44% of all the profiles on LinkedIn do not have a seniority level.

Sourcingtraining
27 augustus 2022

Another new discovery. As you might know, there are currently around 830 million LinkedIn profiles worldwide. Nothing new here. According to LinkedIn, there are only 2% of fake LinkedIn profiles. Experts say it is more like 10%. So if we take out 10%, we still have 747M+ profiles. No big deal. Let's see the discovery I have made. 370 M+ profiles do not have a seniority level. Period.

LinkedIn data proves it.

But how did I find out that over 370 million people are not linked at a seniority level on LinkedIn? By looking at the data. What comes out and where do the differences come from?

If I select all seniority levels, I should come up with around 750-800 million profiles, right? I don't get beyond 460 million profiles. What, only 460 million profiles? That's about 40-45% of all profiles. You can do this check at LinkedIn Recruiter Seat.


Help. What does this mean?

If you search by seniority level, you are, on average, missing almost half of your search.

There are three possible reasons for this:

  1. Or they stopped working at an organization. Over 460 million people. That seems a bit much. Currently, 95M+ people are open-to-work. There's quite a difference in that.
  2. I did come across large groups of people who don't have open-to-work turned on and who don't have a job at the moment at least according to LinkedIn. You can find these out with the hidden operators.
  3. Or there is an unclear reason why they don't have a link to a seniority level.

Seniority level on LinkedIn

In addition, the seniority level filter is not really a reliable filter either. An entry level with 10+ years of work experience is not really an entry level as far as I'm concerned. See below:


Tips to get around this:

Don't use the seniority filter. You'll miss almost half of your talent pool and get a lot of false positives. The data has shown it.

But what if you can turn this around so that you can find people without seniority levels. You can use these hidden candidates by using the hidden operators. Do you want to know more about this?

You can find these hidden candidates by using the LinkedIn hidden operators. Want to know more about this? Please join the Masterclass LinkedIn Recruiter or Recruiter Lite.