In 3 areas of information your LinkedIn profile Dashboard provides: part 1, I talked about information you can use to gauge your status, such as: Who viewed your profile, Post views, and Search appearances. In part2 of this two part series, I’ll talk about the features you’ll find in your Dashboard.

Again, the Dashboard on your profile is for your eyes only. So only you can see how many people viewed your profile, unless you are leading a workshop and displaying your profile; at which point you’ll have to say, “Look, I’ve been at this a while. So don’t feel insecure.”

Career Advice

For job seekers who need help with their job search, LinkedIn offers a feature for career advice. I thought I’d check it out to get a better understanding about the process of asking for career advice. The first step is to get started by clicking on Career Advice. You’re told you’ll complete the following steps:

1. “Tell us what kind of advice you want.”
2. “Review potential matches” Here you’ll see LinkedIn users who are experienced leaders in their field. I wonder what makes them “experienced” and if I’m experienced.
3. “Get in touch” You’ll have the opportunity to have a 1:1 conversation with the experienced leaders.

After you click “Get Started,” you’re given the option of choosing from someone “In my 1st or 2nd degree network, in my region, from my school, or I don’t have a preference.” Next you click “Continue.”

Now you’ll have a limited list of job function from which to choose. I choose Community & Social Services.You’ll also have to choose an Industry Sector. I went with Nonprofit.

Step 3 of 3 is typing in text explaining what kind of help you need. LinkedIn gives you examples, one of which is: “I’d like advice for career pivot strategies from consulting into a marketing, strategy or business development job in the tech industry. What do you see as the pros and cons? And what are some challenges I might face?”

Finally you choose, “Agree & finish,” which I didn’t click. I didn’t want to be put in the system.

Career Interests

This is a feature I recommend to all of my clients. It allows recruiters to see if you are currently seeking employment and what kind. For instance, you might be interested in full-time, part-time, freelance, etc. LinkedIn explains this feature:

Among the many Recruiter spotlights we provide, the Open to New Opportunities feature allows LinkedIn members to privately share their career interests with Recruiter users who aren’t affiliated with their current or related companies.

Once a candidate opts to privately share their career goals with recruiters, users of LinkedIn’s Recruiter product will be able to see that candidate as “open to new opportunities” when running a search that aligns with their background.

If an open candidate starts a new position, they’ll be prompted to turn off their signal if they’re no longer open to new opportunities. They’ll also receive a reminder to respond to InMail messages from recruiters if they haven’t responded to two consecutive InMail messages.

Below is how Career interests looks:

Note that you don’t have to be looking for full-time work to use this feature. You might only be looking for contract, part-time, internship, etc. One of my former clients benefited from this feature. I’m sure others have, as well.

Salary Insights

This feature is the last one listed on your desktop/laptop. It is available to basic members. It provides information you can probably find on Salary.com, Payscale.com, or Glassdoor.com; nonetheless, it’s interesting information. You’ll discover that LinkedIn sends you to a separate site. And if you click “View Jobs,” it returns you to LinkedIn’s Jobs feature.

I decided to look up the salary for a Financial Analyst in the Greater Boston area. LinkedIn provides the following information on the position and location I chose:

Median salary ($65,000) and range ($51,000-$88,000), as well as total compensation ($67,000) and range ($53,000-$90,000).

You can get more specific and choose an industry and years of experience. I chose manufacturing with 6-14 years of experience. Below are the results:

You’ll notice that only 7 people responded to LinkedIn’s request for salary information. This doesn’t give one confidence in the accuracy of the numbers.

Like Glassdoor.com, you can get the salary range for your criteria for various companies. You can also get more insight based on size of company, industry, educational level, and field of study.

Finally, LinkedIn provides the median base salaries and salary ranges for ten selected cities. At the top for financial analyst in San Fransisco is median salary of $77,500 and salary range of $60,000-$100,000. Rounding out at the bottom is Dallas with $63,000 and $50,000-$84,000 respectively. I guess this is information you’d consider if you’re considering moving from Dallas to San Fransisco.

Bottom line: As I tell my clients, no two companies are the same. This is clearly illustrated when you see the differences between Mutual Liberty Insurance $79,000 and Waters Corporation $71,400.

---

So there you have the features in the Dashboard of your profile. Is all of it valuable? No. But there are definitely aspects that you should consider in your job search, most notably Career interests.