Linkedin Premium: Student Subscription

I am not a UI/UX designer so the designs included are pretty rough and are not intended to represent what the product would look like. It is rather to show the functionality of the features I am proposing. If you are a UI/UX Designer and want to redesign these to illustrate the features better please let me know! I will be happy to work with you!

My trial for Linkedin Premium is going to end pretty soon here and although it has proven to be useful, as a student it is very hard to justify the $30/month price for it. Surprisingly Linkedin does not have a student discount or plan making it very hard for students like myself to buy it after the end of our trial. A quick search through my connections reveals that most students do not have it except for Linkedin Campus Editors who get it for free. I thus started thinking about what a student subscription could look like and the justification for Linkedin to have such a subscription.

Currently Linkedin offers 4 subscriptions which are Premium Career, Premium Business, Sales Navigator Pro and Recruiter Lite. Premium Career is geared towards people who are looking to get hired and thus I will focus on that one specifically when creating “Premium Student.” Subscribing to Premium Career currently gets you these features:

Linkedin Premium Career currently offers this for $29.99 Source: Linkedin

Premium Student would have similar features to the ones included in Premium Career but will be more tailored towards university students to help them in their internship or new grad job hunt.

InMail

What InMail Looks Like Source: Linkedin

InMail is very useful for students and professionals alike given the opportunity it gives to directly interact with recruiters and industry leads. Linkedin claims it is 2.5x more effective than email, a claim that might be irrefutable given how great of a networking tool it is. The actual InMail and inMail credits does not have much that should be changed but in the Premium Student Plan I believe it would be nice to encourage students towards sending InMails and ultimately start networking as a whole. Right now lots of students have no idea how valuable networking is in securing work and Linkedin should help students towards that realization. One simple way of doing this is to have a notification pop up every month if a student still has InMail Credits to remind them to use their remaining ones. On top of this the notification could give them a list of individuals that they could contact with their InMails based on their Career Interests. In doing so the student has more of a pathway to knowing where should send inMails rather than not using them. Something like the notification below would be nice:

This Type of Notification might be nice to see

A suggestion board could look similar to the who viewed your profile screen:

Suggestion Board that Linkedin Could Have

To further help students out it would be nice to give an example template to them to base their InMail off of given it might be the first time they are networking like this. Linkedin could resort to populating the fields automatically similar to how the summary for a profile is done right now. It could look something like this:

It looks very similar to the default profile summary Linkedin generates

Of course this itself wouldn’t suffice to send to a recruiter but at least the student now has something to base their InMail on. Many students are confused about how the whole process works and what to send recruiters in an InMail so at least this gives them a very simple example of who they could send inMail’s too and what they could send in the inMail! By making these minor changes to the InMail system, Premium Student can be much more useful for students and help them better in their internship/new grad job hunt.

Who’s Viewed Your Profile

This is another area where I believe Linkedin should make minor changes to tailor towards the student experience. Currently the interface looks as so:

What Who Viewed Your Profile Currently Looks Like on Linkedin

I believe that this can be improved by correlating who viewed your profile to the users career interests. Do not only show the person viewing the job but on hovering over them show the positions available at the company as well. This way the user can see the value of connecting with the individual and will be more incentivized to network with them. This is also beneficial for recruiters because students can see what jobs they may be hiring for and go in with a better expectation of what opportunities their conversations may lead too. It could look something like this:

This contextual bubble can provide better insight into what opportunities this connection could get

This is a pretty rough design but hopefully conveys the point I am trying to get across. If this were to actually be implemented the card could have more information like if they are a top applicant for it or not, etc.

Jobs: HomePage

I believe this is the greatest area Linkedin could benefit from changing it for students. Right now my Linkedin Career Page looks like this:

Lots of full time positions that I am not looking for currently

While my career interests are set like this:

My Career Interests Clearly Outline I am only interested in internships. So why is it still showing me full time jobs?

As you can see in the top applicant section I can mostly only see full time Product Management positions. Although nice to see that I am developing the skills that a full time PM would need, in my current job search this is not relevant to me considering that I am looking for an internship. This is celarly illustrated in my career interests but still as a student looking for a Product Manager internship my job homepage does not aid me towards them. A homepage with actual product manager internships would have much more pertinent information to me and actually help with my job search! Even if it has jobs I may have already applied for, it is still much better to see them then jobs that I will not be applying for until 2 years from now.

Jobs: Search

This exact same problem trickles down into the search functionality. Right now if I search “intern” with the job location “California” and by most recent I get this:

How Linkedin Search Looks Right Now

Almost all the jobs that come up are irrelevant to me with most of them being part-time associate positions. Now of course one could chalk that up as a result of sorting by most recent and generically typing in intern, but a quick find in webpage reveals that the first posting does not even have the word intern anywhere in the post! This makes it even more perplexing to see in this search. Now I could narrow down my search by selecting the experience level as intern but I am then risking losing jobs misclassified as full time by recruiters. The search has to have better results that actually relate to the term searched and not have students go through so much unnecessary content.It would also be nice to have some indication of a posting being related to the career interests you have express. Even a small text saying ‘Similar to Career Interests Expressed” or something similar could lead to a better job search for students.

Jobs: Job Posting/Insights

A lot of the insights that Linkedin offers in the job posting page are very useful and have little room for improvement. However one opportunity I think Linkedin is missing big time in the skill insights section is plugging in Linkedin Learning. Given how much Linkedin seems to be pushing Linkedin Learning it seems like a great opportunity. LinkedIn currently will tell you how many skills you do and do not have but does not offer a solution to remedy the skills you are missing. Linkedin Learning can offer to be this solution and give applicants a way to acquire these required skills. Applicants should be more receptive to using the platform given that Linkedin is showing a direct benefit of using it! Something like the design below could work for showcasing the courses students could take on Linkedin Learning to further better their chances of getting the role.

An Example where Linkedin Learning can be part of the overarching entire Linkedin Experience

No doubt there is a better UI implementation of this but this once again is just to show the functionality.

Featured Applicant

When applying through Linkedin it seems that having premium will allow you to stand out as a featured applicant to recruiters. One improvement I could see is showing recent courses that the student may have completed on Linkedin Learning pertaining to this job. In doing so, more users will be encouraged to use Linkedin Learning while recruiters can get a grasp of what a candidate may know in an interview setting.

Price

If Linkedin wants to capture the student market, it should lower the price down from $30 per month to $15 per month for Premium Student. In this case Linkedin would be making a volume and long term play to recuperate this initial loss. The Volume play would be that with the lower price the number of students subscribing to the new tier of subscription would be much higher compared to currently with Premium Career which should allow them to recoup the lost profits from students switching to this new subscription. The long term play would be that students will eventually switch to Linkedin Premium Career once they are no longer students. This play is already seen by many companies like Spotify and Amazon and no doubt it can be very sucessful for Linkedin as well. As with these other platforms verification of the user being a student can be done through university email .

Conclusion

I truly believe a student subscription like this could be great for both Linkedin and students across the world hunting for their next career opportunity. These features are just some I came up with for the student subscription based on my experiences but of course with more user research these might change. I am curious to hear from you if you have any other ideas on a student subscription or if you disagree with some of the features I listed here!

I am currently looking for PM internships for Winter 2020 and Summer 2020. If you have any opportunities in mind I would love to connect with you!

I started a Podcast! You can check it out using the links below!

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https://lnkd.in/g4sYakw

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Apple Podcasts:

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Please check out more great content by Waterloo students at uWaterloo Voice, a publication dedicated to showcasing articles by uWaterloo students and alumni:

Thanks for reading!

Daivik Goel