LinkedIn lets you seek a job without your boss knowing

LinkedIn’s new feature, Open Candidates, allows users to secretly declare that they’re available for hire.

Professionals across domains have used LinkedIn to seek new opportunities, showcasing their profiles and expertise to potential employers as strongly as recruiters have used the platform to mine potential talent. Taking this a step further, the company is now allowing candidates to privately declare that they are open to being hired, which will only be visible to recruiters.

The professional social network recently announced a new feature called Open Candidates, which allows users to flip a switch under the ‘preferences’ tab that tells recruiters they’re open to job opportunities. Recruiters who pay for LinkedIn’s premium service will then see a tab in its search results that lists profiles of those who have turned on the signal, connecting them with what LinkedIn calls ‘warm’ talent. Others won’t be able to see if a user has turned on the feature, and LinkedIn hides the signal from recruiters at an individual’s own company or its subsidiaries.

Eduardo Vivas, head of product, Talent Solutions, LinkedIn, shared in an official blog, “Through Open Candidates — a spotlight feature within our Recruiter product — we’re making it easy for LinkedIn members to privately raise their hand to say ‘I’m open to being recruited’ for the first time ever.”

In times when both retaining talent and finding new talent are getting more complex, this move by LinkedIn will provide an edge to both recruiters and job seekers. The feature offers larger access to recruiters to reach out to more people, who can now show interest without the fear of their current employer. It would also cut down on the huge number of inquiries some users, especially those in high-demand industries, receive from recruiters, which at times turns some people off.

Vivas says, “We currently have nearly a million members signalling they’re open and expect that number to grow significantly as we expand markets through 2016 and beyond.” Till now, the feature has been rolled out in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK.