The invitation that wasn't

Greg Wyatt • May 24, 2026

What follows isn't yet a chapter in A Career Breakdown Kit (2026).

It will be included in the Summer update, published around July 2026.

If you've already bought any version of the book, you are invited to DM me or email for a free digital version of the new edition.

You see I've tried to do something quite unusual by publishing a book that will always be current, when updatedness is one of the key elements of any advice in a job search.

So much has changed even in the past few months, such as my knowledge of how LinkedIn works when recruiting.

The example below is as current as last week, when H graciously agreed I could share her experience, in introducing her for a key hire.

An aspect of LinkedIn that even they don't talk about publicly, much like the advanced filters in Recruiter Licence (looking at you "headline:" which actually prioritises your headline, rather than using it as a compounding element for ranking).

I think it will sit quite early on in the book, because this single element represents everything I talk about later in developing a through-the-line strategy that accesses all of the jobs market that is unique to you.

12 - The invitation that wasn’t

In May 2026 I filled a key hire vacancy that had been carefully designed and specified with the employer.

The candidate who secured that role asked me how I had found her. You see, she had been prompted to apply by a LinkedIn notification highlighting I thought she’d be a good fit. A notification, not a DM.

This was news to me.

What actually happened was that I’d posted a sponsored advert and got on with the rest of the search - when appropriate I advertise, source, network and headhunt.

LinkedIn had, in parallel and without any input from me, surfaced the role to her in language that read like a personal pick, in what proved to be a standard feature of sponsored adverts.

That gap between what the platform implies and what actually happened is the starting point for this chapter. While this may feel granular this early on the book, it has tactical and strategic value, both for LinkedIn and what it means in your wider search.

After all, what actually is LinkedIn?

The settings that drive action are doing more work than most jobseekers realise. Some of which override your public profile and can bring opportunity to you.

Two mechanisms, one feature

LinkedIn calls this Invite to Apply. It’s bundled into sponsored job adverts and operates through two mechanisms.

The first is recruiter-driven. When you sponsor a job post, LinkedIn presents you with a list of twenty-five pre-qualified candidates. You can invite them individually or hit one button to invite all twenty-five. Or you can decline them, providing feedback why to help train Hiring Assistant AI. From there you can continue to look through recommended profiles or step away entirely.

The second is platform-driven. On the same advert that produced the placement above, my Recruiter dashboard records 298 potential candidates as having been invited to apply, against a Recommended panel of just twenty-five. The dashboard heading reads, in the first person, I invited these top candidates to apply. Given the language commonly used across the dashboards, it is clear the “I” is LinkedIn narrating its own actions back to the recruiter.

A second candidate I declined at application stage later told me on the phone she only applied because of the invitation. I’d called her because I recognised she had been artificially invited to apply and wanted to explain what had happened behind the scenes.

The telling part is the asymmetry in how the two sides experience the same event. On the candidate side, the notification doesn’t mention LinkedIn as the actor at all; it reads as if a named recruiter from a named company has decided you’re a good fit. This framing is asymmetric by design.

The candidate is the audience whose behaviour is being optimised, and the warmth of the framing is what influences action. If the candidate notification said LinkedIn has matched you to a sponsored advert from Bircham Wyatt Recruitment, the response rate would presumably drop.

This matters because the behavioural response to a manual invitation and a platform-driven one ought to be different. A human invitation from me is a strong indication that I have read your profile. A platform-distributed invitation within a sponsored advert is closer to a well-targeted advertisement. Both deserve a response if the role interests you, but only one should be read as a vote of confidence. The user interface makes that distinction roughly impossible to detect from inside the notification.

So much, so what?

This only matters if you’d like a relevant vacancy to be brought to your attention, and in the case of H, it proved an ideal move.

So it makes sense to take advantage of the settings you have control over to maximise the odds.

What LinkedIn confirms is happening

LinkedIn’s Help documentation on Invite to Apply states that the matching uses Recommended Match technology, considering job description, location, required skills, and job title, with a special focus on those marked as #OpenToWork.

