'I'm a former recruiter and one easy hack can boost your chance of getting job'

The job market is tough right now. Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed the rate of unemployment jumped to 4.6% in the three months to April, up from 4.5% in the three months to March andthe highest level since July 2021.

The figures also provided more evidence of cracks appearing in the labour market. The estimated number payrolled employees decreased by 55,000 between March and April, with an even bigger 109,000 slump in May, although the ONS urged caution about reading too much into the number as it was prone to revisions. Meanwhile, the estimated number of vacancies available fell by 63,000 to 736,000 in March to May.

While it may seem like a hopeless mission to get a hired for a job right now, one former recruiter has shared a hack she just learned that will help increase your chances of getting seen by recruiters and invited to job interviews.

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Taking to TikTok, former recruiter Sophie made a video where she shared her latest findings on LinkedIn for making it easier to find a job.

"If you're looking for a job right now, then I've just discovered a very snazzy little hack on LinkedIn that is gonna help you get one even quicker," she said at the start of her video.

"And as a former recruiter, I can tell you that it's super important that you apply to a job within a day of it being posted," she added before sharing her hack that will help make sure you're an early applicant.

In the video, Sophie shows her computer screen as she goes to the job search function on LinkedIn. She then put in a keyword for finding jobs, opting for 'operations' for the purpose of the video. She then made sure her location settings were right before making her search.

While many job applicants might start looking through the job adverts now, Sophie went on to urge people to do one more adjustment of the search alternatives. She went to the 'date posted' option and checked the 'past 24 hours' options before doing another search.

"So these are obviously all the jobs that have been posted linked to operations in the past 24 hours," she explained.

She went on to explain: "What you probably don't realise is if you go into the [URL] search bar up here, and if you get rid of this 86,400, because that is actually the number of seconds in 24 hours. You want to shorten that, let's for example put in 2000."

"Now, the number of searches is going to reduce," she said as she showed her search results now included jobs that had been posted within less than an hour, and with most having zero applicants.

So why is it important to be an early applicant to a job listing? Sophie went on to explain: "Because of easy apply, it means that LinkedIn gets spammed with thousands upon thousands of applicants, but now at least you can be in the top two per cent."

People quickly took to the comment section to share their thoughts, with many praising Sophie for her clever tip.

"Great tip hope this works for me, I’ll give it a go!" one viewer said. Another user said: "THANK YOU!!! It worked for me!"

"Such a good tip Soph!" a third person said.