The truth behind LinkedIn’s Open to Work banner

Lots of job seekers say they’re perfectly comfortable using the banner. A data scientist cheerily told me he isn’t easily embarrassed. A business-development professional said she feels that people who find the banner cringeworthy are “stuck in the past.” In July alone, according to LinkedIn, 40 million users were letting their Open to Work flag fly.

But most of the people I talked to expressed hesitation about the banner. Several compared it to a scarlet letter — one that’s digitally tattooed on your face, rather than sewn on your dress. Whatever the banner’s intentions, it can serve to amplify the sense of shame that often comes from being unemployed. “It invites a lot of questions,” said Dylan, the laid-off tech worker. “Oh, what did he do? Did he have an HR issue? Did he assault someone at work? Did something nefarious go down?” So far, he’s told only his mom and closest friends about his job loss. To him, declaring yourself Open to Work is to brand yourself as Open to Dishonor.

A recruiting executive I’ll call Rachel has been more open about her situation. As soon as she was laid off, she reached out to a hundred of her contacts to let them know she was looking for work. But even she has waffled on using the banner. She doesn’t look down on candidates for using it — but because she has read so many diatribes against it on LinkedIn, she doesn’t trust other recruiters to be as open-minded about it. “I get the impression that some people look at the badge as if you’re a homeless person sitting on the corner with a freaking cardboard sign that reads, Will Work for Food,” she said. “That’s where I struggle. I would hate to be passed on because a recruiter lazily looked at my badge and judged me.”

An IT manager I’ll call Connor was also convinced by the online commentary to forgo the banner. “The majority of the opinions were ‘don’t do it,’ because recruiters don’t want desperate employees,” he says. “There’s this belief that the best employees are snatched up right away. If I turn it on, I’m signaling that I’m automatically not one of the best and brightest.” But he’s bitter that using the green banner is seen as a red flag. “It’s bizarre,” he observed. “Saying ‘we can’t hire you because you said you want a job’ is like saying ‘we can’t feed you because you said you’re hungry.'”

So are job seekers right to assume that recruiters will shun them for coming out as unemployed on LinkedIn? To my surprise, only one of the eight recruiters I spoke with said the banner gives him pause about a candidate, viewing it as a sign of “passivity” in the face of a stalled search. Two recruiters said they feel neutral about it. The rest said that, if anything, they actually seek out Open to Workers. Some even use LinkedIn Recruiter, a premium version of the platform, to prioritize candidates who use the banner. “I know if I approach them, they’re more likely to be interested,” one recruiter told me. “They tend to be more responsive, more open to talking.” Recruiters also know that Open to Work candidates are available for interviews — and can start a new job without having to give notice. “That helps me move my process along more quickly,” another recruiter explained. “My hiring managers want their roles filled immediately.”

Still, I was skeptical. Studies have found that recruiters tend to discriminate against the unemployed, offering substantially lower callback rates for out-of-work candidates than for those with a job. And critics of Open to Work often advise candidates to steer clear of the banner, calling it the “biggest red flag” and an embarrassing display of “pick-me energy.” So I pressed the recruiters I spoke with on this point. Are you sure you don’t judge bannered workers, even just a tiny bit? Don’t you worry that they’re out of work for good reason?

“It’s my job to ask questions, to find out why they’re looking for a job,” one recruiter told me. “A proper recruiter won’t make decisions based on assumptions. Nowadays, especially with all the layoffs, you really don’t know why people are out of a job. Layoffs can be completely random.”

Another recruiter hates that candidates are being warned against declaring themselves Open to Work. “It makes me grind my teeth,” she says. “There’s just so much misinformation out there. These messages are typically coming from someone who’s never worked in recruiting — they’re a ‘career coaching guru,’ or whatever job title they like to use to market themselves. It’s unfortunate, because it gets to a point where job seekers don’t know what advice to listen to.”

I don’t think these banner-friendly recruiters are in the minority. In a survey by Teal, which makes software for job seekers, only 9% of recruiters and hiring managers said they viewed the banner negatively. And LinkedIn’s own data confirms that listing yourself as Open to Work actually encourages recruiters to reach out to you. People who turn on the private signal are twice as likely to get a message from a recruiter than those who don’t, the platform told me. And those who turn on the public banner increase their chances by nearly threefold. The more open you are about needing a job, the more likely you are to get one.

In an employment landscape full of fear and uncertainty, Open to Work banners are an unwelcome reminder that we are all expendable.

On a deeper level, though, it isn’t recruiters that everyone on LinkedIn is worried about. After all, every job seeker I spoke with who decided against using the public Open to Work banner was still deploying the private signal to potential employers. We know, deep down, that recruiters are professionally trained to be aware of their biases. But our peers? Not so much. The real reason we don’t use the banner is that we’re worried about what our friends and colleagues will think of us. If they see us as desperate, or feel embarrassed for us, won’t that make them less likely to give us the help we need?

Ofer Sharone, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, studies long-term unemployment among elite professionals. For his book “The Stigma Trap,” he asked alumni of a leading business school what they would do if they were contacted by a fellow graduate who was hoping to network with them. At first, they were eager to connect. But when Sharone added that the graduate seeking to network had been unemployed for a year, they suddenly demurred.