Five elements, with one of them carrying explicit additional weight.

LinkedIn confirms the Open to Work feature lets you set up to five job titles, up to five locations plus a remote-work flag, a start-date preference, employment types, and a visibility choice. These preferences feed into recruiter searches regardless of which visibility mode you choose. The green frame on your profile photo only appears with the public option.

The most consequential field here is Job Titles.

Drawn from LinkedIn’s pre-populated taxonomy (you can’t invent your own), they make you findable for those titles even if you have never held them. These may not appear anywhere else on your profile. The candidate I placed lists Director of Operations in her Open to Work titles. She is found in Recruiter searches for Director of Operations for this reason, despite that not appearing in her public profile.

Most people don’t know this field exists in this form or how to use it.

It cuts both ways.

A recruiter clicks through, reads the actual profile, and decides whether you’re a credible candidate. The Open to Work titles allow you to be more easily found but the visible profile has to justify further consideration.

If the rest of your profile supports the step (experience, skills, recent achievements), the mechanic does its job. If it doesn’t, you’ve surfaced for a role you are less suitable for than the multitude of profiles that have the explicit capability.

It's no good saying you're a Book, when you're a DVD. The book buyer will never purchase.

In my recent placement, the candidate had “part-time” selected as one of her employment types. My advert stated full-time and part-time in the body of the text. The algorithm appears to have treated her stated availability as a positive signal and surfaced the role to her. I can’t prove that without LinkedIn opening the algorithm, but it is the most parsimonious explanation.

This tells us something useful about how the matching engine weights candidate-stated preferences.

What this means for how you think about LinkedIn

Most jobseekers think of their LinkedIn profile as a public CV: a document that recruiters might find or simply come across. More than this your profile is a live configuration that drives algorithmic surfacing. Sponsored adverts find you, not the other way around, based on fields you set once and forget. Some of those fields override the visible profile entirely.

This is aside from recruiters proactively searching for profiles outside of advert responses (LinkedIn profiles that get found).

There’s an added dimension too, in the ‘Open to Work’ debate, when an Invited to Apply application comes through, it isn’t visibly Open to Work unless the banner is shown.

An inbound and outbound channel at once

This changes how you may think a well-specified LinkedIn profile fits into a job search strategy.

This is not just a static CV that shows your capability.

A profile that brings sponsored adverts to you, without you doing anything, creates inbound opportunity. Roles are recommended to you on the basis of fields you have configured. Set the fields well and the inbound flow happens without further effort, assuming there is a flow to be had.

This isn't a guarantee of an ideal job - it's simply configuring your profile, so that if there is an advert that's a close match, you are more likely to see it.

But then nothing in a job search is guaranteed. Your profile might be brilliantly optimised to be found when recruiters source using Recruiter Licence - but if the jobs aren't there, the recruiter is careless, or they take unreasonable shortcuts... well that's out of your control, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't get the fundamentals rights.

Because, whether for Invited to Apply, a Recruiter search, or another reason, this profile is what people will check to see who you are. Every connection request, every InMail, every comment on a target company’s post, every direct approach to a hiring manager, lands on the same artefact. That’s outbound: your push depends on the profile holding up to inspection when the person you contacted goes to look.

This is critically important in a time when hiring processes need to verify applications, and your LinkedIn profile is a couple of clicks away.

A recruiter discovering you and the hiring manager you reached out to both read the same document, configured by you. That’s the kind of integration most jobseekers never quite achieve, and it’s why the profile deserves more attention than it typically gets.

This is a fragment of a wider strategic framework I cover in Through-the-Line (p120), which sets out how the different channels of a job search combine and feed into each other rather than competing for your time.

The LinkedIn profile is the clearest single example I have of an asset that pulls its weight across multiple channels at once.

The mechanics, the field-by-field configuration that drives both the inbound matching and the outbound credibility, I cover in LinkedIn profiles that convert (p204).

