Did you know about LinkedIn’s Hidden Jobs? Linkedin will hide job postings after a number of people have applied if the job poster doesn’t pay a large sum of money per day for it to be searchable?
Free Job Post
I’ve never posted a job on LinkedIn before so I was very confused by what they meant by posting a “free job post.”
With a free job, up to 10 applicants can apply after that the job is “paused.”
Paused Jobs – LinkedIn’s Hidden Jobs
Good News:
- Applicants can still apply to the job
- Its still technically free
Bad News:
- The Job is no longer searchable on the jobs page. Meaning if you are searching for jobs that doesn’t have 600 applicants you are S.O.L.
- After 50 or so people apply for the free job LinkedIn will automatically CLOSE THE APPLICATION TO NEW APPLICANTS.
Unpausing Jobs
If you want to unpause the job then its no problem. You just need to pay up to $85 a dollars a day so that your job is searchable.
Now as you can imagine this can become very expensive. Lets do a quick example example.
Lets say that you need to fulfill 15 position and you want them searchable for atleast two weeks
15 positions * 14 days * $85 =
$17,850
That is a lot of money to spend in two weeks.
Why Should you care?
If you are an employer:
You should care because this can be very expensive
If you are looking for a job:
You should care because a majority of the jobs you can apply to aren’t easily searchable. The only why you can find a “paused” job is if somebody shares the job link with you or you were to go on the companies Linkedin page and looked under their jobs section.
Its impractical to go to every single company and search their jobs page the manually. So many of these jobs would go unnoticed by many qualified job seekers.
Conclusion
Back in march of 2024 when I was looking for a new position if I had known about the hidden jobs I would have built a crawler to find paused jobs and apply to them if they matched what I was looking for haha.
LinkedIn would never release these stats but I’d be interested in seeing how many jobs exist that are still accepting applications but are paused.
Good luck to those looking for jobs.
Good luck to employers who have to shell out large amounts of money to find those job seekers.
2 replies on “LinkedIn’s Hidden Jobs”
The more you know! Thanks for sharing…I figured LinkedIn had be making money outside of premium subscriptions but damn, $17k to post a job for just two weeks?! We all know that the job market is broken and this is just one cog in that cluster of a process.
Great insight into LinkedIn’s job posting mechanics! I had no idea that free job posts were paused after a certain number of applicants. It’s eye-opening to see how this can impact both job seekers and employers. Thanks for sharing your experience and shedding light on this often-overlooked aspect of job searching.