Is an upgraded LinkedIn account worth it?

Graphic courtesy of www.noop.nl 

Have you ever wondered if upgrading your LinkedIn account could actually help you get a job? So did I! That's why I ponied up for the Job Seeker service to see what it could do for me.  

Let me be clear. I love LinkedIn. LinkedIn can make job searching and recruiting easier through recommendations on candidates’ profile pages. Applications can be added to profile pages, making them more visually appealing and easy to process for both sides. It’s undeniable that LinkedIn can be very useful as a starting point for job applicants, recruiters and business people looking to build connections.

And seriously, show me an individual who isn’t thrilled that they can see who has viewed their profile, and I will show you someone who either doesn’t ‘get’ social, or has so much money and so little time that they probably check their profile once every few years, if ever! I have no figures to prove it, but anecdotally this feature comes up time and again as a key drawing point when speaking with users.

BUT (there always is a 'but', isn't there?) where LinkedIn does come up short, in my view, is in offering expanded services that go beyond basic service to help job seekers. LinkedIn also offers upgraded accounts for recruiters and sales professionals, but those features are not the subject of this review. This is mainly because I am neither a recruiter or a sales professional, and therefore less able to accurately judge those services. 

The following features don’t represent everything you get with upgraded service, just that they are features I tended to use more often during my test drive.

Get featured

This might be the most useful feature of having an upgraded account. When you apply for a job on LinkedIn, you can request that your application be listed in a featured section above all the candidates who don’t have this privilege. 

The idea is that your application is more likely to be seen since other candidates’ materials won’t be ahead in line. Consider yourself to have a VIP position, while simultaneously being at the head of the line. Drink the Kool-Aid that is being at the front of the line, even though you showed up last! I think it's fair to assume that you'll be sharing that with other Premium users, but it is still better than being at the bottom of the page if you didn't get to the listing quickly enough.

I had no way of accurately measuring how effectively being featured got me interviews during my test period, but I did notice that a few employers that already had over 100 candidates apply contacted me. Then again, I’ve experienced replies when applying for positions with high candidate volumes, even without an upgraded account. These days even with an upgraded account if the number is above 50 I don’t even bother applying, mostly because the job has already been listed for awhile, but I still think I'm getting more responses for jobs with a high number of applicants than I would without the service.

My work record and my education as mentioned on my resume, as well as my LinkedIn recommendations, are usually enough to establish contact with recruiters. But I can’t deny that being listed in a special place where recruiters can see me has given me a leg up on other applicants, especially when the volume of job seekers is high. Score a point for LinkedIn Premium.

How do you stack up?

When you apply for a job, so long as 10 or more people have already applied you can see pie charts and info about the candidate pool. For example, if 20 candidates apply, you can see the percentage who have an MA or higher, the percentage who are experienced non-managers or managers, and most importantly how qualified you are as a job candidate compared to the others who have also applied.

The problem with this feature is that how you stack up compared to other candidates is only one determinant of whether or not you should apply for a job. There may be jobs that require certain qualitative skills or characteristics not picked up by LinkedIn that a flesh-and-blood recruiter would immediately recognize and value.

I did hear back from recruiters for positions that I was listed as not being as qualified as the top 50% of applicants. This also tells me that LinkedIn’s system of measuring amount of talent applying for positions does not necessarily prove that you should still not go after the job. 

I did wonder how accurate LinkedIn is in comparison to job aggregators like ZipRecruiter, which sends job listings to your inbox with percentages of how compatible you likely are for the roles. I also wondered how many of these statistics could be seen by recruiters and how much stock they put in them.

Granted, LinkedIn does not claim that it’s a waste of time to apply if you’re not ranked among the most qualified, but then that’s just another way in which upgrading my account seemed to me to either not be useful or a distraction. Personally I would rather not know how I rank then be given statistics that may not matter to the recruiter posting the job.

Get paid

LinkedIn lets you filter jobs by how much they are projected to pay. This sounds useful in theory, but in practice filtering jobs by salary was wildly inaccurate. For example, I applied for a position that LinkedIn suggested would pay $40,000. I applied not because I thought the salary was amazing, but because I recognized that the company was very innovative, well regarded and could definitely do better.