“It’s unfortunate,” one alum told Sharone, “but you wonder if there is something going on.”

“I don’t know,” said another. “My cynicism says that very few people who are really good get laid off — which is probably a bias that’s unfair.”

That attitude, Sharone has found, permeates American culture. “It’s not just alumni,” he told me. “Everybody in our society has this unconscious bias against someone unemployed.”

The stigma, he says, is a reflection of how precarious the modern workplace has become. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, companies almost never laid off managers. To get the ax, professionals had to be really bad at their jobs, or do something beyond the pale. But today, white-collar elites are starting to learn what blue-collar workers already know through long and bitter experience: that you can lose your job at any time, for any reason — or for no reason at all. For those with a college degree, Sharone says, shunning the unemployed is a coping mechanism, a way of convincing ourselves that we’ll remain afloat in a rising sea of pink slips.

“When someone who’s college educated and really qualified and experienced is unemployed, that’s a scary thing,” he said. “That could mean anybody could be unemployed. That could mean I could be unemployed. So the way to avoid that conclusion and keep yourself feeling calm is to think, ‘Well, maybe that person did something wrong.'” We’d rather blame the individual than the system — because blaming the system involves coming to terms with the reality that, no matter what we do, we could lose our livelihood tomorrow. In an employment landscape full of fear and uncertainty, Open to Work banners are an unwelcome reminder that we are all expendable.

To get a firsthand sense of what it feels like to use the Open to Work banner, I forced myself to do the thing I avoided in my job search four years ago: I turned mine on. From the start it made me deeply uncomfortable, and I was repeatedly tempted to take it down. What would people think of me if they saw me as unemployed? Was I secretly being pitied? Or worse, judged?

There’s no way to know for sure. As the weeks went by, no one I knew commented on my new status, except for a colleague who was worried that I had left Business Insider. I also didn’t hear from any employers, which was, I’ll admit, a blow to my ego. Instead, I got a mysterious message from someone at a company I had never heard of touting “an amazing business opportunity.” I could learn more about it, they told me, in an information session on Zoom.

That’s apparently a common experience among LinkedIn users who deploy the banner. One told me he got a lot of messages from recruiters about lower-pay contract work he was overqualified for. He also got at least one scam asking for his Social Security number. Another job seeker received messages from résumé writers touting their services; one quoted him a fee of $6,000.

Still, when you’re out of work, it’s worth wading through a bunch of unwelcome responses in search of the right opportunity. The data scientist I spoke with said the banner led him to two job interviews — including one with the CEO of a startup. And the business-development manager I spoke with fared even better. She not only turned on the Open to Work banner, she also posted a few paragraphs explaining what she was looking for. The response was swift. Acquaintances shared her post with their networks; former colleagues and clients introduced her to people in their companies who were hiring. She got several interviews, and within weeks she landed a job. The owner of the company was a LinkedIn connection who reached out after seeing her post.

All of which suggests that, stigma aside, you’ll be missing out on opportunities if you don’t turn on the public banner. LinkedIn’s data shows that public Open to Workers get 40% more messages from LinkedIn Recruiter than those who use only the private signal. (One recruiter told me they consider public candidates more serious than private ones, many of whom already have jobs and are just looking around for something better.) And smaller employers can’t afford the expensive premium version of LinkedIn, which costs thousands of dollars a year. If you want the little guys to see you, you need to deploy the public flag.

Even more important, private Open to Workers are missing out on the leads they might get from former colleagues and clients and classmates — the people who already know what a great hire you’d be. Sure, some of your contacts may be privately judgy and decline to help, as Sharone found. But others you know will be eager to pitch in. After all, in this new era of endless layoffs, we all have a common interest in helping our friends and coworkers — because, sooner or later, we may be the ones in need of help. By one estimate, 40% of Americans have been laid off at least once in their lifetime. If things keep going the way they’re going, that number is likely to get significantly higher in the years ahead, especially among white-collar professionals.

That isn’t to say the Open to Work banner is a quick fix for the job-search blues. Ultimately, the most effective strategy involves old-fashioned, one-on-one networking, which takes far more time and effort than a simple flip of a digital switch. But in the depths of unemployment, every lifeline counts. I get that it’s uncomfortable to go public with your status. I was relieved to turn off my banner after a few weeks, and I can only imagine what it’s like to have everyone staring at your high-profile call for help for months on end. But when the stakes are as high as your career, the potential upsides are worth whatever embarrassment it might cause.

Besides, in the long run, the only way to overcome the societal stigma of unemployment is to pierce the silence that has surrounded it for so long. Seven years ago, in the aftermath of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, thousands of women began sharing their own experiences with workplace misconduct. The resulting groundswell made it a little less taboo to talk about sexual harassment and assault. Perhaps, with #opentowork, something similar could happen to the way we talk about losing our jobs.

“We’ve not yet had a #metoo moment about layoffs,” says Sharone. “But if this takes off, I think it could potentially take away some of the stigma.”

In other words: Workers of the world, be Open! You have nothing to lose but your shame.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.