For now, the takeaway is simpler: an invitation from LinkedIn often isn’t one. It’s the platform suggesting a match based on configuration you control, sent to you in language that hides its algorithmic origin. Treat the prompt as useful data about your discoverability, not evidence of human interest.

The interest, if it exists, comes later, in a conversation that follows your application, when a read of your profile and CV may be the first time that recruiter has come across you.

A note on stored resumes/CVs

Storing a CV on LinkedIn and turning on the backend "Share resume data with recruiters" button informs which vacancies are recommended to you, and may support the Invited to Apply mechanism. It's worth making sure yours is up-to-date so that you aren't inadvertently influencing LinkedIn to send you the wrong vacancies - they do that well enough without your help!

Salary on the job description

By Greg Wyatt • November 11, 2026
I've written many variations on the article below, over the years, and it seems sensible to revisit given the UK government's announcements around salary transparency. On the whole, I'm for it, with the many advantages it brings. But like a lot of things in recruitment, there is a more involved discussion to be had, especially when this fix treats the symptoms, not the rot. That's not to say the fix isn't worth doing, just that it won't fix many of the problems underlying a lack of transparency. This article is a little dated, in terms of the research shared, but I think the points are as relevant as ever. Originally published May 2023 Salary on the Job Description? Yes, the headline is trolling. The question should be ‘salary on the job advert?’ You wouldn’t confuse a job description with an advert, would you? This is a subject rife with disagreement around ethics and practicality, and worth broaching again considering recent campaigns in the UK to increase salary transparency and ban the ‘what’s your current salary?’ question. Let’s focus on some practicalities first, based on UK research I ran last year for my “Accessing a Candidate Short Market” guide:  Job boards can penalise you for not listing salary. As of December 2021, Totaljobs penalises adverts that don’t list salary, and these aren’t sent out as job alerts to candidates (who may be passive). These adverts are considered sub-standard. Unlisted salaries attract fewer qualified applications. This was estimated to be between 20% and 45% fewer, across the job boards I talked to. LinkedIn reported that not only can you expect more applications, you may also expect better-qualified applications when the salary is advertised. My work supporting senior job seekers confirms this - many would not apply to adverts that had no salary or "competitive salary" because they felt this was a waste of their time. There is less emphasis on salary negotiation from the candidate side, due to transparency in pay. This is a key part of equity, relating to gender, race and intersectional identity. According to Payscale 's research, white men are most likely to negotiate the highest salary. It’s simple – if you advertise vacancies and don’t list salary, you risk receiving fewer, less suitable applications. Then there’s the ethical question, where a common argument is that there is ‘no ethical reason that salaries can’t be listed’. Now, while I’m a proponent for advertising salaries, where possible, I think this ethical argument isn’t the right one - ‘can’t be’ is a strong statement. I think a better question is ‘how does this do harm’ when establishing reasons for not listing salary. This balances pragmatism with the most important aspect of ethics. It can be a complicated question too in scenarios like this: How do you establish salary transparency for job families across multiple regions where the local pay is established by HQ in one country? Currency exchange rates and cost of living mean that a fair salary one day may not be the next, therefore flexibility in not listing salary may be ethically the right thing to do if the intent is right. What about new vacancies that serve to solve a business problem and can be recruited at different levels? What about practical situations like recruiting hard-to-fill vacancies during a wider redundancy programme, whereby listing a salary would create concern in unrelated areas of that unsettled business? It's not always as simple a question as