LinkedIn Launches ‘Career Explorer’ For Job Seekers

In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic toll has resulted in rising unemployment. The pandemic is expected to leave more than 140 million people out of work and another 1.6 billion at risk of losing their income. It has especially hit hard on the low-income workers, women, and underrepresented communities. 

To overcome all these hardships, LinkedIn – with 14+ million open jobs and a professional community of more than 722+ million people worldwide – is helping unemployed professionals get back to work. They are launching new tools and resources to help professionals identify new careers and how to get there, empower professionals with insights on in-demand jobs and fastest-growing skills, and make it easier to find a community to connect them to opportunities.

LinkedIn’s Career Explorer

The new tool of LinkedIn, ‘Career Explorer’ is designed to help people find career paths they may be well-suited for. This tool uncovers new opportunities for job seekers by mapping the skills they have to thousands of available job titles. The company says that by comparing skills across jobs, users can find the right job for themselves easily.

The tool works by analyzing jobs to calculate a metric called skills similarity, which allows Career Explorer to understand how well one job might transition to another. However, to calculate skills similarity scores LinkedIn draws from user data, compares two jobs, and assigns a score between 0 to 100.

For instance, the skills similarity score between a food server in the U.S. to a customer service specialist – one of the in-demand jobs LinkedIn identified with Microsoft – is 71%. The company’s data also shows that 26 million members globally could have all the skills they need to qualify for customer service specialist, by learning just two more skills. 

 

Explorer tool will also highlight additional skills that users may need and LinkedIn Learning courses to help you get them. Also, it will connect professionals to other LinkedIn members for advice and support as they navigate the transition.

LinkedIn rolls out the beta version of the Career Explorer tool globally in English. In the upcoming months, the company will also be including additional localizations and enhancements to the tool.

Along with Career Explorer, LinkedIn has also launched other three new tools on its platform. They are:

1.  Skills Assessment: LinkedIn data shows that nearly 150 million more technology-related job opportunities could be created globally in the next five years as demand for digital skills is rapidly increasing. To prepare users for those job opportunities, LinkedIn has identified the top trending skills among professionals – ranging from digital skills like data analysis to digital marketing and programming.

The company has also launched nearly 100 new ‘Skill Assessments’ based on top trending skills. It provides job seekers a new way to validate their skills and showcase proficiency. At the same time, it will also allow them to display a wide range of skills. ‘Skills Assessments’ help job seekers better prepare for new and upcoming roles. Indeed, candidates who complete these Skill Assessments and display the badge on their profile are up to 20% more likely to get hired than those who don’t. 

2. #OpenToWork Profile Photo Frame: This new profile photo frame #OpenToWork lets job seekers share their status – that they are currently open to new job opportunities – to recruiters and their network on LinkedIn. In fact, LinkedIn data shows that sharing status may be key to finding your next job. That is, more than 3 million members globally have tried LinkedIn’s new #OpenToWork profile photo frames and those with this frame receive on average 40% more InMails from recruiters and are 20% more likely to receive messages from the wider LinkedIn community.

However, if you can specify the types of job opportunities that you’re interested in and your preferred location, LinkedIn can help your profile show up in search results when recruiters look for suitable job candidates. The company further stated that to protect a jobseeker’s privacy, they prevent LinkedIn Recruiters who work at your company and related companies from seeing your shared career interests; however, this complete privacy still cannot be guaranteed. 

3. #Hiring Profile Photo Frame: The new #Hiring frame allows hire managers to share that they are hiring right from their profiles and subsequently, enables job-seekers to see who’s hiring directly in their LinkedIn feed, and apply to relevant jobs.

 

However, LinkedIn noted that the ability to post a job for free will be available to all members globally in the upcoming months.

The company is also adding new interview prep tools for globally in-demand jobs, which as per LinkedIn, will help professionals improve their virtual interview skills and can improve their chance of landing those most sought-after roles.

LinkedIn very well knows the challenges job seekers face these days and with these new tools, resources, and community, the company looks forward to helping anyone who is unemployed to get back on their feet as soon as possible. They are committed to creating economic opportunities for every member of the global workforce in this manner.