Does LinkedIn Suck? (techcrunch.com)

"LinkedIn Sucks" writes TechCrunch's John Biggs: I hate LinkedIn. I open it out of habit and accept everyone who adds me because I don't know why I wouldn't. There is no clear benefit to the social network. I've never met a recruiter on there. I've never gotten a job. The only messages I get are spam from offshore dev teams and crypto announcements. It's like Facebook without the benefit of maybe seeing a picture of someone's award-winning chili or dog. I understand that I'm using LinkedIn wrong. I understand I should cultivate a salon-like list of contacts that I can use to source stories and meet interesting people. But I have my own story-sourcing tools and my own contacts. It's not even good as a broadcast medium....

LinkedIn is a spam garden full of misspelled, grunty requests from international software houses that are looking, primarily, to sell you services. Because it's LinkedIn it's super easy to slip past any and all defenses against this spam.... I know people have used LinkedIn to find jobs. I never have. I know people use LinkedIn to sell products. It's never worked for me.
The article ends with advice for people trying to contact him on LinkedIn for promotional purposes. "LinkedIn isn't a game. It isn't an alternative to MailChimp. It's a conversational tool. Use it that way." But what do Slashdot's readers think? Is LinkedIn a valuable resource for finding recruiters and job offers, interesting perspectives, and updates on your friends' careers?

Or does LinkedIn suck?

Comments

No it doesn't

[Harlequin80]

I am a recuiter, linkedin provides about 25% of the people i place. I approach ~200 people per week via the platform.

If you are not getting approaches you should look at what your profile portrays you as. Also you can mark yourself as actively looking which highlights you to recruiters.

Yes, it does suck

[Sebby]

I have a profile, mostly because I just want to have one if old friends/colleagues want to reach out to me to say hi (I don't make myself really available on other social networks). I've set it up mostly specifically for that, and to avoid getting recruiter emails (no picture, no access to my email, no real "advertising myself to get a job" thing).

So why does it suck? Because despite trying to avoid recruiters and other spam, once in a while I'll get a spam to my work email about seminars, job fairs, services, etc. that I never signed up for (I never, ever put my work email out anywhere for getting contacted).

So how did these spammers get my email? The only way I can think of is them having 'guessed' my email address based on my name and employer, which is only available together on..... (drumroll....) LinkedIn! I've never checked the email server logs, but I'm convinced they try several variations of my contact email when generating their spam.

So it's obvious that LinkedIn is just basically another place for the usual spammers to get a fresh list of people to pester about their services/products, which makes it pretty much useless as a social network.

Research gate

[goombah99]

If you write papers then Research Gate is a much more logical social network to belong to since it gives people access to copies of your papers and track how many people grazed and how many people actually downloaded your paper.

It's a tool...

[QuadEddie]

LinkedIn is a professional tool that can be used correctly to your benefit. I have a hyper-focused field I'm in, and I've personally make a few hundred thousand off of it, so here are my tips:

Don't accept high school contacts. If you are now in a hyper-focused field like "Freelancer with 10 years experience in medical coding software", then don't accept contacts that aren't in your field (like contacts from your first general programming jobs). If you freelance and have clients listed as jobs in your job history, don't accept just any rando who has worked at the same company unless you know them or would benefit from knowing them.

If you want to be aggressive, find the companies you want to contract with or work for, send a linkedIn invite with a personal message to the person in your field. Some will respond immediately, some will take a month, and some will ignore it. I've had good luck with only getting about 15% ignores.

Occasionally 'like' articles that are interesting and pertain to some new development in your field. Not necessary, but it will show in people's feed who glance at LinkedIn.

Include a good level of detail at each relevant company you've worked for. I like to know who is browsing past my profile, so I pay $30 a year to see who is coming by. I occasionally find a reason to reach out to some of these people if they're relevant. Compared to my revenue, the $30 is a no-brainer.

It used to suck less.

[rnturn]

Remember when there were job postings that were exclusive to LinkedIn? They're gone. Have been for some time now.

Want to have your news feed set to only the recent news? Forget it. It defaults to "Top" (i.e., the "Popular") posts by default. In fact, you can't change that default. You have to view the Top posts before you can change it to Recent. This tells me that LI has decided that it wants to cater to Facebook users more interested in what's popular today. That's not why I joined years ago.

What's up with the news feed only showing you 10-20 posts before prompting you to show more, and then when you click on "Show more" you can see more but you're sent back to the top of your feed so you have to scroll through the original set of posts before you get to the new ones. Similarly, what's the point of indicating that there are a small number, say, four replies to an article, only showing three, and making the user click on show more to see the fourth?

Want to see who visited your profile? Sorry. 99% of the people who visit it are people who don't want to be known to you. So please stop the damned come-ons to "upgrade" to a Premium membership so I can see who those visitors were. Because I did that once and, guess what... I still couldn't see who those visitors were. The histogram telling me that 21 of the 25 visitors were recruiters, and that the other 4 were members with the job title "[fill-in-the-blank]" and that I'm not allowed to know who they were is oh so helpful to people who might be trying to tend to their career by using LI. Oh wait... no it's not.

Please, please drop the damned posts about what's "trending in my geographic area". The vast majority of the time, it's not something that would likely be of interest in my geographic area.

Fix whatever "algorithm" decides that the content of my profile detailing several decades of UNIX experience is going to make me the least bit interested in seeing an ad for an elementary course in shell scripting.

Seriously... who designs this crap? LI was once known as "Facebook with a tie". Now it's just a Facebook wannabe.

Finally...

I doubt that any of these types are reading this article and its responses but I don't "live" in LI. I come in, I look around, and I exit. (I'm betting that I'm far from being the only one who uses LI this way.) If you want to send me private messages about job postings via LI's InMail feature, you'll more than likely miss me. My profile has my email address. Use it if you want to get in touch with me. Sending me an InMail tells me you didn't look at all of my profile. I'm not going to have a browser window/tab devoted exclusively to LI all day and visible on all my virtual desktops on the off chance that someone might send me a message. Yes, LI usually sends a regular email to let you know you have an InMail but this mainly ticks off the person who now has to go back onto LI to reply. Frankly, InMail is one of the dumbest features of LI. (Same goes for the private messaging feature on FB.)