job seekers face a dilemma when choosing whether to mark yourself as #OpenToWork on LinkedIn.
For one thing, it sends a clear and helpful signal to recruiters. On the other hand, the badge can lump you in with a crowd of people who are more likely to be unemployed or unhappy with their jobs, which could be seen as a negative, you know, the old Groucho Marx quote: I don’t want to belong to any club that accepts me as a member.
If you are a software engineer in the market, should you list yourself as OpenToWork? Does doing so send a negative signal? And with the recent spate of layoffs at tech companies, has the meaning of #OpenToWork changed? We decided to find out.
We aggregated the pass/fail rates in the interviews our users took and compared them to whether users marked themselves as OpenToWork on their LinkedIn.
Startup
interviewing.io is an interview practice platform and technology recruiting marketplace. Engineers use us for mock interviews and companies use us to hire the best. Throughout our lives, we have conducted more than 100,000 technical interviews, divided between mock and real. To test whether being listed as OpenToWork is a good thing, we aggregate the pass/fail rates in the interviews our users conducted and compare it to whether users marked themselves as OpenToWork on their LinkedIn. We also made sure to check their LinkedIn twice: once in early 2021, when there were virtually no tech layoffs, and again in early 2023, following the worst round of tech layoffs since 2001.
Why do we double check? Economic theory suggests that people laid off or looking for work in good times are different from people laid off in a recession. If you get fired or can’t find a job when companies are full, you may have been fired for performance reasons or may never make it through a selection call. On the other hand, someone who suffered widespread layoffs at a time of economic crisis might be perfectly capable, just a victim of macroeconomic forces.
We found that being OpenToWork is much more common now. Among the more than 10,000 people for whom we had LinkedIn data, only 1.4% had the badge in 2021 compared to 4.2% in Q1 2023.
The results
How are these two cohorts of OpenToWork engineers performing?
We found that being OpenToWork was a negative sign for those who had it in 2021, a boom time for tech contracting. The chart below shows the percentage of people who passed their interviews – our summary measure of candidate performance. On average, about 51 percent of candidates pass their interviews. By contrast, those with OpenToWork badges in 2021 were 7 percentage points below that, at 44%.
