[lpolovets]

This is connected to an employee's LinkedIn profile, so why wouldn't an employee just change their contact settings to "I am open to career opportunities"? I know a lot of people that have that setting on, even if they are very happy with their job, and I don't know of a single person who has gotten flak for it from their employer.

[angelbob]

Unfortunately that's very error-prone from the potential employer side. It's not a very strong signal that they're actually looking.

[lpolovets]

Very true. However, the impression I've gotten from recruiters emailing me is that most of them are just sending uncustomized emails to a lot of people who match some keywords. If that is the case, then contacting 100 people instead of to 25 people means an extra hour of work. I don't think it's worth paying $5/contact to avoid something that takes so little time.

[vidarh]

Conversely most e-mails from recruiters get ignored. I'd be far more likely to take an e-mail that I know someone had to pay to get to me seriously, on the assumption it'd likely be better targeted.

[angelbob]

That might be an argument for premium job sites like TheLadders advertised as ($100k+ jobs). It seems like they've backed off on that branding, though. So maybe that doesn't work out well in practice?