After applying, within a week I got an email from a recruiter and a follow-up conversation for an hour to see if I was interested. The recruiter brought up salary even though it was our first phone meeting.

How much do you think the company was actually offering compared to LinkedIn’s projected salary?

Around $75,000 a year plus good benefits. Benefits are not mentioned when LinkedIn projects salary.

I could understand being off by $5,000 or $10,000, but $35,000 is a huge difference, almost the yearly projected salary. It's a good thing I hadn't cared about the projected salary.

For me, LinkedIn’s filtering system was not accurate enough to be worth the monthly cost of having an upgraded LinkedIn account. If it was a free feature I might have let it slide.

InMail

LinkedIn has a neat little messaging system called InMail. It is not covered by basic membership. 

Upgraded account users receive a certain amount of InMail credit each month, depending on level of membership. With InMails, you can send a message to people on LinkedIn, even if they are not contacts, as long as you label your message with one of about 10 different intents. I'm not sure if there is even a way for people to block InMails from reaching their inbox.

Photo courtesy of Robert Ganzer on Flickr

If an InMail you’ve sent is not responded to then the credit is returned to your account. Rolled over credits stay in your account for up to 90 days for upgraded subscribers.

Although my coverage was for a job seeker account, I found that sending InMails to recruiters to underscore my interest, while not something I recommend, almost never got a response. I tried different writing styles, I tried different timings for sending InMails, I even asked for pointed questions from recruiters who had listed “job inquiry” as one of the types of messages that they are interested in responding to. Nothing, zilch.

I wouldn’t be surprised if recruiters are sick and tired of applicants sending them InMails and don’t respond the vast majority of messages they receive.

Why does this matter? Because people expect their job seeker account is going to help them get jobs. If InMails can’t help them do that with recruiters, then what is so special about them that only Job Seeker accounts can have them? This is especially troubling because LinkedIn comes out and says "send InMails to recruiters".

Maybe LinkedIn should be offering at least some limited InMail capability to everyone, even if all they have is a basic account. I think that people who are using the site deserve at least five free InMails, if not more.

Where InMail’s came in handy was when I wanted to get in touch with people other than recruiters who are not yet contacts, and who might still be useful to reach out to. I made a few connections this way with one individual even asking me unprompted if I’d like to work on a project with him. I couldn’t have done that without InMail. But it also probably wouldn’t have happened if I had approached him as a job seeker.

Connected to this service is that an upgraded account allows anyone on LinkedIn to contact you for free. There are plenty of ways around this though that don't require an upgraded account. Set up an email account and list it as the best way for people to contact you. Boom, you're done.

Show me your badge!

LinkedIn lets premium users display different badges next to their name throughout the site, indicating that the user is a “job seeker”, has a “premium account” or is an “open networker”, meaning that the user does not only establish connections with people he or she knows.

I could not see how such badges helped my chances with recruiters, except that the “job seeker” badge seemed somewhat more subtle than screaming out, “hey world, give me a job!” 

I don’t know that most people would notice the tiny badges. No one said anything to me during the time period that I displayed the job seeker badge. Interestingly a recruiter from a Fortune 500 company did reach out to me when I wasn’t using a badge, but she said that had more to do with her searching for profiles that contained certain matching information than anything I did. None of my badges got anyone to listen to me respectfully or even comment on my fine taste.

To summarize badges, they look nice but in my case they do no more than dress up my profile. I don’t understand how anyone could get anything out of this feature.

Weekly updates and expanded list of viewers

Every week LinkedIn sends a collection of numbers and statistics to show premium job seeker account holders how they’re doing, such as how many people have looked at your profile this week, how many jobs you’ve applied for, and so on. For me the problem was that much of the information being sent was something I knew anyway. I could look at my profile manually and see that I received six views one week and the following week.

One nice feature that LinkedIn likes to play up is that premium account holders can see an expanded list of who has viewed their account. However, in practice I found that it didn’t really help me with anything. Actually, being able to see everyone who looked at my account removed a considerable amount of the mystique behind that part of LinkedIn. Many viewers had toggled their accounts to not show their identities, But it was not like I was able to see through their cloak of anonymity. They might have been recruiters, but it would have been nice to see who they are.

