can make you feel.

LinkedIn Premium’s competitive intelligence feature can save you both that time and loss of morale. Here’s how it works.

When you get a premium account, LinkedIn will unlock some of its data to you. With over 750 million users and 20 million open jobs, that’s a lot of data!

Luckily, LinkedIn also uses it’s AI to help show you where you rank compared to other applicants. Here’s what it looks like:

Something important to keep in mind is that this ranking is based exclusively on your LinkedIn profile. So, if your profile isn’t complete or in all-star status you’ll want to do that first before looking at this data.

This is by far my favorite feature about LinkedIn Premium and this alone might be enough to make it worth the $30/month price tag. 

Use our special link to get LinkedIn Premium for 1 month free!

If you're not using a modern resume builder, then creating a custom cover letter and optimizing your resume can take a lot of time (if you don’t know how to do it), so checking out how you compare to other applicants before applying can save you a lot of time and energy.

One thing to keep in mind is that it may be worth getting LinkedIn Premium just for a couple of months to see where you stand among your competition. When I had Premium I found it super helpful, but after a few weeks of looking at the stats I could almost predict which jobs I would be a good fit for and which I should skip.

So when you use this LinkedIn Premium feature, make sure you take notes on any patterns you notice.

2. Job Application Data

One Premium feature that helped me enormously in my job search is the application data. This data reveals how many people have already applied to a certain job. 

When I was applying to jobs I would look at the number of applicants to a job and determine if I should apply based on the number of people I would be competing against. 

If I saw 300+ applicants, I would usually skip applying to the job unless I really wanted it. On the other hand, if I saw a job that I was so-so on, but I saw that it only had 20 applicants, I would throw my application in for consideration.

Something to keep in mind when doing this, however, is to compare the number of applicants to the size of the company. For example, a company like Google gets 3 million applicants per year! BUT, before you get discouraged, you should also know that Google has hundreds of full-time recruiters.

So, if you send your application, there is a high chance that a recruiter will actually look at it. When I applied to Facebook, for instance, I received an email the next day from the recruiter who had reviewed my application.

Another nice feature is that you can see the company’s hiring trends. This is helpful to make sure that the company you’re applying for is growing and will offer stability. 

On this dashboard you can also see the average tenure of an employee at the company, which gives you an idea if people are happy working there.

3. InMail Credits

The usefulness of this LinkedIn Premium feature is largely dependent on your job search strategy. If you’re applying to jobs online using our multi-resume strategy, then this feature won’t be necessary. 

If, however, you’re using a networking strategy like the one advocated by career coach Sarah Johnston, this feature will be super important. In job search, a networking strategy is a way to get past the online application process by building relationships with people at your target companies.

On a basic account you’ll only be able to message people who you’re already connected with. A LinkedIn Premium account, on the other hand, allows you to send up to 5 messages per month to people outside of your network.

If you’re going to pursue a networking strategy, InMail Credits will be useful because they allow you to message more people on LinkedIn including people outside of your network.

4. LinkedIn Learning

Most people don’t realize that when they purchase a LinkedIn Premium account they also get LinkedIn Learning as an added bonus. LinkedIn Learning has the largest library of online courses with over 16,000 courses and counting.

They have some courses on job search, my favorite being Find a Job on The Hidden Job Market.

But, in my opinion the real value of LinkedIn Learning is the courses that help you brush up on whatever industry skills you might be missing. When we’re in a job for a long time, it can be easy to let our skills get outdated. LinkedIn Learning can help you update your skills so that you do better in your job interview.

Of course, I recommend pairing those industry-specific courses with our resume course which is available for free here.

5. Profile View Alerts

One of the most annoying things about searching for jobs is the lack of communication from companies. Many times when I was applying to jobs it felt like I was just sending off my applications into a black hole, never to hear from them again.

LinkedIn Premium solves this problem by allowing you to see who has viewed your profile. This is great for knowing whether someone has actually looked at your application or not.

While it won’t help your job search directly, it does help knowing that your application is at least being considered.

I think this feature is a nice morale booster, but that’s about it.

So, Is LinkedIn Premium Worth it for your Job Search?

LinkedIn Premium certainly has a few strong benefits when it comes to job searching. Whether those benefits are worth the $30/month price tag is really a matter of your particular situation.

If you currently have a job or have some money saved up, then spending $30-60 to get the benefits mentioned above is certainly worth it. If, however, you’re struggling to make ends meet, then I think you might want to consider passing on LinkedIn Premium.

You can also use our special link to try LinkedIn Premium for 1 month completely free.

Another thing to consider is how competitive your particular job is and how far along you are in your job search.

For example, when I was applying to jobs, I tried applying both with and without LinkedIn Premium. What I found was that LinkedIn Premium was nice to have, but it definitely wasn’t a must-have for me.

This is partly because my particular role, Content Marketing, was highly in-demand at the time, so I didn’t need the extra help that LinkedIn Premium offered.

Before you consider LinkedIn Premium, I recommend you consider either watching some of our free job search videos and courses.

If the strategies discussed in the videos are things you already know, then LinkedIn Premium might be helpful for your job search.