Do Job Seekers Need a Premium LinkedIn Account

Do Job Seekers Need a Premium LinkedIn Account Linkedin have offered premium accounts to the greater public for some time now. These have been popular with salespeople and recruiter  for years. Congratulations to all the job seekers out there, its your turn to face the big question: Do I need to upgrade my LinkedIn account? Is the free account good enough? Tempting as it may be to upgrade, nobody is saying the regular LinkedIn account is bad. In fact, I believe LinkedIn have purposely made the free accounts good enough to keep building their member base as opposed to charging users. Other platforms like Viadeo and Xing are more inclined to charge their members money and havent grown as much. Heres what you get with the normal (free) LinkedIn account: Build your professional identity on the web. Build and maintain a large trusted professional network. Find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates. Request and provide recommendations. Request up to 5 introductions at a time. Search for and view profiles of other LinkedIn members. Receive unlimited InMail messages. View 100 results per search. Save up to 3 searches and get weekly alerts on those searches. Did you do three of the above points last week? How about last month? Most people wouldnt use all these features and therefore  theres no reason to even think about upgrading.  However if you do these actions regularly and hit ceilings such as running out of search results, then it might be time to consider a premium account. What do you get with a premium account? Heres what you get with the premium job seeker account: A full 90 day list of viewers and rich data insights like the keywords that led people to your profile. See how you rank among your industry peers with the How You Rank “Professionals Like You” tool. When you’re on the job hunt, get the inside scoop on how you stack up against other job applicants with Applicant Insights. When someone searches for you on LinkedIn, you’ll be shown as a standard listing in results. Your job applications will appear above those of non-premium members. Banish writer’s block for good with Keyword Suggestions for the Summary section of your profile. Use up to 8 additional filters to fine-tune and expedite your searches. With InMail, you can contact anyone on LinkedIn   from the recruiter who just viewed your profile to that hiring manager. Is it really worth it? If you use LinkedIn daily and have hit a wall where you have run out options, go ahead and try it. As long as you get useful incremental results, stick with it until you get that new job. This is assuming that you have the money to spend, check your budget and ideally cut back on something else instead. What is your experience of premium job seeker accounts? Please let us know!