Community access

When I upgraded my LinkedIn account I was granted access to a special locked forum called Job Seeker Premium. Think of it as a VIP lounge for very motivated job seekers to build connections.

My problem wasn’t that the forum didn’t have very smart people with good ideas. My main issue, again, was that it seemed to me that much of what could be done in the forum could be done in open groups. Being part of the group didn’t seem so much of a perk considering the amount being spent per month. I felt it needed to be more than what seemed largely to be stories of people telling each other how to use Premium accounts, or sharing good news about getting new jobs.

$ticker $hock

So this is what it all comes down to. Ready to ante up? See the screen grabs below for the current pricing (apologies for the tool bar scrolling across the grabs, that couldn't be avoided):

Some people say that starting out at $23.99 and moving up to $59.99 a month for a further upgrade is worth it if it gets you a job. I’m just not sure you need to spend that money to still get a lot out of LinkedIn.

Many of the Premium services were not very useful for me, could be replaced by free alternatives or could be figured out with a little time spent. I think that for what you get, upgraded LinkedIn Job Seeker accounts get expensive in a hurry, which for people out of work might make upgrading a luxury.

So at the end of the day LinkedIn offers a number of benefits. If you decide to upgrade and get a lot out of it, I’d be the first one to be happy for you. But do I personally think that provides such a huge leap over the basic package that it’s worth the cost?

I downgraded my account yesterday.

How to defeat trolls: a guide

You’re engaged in a deep conversation with others online about something important, when BAM!

You’ve just been targeted by a troll, that scaly, lecherous upsetter of do-gooder netizens that just wants to see the world burn.


Is there anything that your can do to counter trolls? Yes, but it all begins with an understanding of human psychology, not social media tools. 


What I’m about to share with you is valuable information that I learned at Northwestern University. This advice works with real world businesses, as well as random online civilian encounters.

Not every troll should be treated the same way. Some trolls seek to upset conversations because they are frustrated because of some related negative past experience. There are trolls just looking to derail a conversation for the purpose of inflating their own egos. Other trolls are seeking to embarrass or disrupt online discourse for political or business reasons. And some trolls are just jerks. Sad but true.

Whether you are an individual or a business, dealing with the four types of trolls mentioned above requires patience and a tactically-sound approach. I’ll show how it’s done, but first, if you want a good overview of trolling, watch this:

Unhappy trolls

Unhappy trolls bitter about the past are usually upset because of a vicariously negative experience; they are angry because they feel they have been burned.

For example, the individual who excitedly buys a new car, only to find it breaks down repeatedly in front of friends and family. This person is never going to buy from that car manufacturer again, and he or she is going to make sure that everyone continuously shows sympathy. You know tat this person is a troll and not just an unhappy customer with reasonable concerns by the lengths they go to whine, whinge and make sure everyone nearby feels equally outraged.

The unhappy troll is a disgruntled type that is usually just having a bad day or week, not trying to be especially malicious or a pain in you know what. Usually unhappy trolls simply need to have their bad experience recognized. Regardless of their demeanor, the upset troll needs to be addressed as a respected individual. After they have been calmly addressed, which sets the tone for the conversation, the troll’s negative experience should be heard out. Finally, the individual should be smoothly offered an option that they will probably reject. When the option is rejected, that should be followed quickly by a counter option that is more palatable to both sides.

Luckily, people are more like to be accepting of negotiation if they feel that the other side is willing to do the same. However, this process needs to be handled very carefully so that the first offer does not appear as a rip-off. Community managers should stockpile offers and counter-offers for different situations. If trolls still continue to whine,

Egotistical trolls

Some trolls are just looking to inflate their egos. The best example that I can think of is the argumentative person who has no good reason for what they say, except that they are saying it. Such trolls are often loud and rude, or use forceful language not backed by facts. The whole intent behind this approach is to paint themselves as intelligent while the opposition as flawed. If they were simply attention-seeking and not trolls, they would not try to tear others down.

There are two approaches to this type of troll. The approach that you choose depends on how intelligent the troll’s argument appears to onlookers.

