TCW #034 | Is LinkedIn Premium worth it for job seekers?
Job seekers turn on LinkedIn Premium to transform their job searches. This post demystifies the offering so you can decide if it's worth the $30-$50 monthly fee.
Hey, it’s 📣 Coach Erika! Welcome to a ✨ free edition✨ of The Career Whispers. Each week I tackle reader questions about tech careers: how to get one, how to navigate them, and how to grow and thrive in your role.
Subscribe to The Career Whispers to access this post and every future post.
This week, I’ll talk about a relatively controversial topic: whether or not LinkedIn Premium is worth it for job seekers.
Whenever you’re investing, you want to know if you’re getting at least as much value as you’re paying in.
At $30-$50 per month, LinkedIn Premium is definitely not the cheapest job search tool out there (the Career Whispers is only $9/month, btw 😉).
Opinions are all over the map.
I’m not here to wade into any drama or add (yet another) opinion into the mix. I will disclose that I have purchased LinkedIn Premium in the past, and I am not currently a Premium member.
My goal in this post is to objectively explain what you’re getting with LinkedIn Premium (and what you may think you’re getting but what you are not getting).
To write this post, I read dozens of LinkedIn, Reddit, and Twitter (X) threads and over 280 unique takes and opinions from individual users. This post is an unbiased synthesis of those opinions as well as an objective analysis of the current offering.
Using this information, you can decide for yourself if LinkedIn Premium is worth it for you.
Let’s dive in.
LinkedIn Premium: what you get
Premium is LinkedIn’s paid subscriber tier, just like I offer a free and paid tier for this newsletter. LinkedIn sells the Premium tier to both individuals (Career Premium) and to businesses (Business Premium).
We’re all so used to being part of LinkedIn that we forget that it actually costs money to run the site. It’s natural that they need to make money to provide the service. One way they monetize from individual professionals is via LinkedIn Premium Career, a monthly $30-$50 subscription (typically billed annually).
Here’s how they market Premium to job seekers:
Features
InMail. This feature allows you to send direct messages to people who are not in your network. This is theoretically helpful for reaching out to hiring managers, recruiters, or others who can influence your job search outcome. Free subscribers are limited to 3 per month, but Premium subscribers can send more.
While LinkedIn claims that InMails are 4.6x more effective than email alone, most job seekers in the threads I read attest that they aren’t all that effective. After all, the person receiving the InMail isn’t incentivized to open it any more than any other message.
Frankly, I only open InMails because I feel bad that someone is using one of their limited InMail credits to reach out to me. I still don’t respond if the outreach isn’t welcomed, and I suspect this is true for most users.
Who’s viewed my profile? This feature allows you to see everyone who is looking at your profile. Theoretically, you could then reach out to them, but then what are you going to say? “Hey, I saw that you were stalking my profile, let’s grab coffee!”
Even if I can see who looked me up, I don’t really know why they looked at me or how long they spent reading my profile — so making any conclusion is futile. It’s superficial data without actionability, and many users acknowledge this limitation. Others openly admit that they love it despite it being a vanity metric only.
It’s nice to see your old colleagues checking you out. But is that worth $30-$50 a month? Your call.
LinkedIn Learning. This feature gives you access to over 16,000 online courses to develop skills. It’s a solid library that is well-curated and touches on many topics. Of course, you can find better and more advanced content on role-specific niche sites, podcasts, newsletters (!), or communities, but many users admit that the Learning content is a great starting point.
For students or early career job seekers who are upskilling in parallel to their job search, this can be a solid value proposition.
Applicant Insights: Applicant Insights is a feature that provides you with data on your job applications. These data can help you understand how you stack against other applicants and identify areas where you can improve your chances of getting hired. Some people find this very useful…
…while others feel like it’s just data without any actionable way to help them land the job.
More saved searches: With a Premium account, you can save up to 10 saved searches. This could be helpful if you're running a pretty broad job search with multiple titles, locations, and industries. But the filters don’t matter, according to many users, because the results from LinkedIn Jobs searches are janky and often irrelevant.
More advanced filters: Premium members have access to additional, more advanced filters when searching for jobs. This theoretically allows you to narrow down your search results and find the most relevant opportunities. But, if the search results are generally jank, does it really matter if you can filter them better?
Job Application Data: This feature shows you how many people have viewed your resume and cover letter for each job you apply for. This data can help you understand how your application is performing and make adjustments as needed.
