A common complaint from applicants using LinkedIn is that: They’re up against hundreds of other applicants for every job.
It’s worth knowing a small secret about how LinkedIn counts job applicants, specifically for jobs where the ‘Apply’ button clicks out from LinkedIn to the recruiter’s website.
Here’s an example:
Just there you can see it says there have been ‘70 applicants’. That’s quite lot, for a job that was only advertised a few days ago. If you look a little closer above, you can see a few lines further down it then says ‘See how you compare to 68 applicants’. That’s strange, eh? The two numbers don’t match. That’s a small clue that the numbers here may not be perfectly accurate.
So let’s see what happens to the first ‘70 applicants’ number after we click the ‘Apply’ button:
- Firstly, it loads the recruiter’s website in a new window
- Secondly, if we now refresh the job ad on LinkedIn, it says there have been 71 applicants
Note: This is before applying for any job on the recruiter’s website, we’ve simply clicked an ‘Apply’ button, and a new window has loaded.
You can also see there, a few lines further down, it now says ‘See how you compare to over 100 other applicants’, where it had previously said ‘See how you compare to 68 other applicants’.
So what’s going on?
The answer is: When a job is advertised on a third party website, LinkedIn doesn’t actually know how many applicants there have been. In an effort to provide some info to jobseekers, it therefore simply counts how many people click the ‘Apply’ button, and refers to those people as ‘applicants’, whether they completed an application at all.
In summary: If you’re applying for jobs on LinkedIn, don’t be too disheartened by the applicant numbers – they may be way higher than they seem on the surface.