Does Applying on LinkedIn Actually Work? What Reddit Says

If you search for whether LinkedIn applications are worth sending, you land on one thread. It is in r/jobs, it has over 24,000 upvotes and more than 1,100 comments, and it is titled "I worked at LinkedIn for 3 years and here's what they don't tell you."

I went and read the whole thing, including the replies, because almost everything written about that thread repeats the headline and stops.

What the post actually claims

Four things, from someone saying they spent three years working there.

That Easy Apply is effectively a black hole, with something like 800 applications landing on a single posting, recruiters filtering to Premium users, and reading roughly the first twenty.

That the Open To Work banner is treated as a red flag by hiring managers, something the poster says came up in internal meetings.

That most roles are already filled internally before the listing goes up, with the public post existing to satisfy an HR policy.

And the conclusion: stop applying through LinkedIn, start talking to people on it.

The part nobody quotes

Another person in that same thread, also claiming to work at LinkedIn, says the post is wrong. Their reply sits at over 400 upvotes.

Their argument is specific rather than vague, which is what makes it worth taking seriously. They say Easy Apply is not a black hole when the employer has it routed into their own applicant tracking system. They say there is no Premium filter in LinkedIn Recruiter at all, and that they know because they train people on the product most weeks. The only claim they concede is the one about roles having internal successors, and they add that it is not true of all of them.

You now have two anonymous people, both claiming the same employer, flatly contradicting each other, and no way to verify either.

What the rest of the thread reports

The commenters are more useful than either insider, because they are describing outcomes rather than mechanisms.

The highest voted reply, at around 2,800, says the only real success came from in-house recruiters sending a specific message, not a generic one.

Another, above 1,200, says do not spend your time applying there but keep the profile thorough anyway, because a recruiter approached them after they overhauled it, following eight months of unemployment.

One with several hundred upvotes says the first thing they do with any LinkedIn posting is go straight to the company's own site instead.

And several people say plainly that they got hired by applying on LinkedIn, without Premium, which is the outcome the original post says does not happen.

What actually holds up

The internal successor claim. Both insiders agree on it and it matches how large employers are known to operate. Some postings exist because a policy requires the role to be advertised, not because the outcome is open.

Volume. Nobody in the thread disputes that popular postings draw enormous application counts. Whether the number is 800 does not matter much. Being one of several hundred does.

Going to the company site directly. This is the single most repeated piece of practical advice in the thread and nobody argues with it.

What does not hold up is the absolute version. "Stop applying through LinkedIn" is contradicted inside its own comment section by people who did exactly that and got hired.

The honest read

The useful takeaway is not that LinkedIn is broken. It is that the same application performs differently depending on where you send it and whether anybody at the company knows your name, and none of that is visible from the listing page.

Which is the actual problem. You cannot tell from a posting whether it has an internal successor, whether it routes to a real tracking system, or whether four hundred people got there first. You find out by not hearing back, which is indistinguishable from being rejected on merit.

Where this leaves you

Apply through the employer's own hiring system where one exists. Treat postings with no salary, no named manager and a long listing life as lower odds. And spend the time you save on fewer, better targeted applications rather than more of them.

That reading is what I do at RightHand Career. Somebody opens the postings, throws out the ones that were never going to answer, and hands you a short list with the reason each one is on it.

I cannot promise you a job or an interview, and you should be suspicious of anybody who does. The original thread is here and it is worth reading the replies rather than just the post.