Multiple users mentioned using these insights to tune their own LinkedIn profiles, for example by adding skill sets they saw in competitive applicants for roles of interest.
Salary Insights: This feature shows you the average salary for jobs in your field. These data can theoretically help you negotiate a fair salary when you get a job offer. Some users attest to finding this useful, but there are a ton of other places on the internet where you can find more abundant and more accurate salary information (Levels.fyi and Glassdoor are my recommendations for you).
LinkedIn Premium: what you don’t get
The lore and superstitions around what LinkedIn Premium does for you as a job seeker are many.
Some people think it increases your position in recruiter results. It doesn’t.
Some people think it gives you preferential treatment for EasyApply. It doesn’t.
Some people think it comes with coaching or other 1:1 services. It doesn’t.
What you see is what you get on LinkedIn Premium.
If they don’t advertise it, you aren’t getting it. There are no free lunches or magic sprinkles that will auto-magically boost your job search on LinkedIn or anywhere. You still have to put in the work.
Beta features
I’ve recently been seeing a boost of AI features on LinkedIn that are available to Premium members only. These AI features claim to help you hone your profile:
I surveyed a group of LinkedIn Premium users who had tried these AI features. Unfortunately, not one of them kept the proposed changes that the AI recommended.
While I applaud LinkedIn for leaning into AI, they seem to be missing the mark. It seems like they are trying to grab onto the AI movement, but the outcomes aren’t yet magical let alone useful. Meanwhile, their members are begging them to get the core features right first: in particular, the job search features.
My advice to LinkedIn: get job recommendations working and make sure that job filters only show relevant roles (no cheesemonger jobs for software engineers, please!).
Products that work seamlessly are worth paying for, and my bet is that users would pay for a more effective LinkedIn Jobs experience alone (ok, and throw in “who viewed my profile?” for the curious kittens out there).
Closing thoughts
After reading dozens of threads and hundreds of LinkedIn user opinions, I conclude that LinkedIn Premium for job searching is worth it only if you’re going to heavily use LinkedIn Learning — or — if you get it at a good discount.
Most people fool themselves into believing that LinkedIn Premium gives you a boost in your job search. However, the vast majority of users who’ve tried it and expressed their opinions on LinkedIn, Reddit, and Twitter attest that it does not materially boost job search outcomes.
The marketed features don’t corroborate that there’s any magic sauce either.
So, there you have it.
I’ll be curious to watch how LinkedIn adapts the value proposition for Premium over time. I always root for products that improve in response to user feedback. You can do it, LinkedIn!
Shameless plug for a tool that actually will improve your job search outcome:
🪄 If you don’t have time to wait for LinkedIn to make Premium worth the monthly fee, you can make magic for yourself by subscribing to The Career Whispers (yes, this newsletter).
Learn relevant, practical, and actionable tips for job searching that actually work in today’s market. Paid subscriptions to TCW are a quarter of the cost of LinkedIn Premium, and you get a new post delivered to your inbox every week chock full of tips for your tech career, from interviewing and beyond. Save ‘em for when you need them, or use them right away.
🎉 That’s a wrap! Subscribe to stay tuned…
When you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
→ First Round Ready Course — An affordable 77-minute course that offers the exact job search and interview prep tools, frameworks, and skills that landed 93% of my clients into their dream roles and tech companies…plus it comes with a Quick Wins interview prep workbook to immediately translate your learning into action.
→ 1:1 Job Search Coaching — I offer packaged bundles with pay-for-performance pricing so you know our incentives are aligned, and we win together when you ace your interviews. I also offer on-demand 1:1 sessions that you can book up to 4 weeks out, with a minimum of 24hr notice. Check out my testimonials.
→ Resume Glow Up — I fully transform your resume to tell your career story more powerfully and land you more interviews. The resulting resume is optimized for applicant tracking systems (ATS) and for human readers alike. I will also Fairy Godmother your LinkedIn profile to get you more inbounds and more traction with recruiters and interviewers.
Great review on the true value of LinkedIn Premium ... at this price mark, it seems to offer very little, but I know others who swear by it .... I'd recommend to drop in price to around $10/mth and I'm sure they'd get a lot more subscribers ...
Good break down. From personal experience, purchasing LinkedIn Premium, Sales Navigator, etc. is not worth the price. Your "what you don't get" section is spot on - even though the marketing seems to imply that it does some of these things.