LinkedIn's Advice Sessions Undercut GLG. Don't Use Them to Pitch Engineers

Your InMails rarely reach the senior engineers who run side projects. LinkedIn has now put a paid booking button on their profiles. In October 2026 LinkedIn expanded Advice Sessions, its paid one-on-one booking feature, and gave side roles a structured place on the profile. It's a legitimate way to reach these engineers, and a cheap one. If you use it to slip in a recruiting pitch, though, you'll burn trust fast.

What did LinkedIn change in October 2026?

LinkedIn expanded Advice Sessions, which first launched around May 2026, and added profile support for more than one current role. Sessions are available first to US Business Premium subscribers, and LinkedIn takes no commission on what members earn.

LinkedIn Advice Sessions is a paid booking feature. A member sells one-on-one consultations from their profile, and LinkedIn handles scheduling and payment. It isn't new. Inc. covered the first rollout to US Premium Business subscribers around May 2026, when LinkedIn senior PM Nils Albertsen described it as a way to "leverage what you already know, and get paid for that expertise." The October news widens it.

What changed, concretely:

• Paid sessions: members can sell one-on-one time through the platform. Analytics Insight reports the tools explicitly cover "side hustles, vibe-coding projects, and other freelance activities that don't match their job profile."
• No commission: the seller keeps the whole fee, according to Engadget.
• Multiple current jobs: a profile can show several ongoing positions at once, so a side role no longer has to compete with the day job for the headline.

Daniel Shapero, LinkedIn's CEO since April 2026, gave Fortune the numbers behind the push. Some members are "charging hundreds of dollars an hour based on their content." The share of members reporting more than one ongoing position is up 26% since 2019. "Founder" is one of the fastest-growing titles on the platform, up 70% year on year.

26%

Are Advice Sessions a legitimate way to reach passive candidates who ignore InMail?

Yes, as long as you buy what's on sale: advice. A paid session is an honest way to get time with an engineer who ignores cold outreach. It only works when you use it for calibration and market mapping, not as a back door for a pitch.

A passive candidate is someone who's employed, isn't looking, and doesn't answer recruiter messages. InMail asks that person for free time on your behalf. Advice Sessions flip the deal. The engineer names a price and a topic, and you agree to both. That's why it works: you aren't asking a favor, you're a paying client.

It also tells you something about intent. Shapero has argued publicly that employers shouldn't read employees sharing knowledge on LinkedIn as a sign they're about to leave. Third-party coverage of LinkedIn's creator data reports that creators are up 60% since 2024 and that 83% of them have day jobs. The platform is telling the market these people are building something on the side, not job-hunting. Plan your approach around that.

How much cheaper is a session than an expert network call?

Much cheaper. An engineer charging $300 through Advice Sessions keeps all $300. Getting that same person a $300 payout through an expert network would cost you roughly $750 to $1,000, and many networks also require an annual commitment.

Paid expert calls for sourcing means paying a practitioner for an hour of insight (comp, team structure, hiring difficulty) rather than for a job application. Expert networks like GLG, AlphaSights, Guidepoint and Tegus sell exactly this. According to 28experts, experts typically receive $200 to $1,000+ an hour, which is usually only 30 to 40% of what clients pay. Expertnetworks.net puts client-side rates at $700 to $1,500 an hour. Nexus Expert Research says traditional networks require commitments of $20K to $150K a year.

At the same expert payout, a recruiter or founder can buy two or three calibration calls for the price of one network call and never sign a contract. The catch is that you do the matching and vetting yourself.

Why can't you find side-role engineers by searching headlines?

Because almost none of them put the side role in the headline. In Refolk's index, only about 0.5% of US Staff and Principal engineers mention "founder" or "advisor" there, while LinkedIn says multi-position reporting is up 26%. The side work exists. It just isn't written anywhere a keyword search can see.

Here's the count from Refolk's index, using a title filter for Staff Software Engineer, Principal Software Engineer, Staff Engineer and Principal Engineer in the United States:

1 in 245

The cause is structural. Until now an engineer with a side project had two choices: squeeze it into the headline or replace the main job with it. Most did neither. Support for multiple current jobs makes side work its own structured field. As people fill it in, headline searches will keep missing them while the actual population grows. If you want these people, filter on the concurrent-position data, not the headline text.

The "advisor" keyword mostly finds IBM

Raw keyword counts are noisy. In the sample from Refolk's index for the "advisor" headline search, 10 of 25 profiles worked at IBM, because IBM uses "Advisory Software Engineer" as a job title. Those people aren't advising startups on the side. In that sample, 40% of what looks like side activity is really one company's title ladder.

Who shows up in the founder sample

The "founder" sample looks more like the population you're after: current Staff and Principal engineers at Cloudflare, HubSpot, Workday and DraftKings, plus CTO and co-founder titles at small startups. They're senior and employed, and they're building something on the side. That's the profile most likely to sell an Advice Session and least likely to answer an InMail.

