On your LinkedIn profile, you can choose to display an Open to Work badge. And then you can choose whether everyone can view it or just recruiters. As a recruiter, does the badge influence whether I contact the person? Spoiler alert: no. I have never run a search selecting for people who are Open to Work since I am evaluating on experience and skills.

Beyond my perspective, empirical data exists on whether the Open to Work badge helps. The answer is yes it helps in a tough job market, but not always, according to the company interviewing.io. It asked, “If you’re a software engineer who’s on the market, should you list yourself as #OpenToWork? Does doing so send a negative signal? And with the recent deluge of layoffs at tech companies, has the meaning of #OpenToWork changed?” and posted the results of its experiment on TechCrunch (or here without the paywall).

The methodology: “To test whether listing yourself as #OpenToWork is a good thing to do, we aggregated pass/fail rates in the interviews our users did and cross-referenced them with whether users marked themselves as #OpenToWork on their Linked Ins. We also made sure to check their LinkedIns twice: once in early 2021, when there were practically no tech layoffs, and again in early 2023, in the wake of the worst round of tech layoffs since2001.” Their findings from analyzing 10,000 people they had LinkedIn data for:

• Being OpenToWork is “far more common now.” In 2021, the banner appeared for 1.4% of candidates vs. 4.2% in Q1 of 2023.
• Those who used the banner in 2021, a strong market, were negatively impacted: “On average, about 51 percent of candidates pass their interviews. In contrast, those with OpenToWork badges in 2021 were fully 7 percentage points below that, at 44%.”
• Those who used the banner in Q1 2023, a weak market, were positively impacted. “Engineers who are currently OpenToWork are actually positively selected relative to everyone else. Listing yourself as OpenToWork is a good sign in these rough times: 56% of engineers tagged as OpenToWork passed their interviews, 5 percentage points more than average. The difference in these effects is highly statistically significant. And we get the same results when we leave out anyone who has worked at a FAANG company—in case the recent layoffs simply flooded the market with engineers from those top-tier companies.”
• The conclusion: “[T]here can be negative selection among job seekers. Being upfront about looking for a job—at least in 2021—was indeed a bad sign… Regardless of layoff composition, in boom times, openly searching for a job can be a negative signal. But during downturns, the rules change, and openly looking for work becomes much more ‘normal’. The signal to managers is clear: because of the rocky economic times, good workers are out there looking for jobs—the OpenToWork tag is no longer a negative signal. While hiring has slowed across many tech companies, those with the budget will find a better pool to choose from, and those who were laid off in late 2022/early 2023 might be among the most impressive candidates.

So should you post you’re Open to Work? Just like the favorite phrase of lawyers, the answer is “it depends.” If it were me, I would do it now. As a recruiter, I don’t care if potential candidates select that they are open to work to help me decide whether to contact them. And see here for a poll on LinkedIn asking if recruiters and hiring managers were affected by the open to work badge. The result: 61% said it made no difference.