Job seekers meet them problem when choosing to tag yourself as #OpenToWork on LinkedIn.
On the one hand, it sends a clear and useful signal to employers. On the other hand, the badge can get you a lot of people who may be unemployed or unhappy with their jobs, which can be seen as a bad sign – you know, the old Groucho Marx quote: I do not want to belong to any group that would accept me as a member.
If you are a software engineer in the market, should you register yourself as OpenToWork? Does doing so give a sign of opposition? And with the recent flood of tech industry layoffs, has the meaning of #OpenToWork changed? We decided to investigate.
We aggregated the success/failure rates for the interviews our users took and reported whether the users listed themselves as OpenToWork on LinkedIns.
Preparation
interviewing.io is an interview and recruitment marketplace. Engineers use us for interviewing and companies use us to recruit top performers. In our lifetime, we have had more than 100k interviews, split between mockery and reality. To see if self-branding as OpenToWork is a good thing to do, we included success/failure rates in surveys our users took and reported whether users self-branded as OpenToWork on LinkedIn. We also made sure to check their LinkedIn profiles twice: once in early 2021, when there were no technical outages, and in early 2023, due to the worst technical outage since 2001.
Why did we double check? Economic theory shows that people who lose their jobs or look for work during a boom are different than those who lose their jobs due to a recession. If you’ve been let go or can’t get a job while the company is running, it could be that you were fired for work-related reasons or you can’t pass the phone interview. On the other hand, a person who has suffered a layoff during the economic crisis may be able to afford, financially injured.
We found that being OpenToWork is very popular now. Of the more than 10,000 people we had LinkedIn data on, only 1.4% had a badge in 2021 compared to 4.2% in the first quarter of 2023.
Results
How do the two OpenToWork engineering teams work?
We found that being OpenToWork was a bad sign for those who had it in 2021, a good time to hire tech jobs. The chart below shows the percentage of people who passed their interviews – our shorthand measure of candidate performance. On average, about 51 percent of candidates pass their interviews. In contrast, holders of OpenToWork badges in 2021 were 7 percentage points lower, at 44%.