When looking for a new job, many applicants often prioritize roles, titles, salaries, and perks when making a decision. But knowing how long the average commute will be each day is just as important to one’s mental and physical health as well as happiness at work.
LinkedIn Jobs, essentially the classifieds vertical of the professional social network, is adding new feature to help job seekers to calculate estimated commute times in order to provide an idea of how long it might take to get to a potential workplace every day.
“We know commuting is a pain point for many job-seekers,” wrote Dan Li, a senior product manager for careers at LinkedIn, in a blog post on Thursday, announcing the news. LinkedIn surveyed more than 1,000 of its members in the U.S. in October 2017, and 85% of them said they would take a pay cut for a shorter commute.
LinkedIn users can access the “See Your Commute” module directly on job postings posted to the site. Users can then calculate estimated commute times for walking, driving, or taking public transportation for job postings on LinkedIn. All times and maps are processed via Bing, which shares the same parent company—Microsoft—with LinkedIn (MSFT).
Mobile users can take things one step further with the option to save location information locally on their smartphones so they don’t have to type it in for every job posting.
Inversely, users can also search for jobs and limit results based on desired commute time ranges.
The “See Your Commute” feature is now available worldwide via mobile. Desktop support via LinkedIn.com will roll out in the coming months.
