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With LinkedIn Premium, when you go to a job posting it gives you some analytical details based on your profile that tells you how "qualified" you may be for a given position. This is based on your skills listed, your past positions held, education, etc.

If one is particularly well-qualified according to LinkedIn, is it at all appropriate to include that point somewhere in the cover letter?

My gut sense tells me no, but given how ubiquitous LinkedIn has become, I thought it may be worth checking in here.

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So what can I do with this info?

Very little. I suppose it would be useful to tell at a glance how compatible your skills and experience are to a given position but that's something you could just as easily and more accurately determine by reading the job posting. If your profile is complete and detailed and if the job posting is accurate and detailed then a simple match percentage can do a decent job of quickly gauging whether you're qualified for the job. But those are both big ifs.

Note that I'm assuming that it shows you an actual percentage match rather than the percentile where your hidden match percentage is in the pool of people who accessed the job posting or applied to it. The latter would just be useless noise.

Is it at all appropriate to include that point somewhere in the cover letter?

Absolutely not. You'd come across as naive at best. Your cover letter is the best document you have of selling yourself to a potential employer and needs to be customised for each position. You need to highlight relevant experience and skills instead of bringing up useless metrics. There's as yet no algorithm that can do that for you.

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  • Your assumption that it's a match percentage, and not a ranking (percentile) score relative to others appears to be incorrect, see here and here.
    – Junuxx
    May 6, 2020 at 17:44
  • @Junuxx Good to know, but note that my point is that in that case there is absolutely nothing you can do with that number. You have no way of knowing who applied for a role so knowing what percentile you're in is meaningless data disguised as information.
    – Lilienthal ♦
    May 6, 2020 at 20:57
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This doesn't mean anything at all beyond the fact that you have some keywords in your profile that match keywords in the job offer.

If you think about all of the butchers, bakers, and candle-stick makers on LinkedIn that don't have any of those keywords in their profiles, it kind of puts this message into context.

To put this into a dating website analogy:

Oooh!! This person has brown eyes too - you're a perfect match!!

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  • Incorrect, it's relative to people that have applied, not relative to everyone on LinkedIn.
    – Junuxx
    May 6, 2020 at 17:46
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If one is particularly well-qualified according to LinkedIn, is it at all appropriate to include that point somewhere in the cover letter?

I would say no. It is understandable that such a statistic may sound interesting and worth mentioning, but nevertheless it was calculated by LinkedIn (some algorithm) and not the actual company or recruiter that is looking to hire.

It is true that Machine Learning is useful in those sort of tasks and analysis, and that it has been improving considerably in the last years (FWIW, my field of study is ML). Even though I am really positive that candidate matching could be feasible to achieve with good accuracy, it is a task that most humans are not quite ready to delegate yet.

Companies like to see, and talk, and come to really know their candidates before hiring them. Most companies have customized and sometimes long hiring processes for this reason.

That's why including that information in your cover letter may not help you much, as you would do better focusing on other things, like why should they hire you and what you know and can bring to the table.

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Statistics and Big Data analysis are only tools.

In this kind of context they're tools to help you, not to choose for you. In this case it is to help you discriminate potential good matchs vs bad matchs, so you could focus more on those that "are good".

Of course that depends of your trust in their algorithm, if you think it is reliable enough, then you should definitively read with care this job offer. The rest is up to you.

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If one is particularly well-qualified according to LinkedIn, is it at all appropriate to include that point somewhere in the cover letter?

I'd like for you to imagine this for a second. You paid LinkedIn to upgrade to a premium account that in turn spits out various data about your resume, current job posts, and how you compare to others. What sort of relevant information would that give to a potential employer other than that you a) paid money for statistics, and b) you think that data means something?

You're better off practicing your interview skills and landing a job rather than relying on some data points that in reality means nothing. Your end goal is to get a job, so you should work towards that goal rather than being sidetracked into believing that you are better than others based on what a paid statistical analysis does. I can't imagine them saying anything bad about you due to you paying money, so you can't really rely on this for being useful to anyone but you.

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It doesn't mean much of anything. I've had this happen for every job I applied for that was listed on LinkedIn. I know I've got good skills but the top 10% for every single one. Sheesh.

I use LinkedIn for networking. I do not use it (or Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Monster, etc.) as my basis for job hunting. Very few positions are filled by using job boards. Old fashioned networking (where LInkedIn can be a great help) has gotten me my last several jobs.

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