we’d like to think. If you’re facing a complex situation in advertising a role, I recommend describing your stance in the advert itself, if you legitimately can’t state the salary. At the same time, as we’ve seen in the US, legislation to enforce salary transparency creates situations such as Netflix apparently advertising a range of $90-900k. Who does that help? The problem with this kind of legislation is that companies can comply while continuing the behaviour that led to the legislation in the first place. It’s palliative, rather than treating unfairness at its root. We should also consider the unforeseen consequence of salary transparency, such as this research which appears to show a reduced link between performance and pay: Influence of Pay Transparency Helping candidates negotiate better pay or terms is a privilege I enjoy. And there's more to understanding someone's existing remuneration than simply establishing whether they can afford to move. Sometimes these conversations reveal that someone is being underpaid. With evidence of what their experience and contribution might command elsewhere, they can go back to their current employer and make the case for a pay rise. That might mean they decide not to move at all. Which is a perfectly good outcome for them, even if it isn't for the vacancy in the short term. It also opens up the counteroffer conversation early. If their employer could resolve the reason they're considering leaving, I'd rather understand that before they accept an offer elsewhere. There's a benefit for prospective employers too. A new employer may budget £52,000 for a role, believing that to be market rate, based on historic data. But if conversations with suitably experienced candidates reveal that their existing remuneration, expectations and other opportunities consistently indicate otherwise, there's good reason to revise either the budget or the requirements. If that budget does prove unrealistic, and it's the same budget other team members are measured against, it can also create the argument to revisit everyone's salaries - subject to affordability, of course. After all, it's cheaper to retain fairly paid staff with all the knowledge they have than to replace them. Of course, conversations with candidates aren't a substitute for proper salary benchmarking. But they can reveal problems that wouldn't otherwise be apparent. There are also situations where understanding the whole package matters. What if someone currently receives a 16% pension contribution and moves to a role offering a 10% pay rise but only a 5% pension? Car allowances, RSUs, tax-efficient packages? Remuneration is a more involved conversation than simply salary. And none of this means someone's existing salary should determine what they're worth to their next employer. If their previous salary was unfair, using it to determine their next salary risks perpetuating that unfairness. And if an employer routinely offers a 15% increase on previous earnings, the new salary may have little relationship to the contribution that person can make. It makes sense to pay commensurately with contribution and capability, rather than what may be irrelevant history. So I understand the reasons for wanting to ban questions about previous salary. They're often used badly. But I think there's an important distinction between asking to establish someone's worth and asking to understand their circumstances. One can perpetuate unfairness. The other can help identify and correct it. If legislation restricts these conversations, I'll adapt how I offer this support. But I'd hope any restrictions recognise the difference between using salary history to determine an offer and voluntarily discussing remuneration to help someone make better decisions. I hope you’ve found these thoughts helpful to start a broader conversation in your business. My thoughts aren’t set in stone, so please let me know your opinions if you disagree. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg p.s. While you are here, if you like the idea of improving how you recruit, lack capacity or need better candidates, and are curious how I can help, these are my services: Commercial, operational and technical leadership recruitment Manage part or all of your recruitment on an individually designed basis for one client Outplacement support Email me on greg.wyatt@bwrecruitment.co.uk if you'd like to discuss.

