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

The only 'It doesn't suck" comments...

[Rick Zeman]

...will be from people who make money from the platform.

Re: No shit

[iamgnat]

Start by not accepting EVERY FUCKING INVITATION you receive. My entire network is 250 people. I consider them all a part of my professional resume.

DING! DING! DING!

People think it's about your number of connections, but it's about the quality. I'm been using it since 2007 and have a whooping 136 connections. I only accept people that A) I actually know and B) am willing to suggest to others for a job.

I don't use any of the silly social features of it and most of the people I connect to don't either. In fact I only log into the site when I need to update my resume.

Between those two things I don't get anything I would consider spam. I do get invites from random people, but I simply ignore them. There are of course the weekly "we think you'd be perfect for this job that we won't tell you about because we did a keyword search and didn't bother to actually read your profile" BS, but again that is easy to ignore. I also get at least one real (that actually fits my profile) ping from a recruiter a week.

As far as an impact on my career, my current employer (3 years and counting) found me via LinkedIN and my job before that (5 years) came from me being able to use it to see where previous co-workers had ended up and using them as contacts to move there too.

So yeah, as long as you treat it professionally (e.g. skip all the FB-esque garbage) and use it to manage your career, it's a very useful tool. If you treat it as some type of scoring game, then it's going to be garbage.

Re: No shit

[Sarten-X]

Curate the information you present, much like a resume. Make sure it lists skills and technologies you'd like to use again, because those are what recruiters are searching on. Put in employment-relevant information about yourself like location and employment history.

The biggest difference between LinkedIn and a resume, from a curation perspective, is the amount of information that LinkedIn can reasonably organize. Where a resume is mostly limited in length, LinkedIn is only limited by your desire for privacy. Online, you can (and probably should) list every skill you hold expertise in, rather than keeping a carefully-pruned list of eye-catching skills. A resume is written to pass a human HR drone's quick review, but LinkedIn searches don't care how irrelevant skills they have to parse to include you as a match.