In the first approach, the troll’s argument is not very intelligent. All that you have to do to poke holes in the argument is to make clear that you are more skilled/knowledgeable/cooler than the troll, and that you have a different opinion than the troll. A classic example of this approach is Senator Lloyd Bentson shooting down Senator Dan Quayle’s assertion of being as skilled as John F. Kennedy. 

Quayle wasn't exactly being a troll here, but you get the point:

In the second approach, the troll might appear a good deal more intelligent or qualified, usually more because of their position than because they offer a strong argument. In this case, the troll’s argument should be addressed directly. The troll should not be attacked on a personal level, but rather his or her points must be dismantled and/or shown as insulting to listeners. We must expose the troll’s knowledge as inferior to our understanding.

This week, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, debated ESPN’s Skip Bayless on whether or not LeBron James of the Miami Heat deserved to be criticized for how he played Dallas. Skip has been criticized by his co-host Stephen A. Smith for being over the top in how he characterizes LeBron.

I'm not a LeBron James fan, but by most accounts I’ve seen online Mark completely demolished Skip. I have to agree. Here’s the video:

Political trolls

Trolls that are motivated by political or business reasons can be very dangerous and difficult to deal with. The reason for this is that they are driven by their intellects more so than their egos. They can be calculating, conniving, and extremely motivated. Understanding their thinking and exposing it as incorrect can very often draw them out into confrontational positions that are far easier to debunk.

Dealing with such individuals requires a very nuanced and careful approach to first re-frame the conversation and then prove the troll wrong. One of the best ways to defeat a political troll is to expose their bias. We do this by showing that the troll has different standards depending on whether it supports their point of view. By the time this is done, the debate is usually over regardless of what the troll tries to say or do, and the debate is over.

Jesse Lange, a high school student, debated Bill O’Reilley, the abrasive conservative commentator on FOX, showing how it’s done. The same tactics used by Jesse can be used by conservatives against liberals as well:

Trolls that are sociopathic jerks

Trolls that are jerks are some of the hardest people to deal with. They want attention and have strong sociopathic tendencies and just want to hurt others. At times their behavior goes beyond simply mean to outright illegal.

Wonder what such a troll looks like? The BBC tracked one down and asked him his motivations:

Not a very pleasant guy, is he.

Short of getting the police involved, there are only a few different approaches to dealing with trolls that are jerks. Deleting posts and banning trolls should be strongly considered. If posts that are offensive are allowed to stay up, they can poison the whole atmosphere of the forum. This is why many forums either ban posts that violate user rules, or allow other users to vote down offensive comments so that they are hidden.

If trolls cannot be banned for some reason, then they should be ignored. Since they are not getting the attention they crave, they often give up and go away.


Trolls fear humor

Finally, if you’re up to it, humor can humiliate trolls or at least make them look ridiculous. As a last resort, use humor to defuse tension. Take the trolls views and adopt them as your own!


Al Franken owns Ann Coulter during a debate on which person they would most like to be:

Stephen Colbert takes humor to an even higher level by appearing to agree with Bill O’Reilley. Stephen’s reason for doing this was to show how unreasonable Bill is:

You know that when you get a troll to laugh that you’ve done a good job. Aside from The Joker anyways.

What experiences have you had with trolls? How have you defeated them? Do you think there is anything missing from this guide or anything that could be improved? I'm looking forward to your comments!

1 unbelievably fun tip for memorizing anything (Hack Your Brain #2)

Corporate communications professionals have to juggle unbelievable amounts of information and relationships. Come to think of it, EVERYONE needs to do that.

How can this be done?

Memory. Aside from using tools, such as Radian6, a strong memory makes all the difference for your getting work done efficiently and enjoying your life.

Unfortunately, many people are intimidated by the idea of relying upon their minds, rather than committing their thoughts to paper. They don’t know how to do it, aside from the usual tips to break down items into abbreviated lists and so on.

Abbreviations work. But you can do much, MUCH better.

If you’re like me, memorizing things can be tricky. That is, until I heard of the Memory Palace technique. People use this simple trick to quickly memorize unbelievable amounts of information. An eight-time world memory champion, Dominic O’Brien, was able to memorize 54 decks of cards in sequence looking at each card only once using this tip.

Intrigued? So was I. Practicing this technique has forever changed how I approach memorization.

I’ll explain how it works.