Tone deaf - No problem, pt 6

By Greg Wyatt • November 5, 2026
It's interesting revisiting this article from 3 years ago, especially now AI products are more embedded in market. If anything my view on AI is more polarised, bringing many new opportunites, brand new problems, as well as the existential angst many are talking about. For me, codifying my experience with AI tools means I can help more people, while freeing up my time to do more human work. It's certainly helped with job seeker support, and increasingly so in my recruitment work. Mainly it's giving me more time to talk to people, and when homogenous AI applications at scale are one new problem, as well as the increasing threat of deep fake interviews, in person conversations might be a necessary exnovation (just googled that - what a great word that I will now abuse at scale). While the article below has dated somewhat, I think the threat it assesses has never been more pertinent. I've said for some time that AI might be the death of knowledge and judgement, even so far as 'meaning', something that this recent research also indicates . Importantly the research doesn't say the recommendations were wrong, just how they were followed. Read that article and think about how AI recommendations on applications relate. I've certainly found them more problematic, so far, than the old school ATS style ranking and filtering - because of the false confidence they convey, especially when dealing with non-traditional applications. Things may improve, or so is promised. And while words might be the first facility of LLM, they are still the core facility, given all it does is determine the most probable answer in its outputs (I know I'm being reductive, some of the developments from AI are amazing). Whereas words should be the consequence of thoughts, lead to the development of thought, and distil ideas in a way you can act on. Much like job adverts should be the consequence of effective job analysis, rather than a polished word that lacks meaning. The greatest risk for me in recruitment isn't so much the answers AI offers, but that we become so reliant we forget to ask better questions. I've edited down the previous article, but if you're curious, you can see it here . September 2023 I’d commented about my hearing on a social media post on deafness. ‘Have you looked into these hearing aids - they’re designed to overcome head shadow’, came the impromptu reply from a hearing aid specialist. Head shadow? Not a phrase I’d heard before, despite having no hearing on one side, which effectively creates a sound-free shadow to my right. See, when I had mumps at 18 months it killed the vestibulocochlear nerve in my right ear and damaged the one on the left. But it was my balance that showed the nursery assistants that something was wrong - I kept falling over for no reason. I expect they thought my slow response was normal naughty-boyness. Balance, intermittently poor audio processing, energy required to maintain attention in noisy environments and that bloody tinnitus - all these issues are far more annoying than not being able to hear in one ear. That and not being able to tell where sounds come from. “Over here, Greg!” is the most useless call on a football pitch. And the head shadow thing? Well, it’s never been an issue - I just turn my head when in conversation. It might look like I’m turning to kiss you, but it’s just a conversation I want honest. Sure I miss out on certain audio cues, but it’s rarely an issue. Anyway, curious as I am I looked into the £4,000 hearing aid that solves head shadow by placing a microphone on the deaf ear and projecting it into the the good ear. Quite the brute force tech solution and one I’m sure some benefit from. But the key issue is one of reverb. While the product is good, it would impact the quality of sound in my good ear, which seems a pointless trade-off for me, when my process of life is more effective than shiny tech. It’s ironic that I consider myself highly excitable when it comes to technology developments, yet I’m never an early adopter. Because I always ask myself, other than giddiness, what problems does this solve and how will it enhance my life. And so it is for AI in recruitment, and the shininess of tech in general. They are positioned as solving problems, and indeed they do, but in many cases, it’s the wrong problem that detracts us from the real opportunities for better processes. Simpler administration, speed and scale are clear benefits. And some of these AI-branded automations are excellent. The Star Trek-style auto-translator makes me giddy. As does the sales bot conversation-as-a-human sales video that’s doing the rounds. But AI for writing? What problem does that solve? For me, it depends on what you consider sales to be. Is sales pitching a generic message and hoping someone will bite? Or is sales laying out the facts so that the right person can reach an objective decision? A decision which might mean getting in touch, or changing their view on what needs recruiting. For the former AI writing seems to solve a problem. The words are certainly better, but the message is even worse. Yes: prompting. But if you can prompt the right message, why aren’t you just writing it, so that you embed that knowledge for use across other mediums - conversations, meetings and so on? While AI writing does not meet the requirements for the second type of sales. You can only do this by establishing the right facts from a briefing, consultation or interview. Then interpret this with meaning to the right people so that it creates the right impact. Sales as data visualisation, if you will. And if AI doesn’t work for sales in this way, why would it work for content or marketing? I think the answer depends on whether you value contextual insight or not. Until AI is better at asking questions that create meaningful conversation, it’s a non-starter for me. I say until because this hesitation will be moot in the next year or so. Because it isn’t what AI is now that’s the opportunity - it’s what’s coming soon. I can’t wait to see what’s next. Until then, AI, for writing, is a question of in one ear and out of the other. Which, if you’re deaf in the one, is quite the problem. Go learn copywriting instead, and listen to how it transforms your approach to recruitment. Then layer tech on top, when it’s ready. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg p.s. If you like good recruitment and you need help with it in the UK, drop me a line. DM on LinkedIn, email greg.wyatt@bwrecruitment.co.uk , whichever you prefer.