Finding them is a search problem, not a messaging problem. Refolk is built for this: you describe the person in plain English, including the day job and the side project, and get back a ranked list instead of guessing which headline keywords a person happened to use.

How do you book a session without a bait-and-switch?

Say you're a recruiter in the booking note. Only bring up a role if they ask. Pay for the full hour no matter what. Those three rules turn a paid session into a fair trade instead of a disguised pitch.

A bait-and-switch here does more damage than a bad cold InMail. You can delete an InMail and forget it. A session is booked, paid and held on LinkedIn under your real name, against terms the engineer wrote. If you pitch, you've broken those terms on the record, with someone whose CEO is publicly telling employers these people aren't leaving.

The rules:

1. Disclose in the booking note. Something like: "I recruit for infrastructure teams. I'd like to understand how senior platform engineers think about comp and team design. No pitch."
2. Stay inside their stated topic. If they sell architecture reviews, don't book them to talk about their career.
3. Only bring up a role if they ask. If they say "are you hiring for this?", answer honestly and briefly. Then go back to their agenda.
4. Pay for the full hour. Don't cut it short once you have what you need, and don't ask for a discount because "it's partly a recruiting call."
5. Follow up only with permission. End with "Would it be okay if I reached out if something relevant comes up?" A no is final.

You're paying a client's fee, so behave like a client. The engineer wrote the terms, and pitching breaks them.

What should you ask on a paid calibration call?

Ask things you can't get from a job board or a comp survey: how the work actually happens inside teams like theirs, and who the best people are. A calibration call is a paid conversation that checks your role spec, comp band and hiring assumptions against someone who does the job.

Questions that are worth the fee:

• Comp bands: "For a Staff engineer on a platform team at a company this size, what does a realistic total package look like?"
• Team structure: "How many engineers usually sit within a Staff IC's sphere of influence on a team like yours?"
• Hiring difficulty: "Which part of this stack is hardest to hire for, and why?"
• Title translation: "What do companies call this role internally? What title would the right person actually have?"
• Spec sanity check: "Read this spec. What would make you close the tab?"
• Referrals: "Who's the best person you've worked with on this kind of system?"

The referral question pays off most. An engineer at Cloudflare or DraftKings who has worked with the person you need can name them in ten seconds.

Why aren't the engineers who sell sessions your candidate list?

Because who sells sessions depends on who posts content, not on who's best at the work. Shapero said pricing is "based on their content." So the engineers selling hours are the visible ones, and many of the strongest builders don't post at all.

The creator data shows the same pattern. Over two years, LinkedIn creator growth hit 128% in computer and network security and 117% in software development. Those are big jumps, but they measure people who publish. A quiet principal engineer who never posts won't have an Advice Session button, and won't show up when you browse who sells time.

So split the two jobs:

• Use sessions to map the market. Buy calibration, check comp, and collect referrals.
• Use search to build the candidate list. Look for the quiet builders through their employers, titles and concurrent roles, then reach out normally.

This is where Refolk fits after the call. Take the names and patterns the engineer gave you ("the best people came out of the storage team at X"), describe them in plain English, and get back the people who match, including the ones who never post. The paid hour tells you what you're looking for. The search finds the person.

FAQ

Can recruiters use LinkedIn Advice Sessions?

Yes. A recruiter paying for advice is a legitimate client. The line is honesty: say you're a recruiter in the booking note, stay on the topic the engineer is selling, and only bring up a role if they ask. Using a session as a disguised recruiting call is the fastest way to turn a good channel into a reputation problem.

How much does a LinkedIn paid consultation cost a recruiter?

Whatever the seller charges. Shapero told Fortune that some members charge hundreds of dollars an hour. Since LinkedIn takes no commission, the price you see is all you pay. Compare that with expert networks, where client rates run $700 to $1,500 an hour, the expert keeps only 30 to 40%, and annual commitments run $20K to $150K.

How do I find engineers with multiple current jobs on LinkedIn?

Search the structured concurrent-position data, not headlines. In Refolk's index only 473 of 115,947 US Staff and Principal engineers put "founder" in their headline, and the "advisor" keyword is polluted by job titles like IBM's "Advisory Software Engineer." LinkedIn's multiple-current-jobs support gives side roles their own field. Filtering on that field, or describing the day-job-plus-side-project profile you want, will find far more people than keyword matching.

Is it ever okay to pitch a role during a paid session?

Only if the engineer asks. If they say "are you hiring for this?", answer honestly in a sentence or two and go back to their agenda. Pay for the full hour either way, and ask permission before any follow-up. The session is booked and paid on the platform under your real identity, so whatever you do there stays attached to your name.