How your memory works

Your brain is an amazingly powerful organ. And it can remember things far beyond what you might think is the expiration date. How often have you tasted a dish and been transported back to your childhood, or seen a beautiful sight that stays for years? Clearly, it is possible to store info for long periods, without apparently trying very hard and this is all the more true if those thoughts are highly emotional.

The other thing that matters a lot to your remembering information is that your Hippocampus, a visual center in the brain, is intimately tied to your memorizing abilities.

Activate your Hippocampus and chances are that you will be more likely to remember once fleeting thoughts. Make your thoughts highly emotional and you can bank on not forgetting as easily as you once might have.

How can we take advantage of our neurological wiring? We build a palace. 

Build a place in your mind that you already know well

The Memory Palace is highly effective as a memorization tool largely because it activates the Hippocampus. 

Here’s how to do it. In your mind, visualize a place that you already know intimately. The place you visually might be a home you lived in for years, or a path you walk every day through your workplace. The place really doesn’t matter so much as your knowledge of it. If it is a place that you feel strong about, all the better. Your visualized place is your palace.

Now, associate your items for memorizing with the place you have visualized

Create relationships between different areas in your palace with the items you want to memorize. For example, if you want to remember a pencil, you might consider visualizing a pencil as you enter your palace. As you walk through your palace in your mind’s eye, you see other objects you need – a tomato, a crocodile, tickets to an NBA game.

You know what? Let’s keep these items in mind as we go to the next step – a pencil, a tomato, a crocodile, and tickets to an NBA game.

Make your thoughts as emotional and strange as possible (a practical example)

We have already nailed an important part of memory by building memory palaces. Now lets really make those thoughts stick.

The Romans, who came up with the Memory Palace technique, suggested making the thoughts we memorize as gory as possible. They said that the more weird and emotional the image, the better.

Here is how I would do it.

As I walk into my childhood home through the garage, I see the pencil. It is a HUGE pencil, with the circumference of a log. Better escape into the next room, the pencil is rolling after me and might crush my toes! RUN!

Whew, made it. … Uh, the floor is covered in squashed tomatoes … who is going to have to clean up this mess? Ugh!

(Luckily there is a cartoon crocodile in the living room, his teeth dripping with blood and guts. I say luckily, because he has begun sweeping up the tomatoes.)

Better go in the kitchen, this is a little weird. And I don’t like the way the tomatoes are squelching underfoot.

Woah! … It’s Derrick Rose, my favorite player for the Chicago Bulls, and he’s sitting at the kitchen table. Why is he here? … He’s handing over those NBA tickets for my family that I wanted! What a great day.

See what I mean? You might be able to memorize my list more easily than before I made it so bizarre. The more bizarre, emotional and disgusting, the better.

On a side note, there is a major reason I used a childhood theme for my recent Burt and Ernie teach Twitter techniques post. Memories of childhood shows and experiences can be a powerful way of helping others remember our social media content. Of course such content has to be memorable for the right reasons, otherwise it can more easily remain in the mind for the wrong reasons!

How to begin applying the Memory Palace to your work

Now it’s time to practice this technique yourself. While you’re at home, write down a grocery list and commit the items to memory by building a crazy Memory Palace. Leave the list at home; do not look at the list while shopping.

After you get back, check how many items you remembered. If you forgot any items, really think about why that might be. Was your association between the items and the place you constructed strong enough? Were the razor blades you needed not scary enough?

Don’t get discouraged if you were not 100% successful the first time. The more you practice the Memory Palace technique, the easier it will be to remember items. On the other hand, you might find yourself getting perfect scores from the beginning. The key to success is really activating your brain’s emotional and visual center.

Once you have become good at memorizing lists of up to 30 items, you can graduate to relying on this technique at work. Once you can do this reliably with memorizing physical objects, you might try using Memory Palaces to recall abstract concepts linked strongly to physical objects in your mind’s eye. 

For example, if you want to memorize “honor”, you might find remembering a knight in shining armor useful to memorizing that concept. The more you learn how your mind works, the more you can fine tune this process. Eventually you would always want to use the same objects to recall specific concepts.

Well, what do you think? Have you ever used the Memory Palace, and what sort of results have you gotten? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Happy memorizing!