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

[h33t l4x0r]

No. Those from whom the sucking originates.

I've gotten two jobs via LinkedIn

[howardjp]

One was the worst job I ever had. One was the best. On average, it is okay.

It does have some (limited) benefits

[Faizdog]

I pretty much just use the core LinkedIn features. I don't post blogs there, don't really post anything at all on their stream, neither do I take their trainings, or participate at all in any of the many groups I joined years ago.

However:
1) In my career I have had many offers, and actually taken 3 jobs (including my current one and the one right before that) because recruiters found me on LinkedIn. Whether it was my profile, connections through my network, I don't know, but they found me.

I've found many headhunters rely very heavily on LinkedIn.

2) It's a good way to stay in touch with people, if you have the discipline to do so. Professional contacts will stay in touch via LinkedIn, whereas they would be reluctant to connect on Facebook, or to share personal phone #s or email addresses. They'll share business phone numbers and email addresses, but if they leave that job, you can't get in touch with them anymore. LinkedIn connections provide a way to do that.

About once a year I set aside one day on a weekend, and just drop notes to all my contacts who I'd like to stay in touch with. I write up a core letter which gets customized a bit, but it summarizes what I've been up to, and inquires after the recipient. It's a good way to keep the network alive by sending out a ping and just staying in touch with folks.

I've also in recent years developed a general rule that for the most part, I don't accept invites unless I know the person somewhat substantially ie we worked together, or spent a few days together in some training etc and had meaningful interactions there. I rarely accept "cold call" invites, and am quite selfish about accepting invites from bare acquaintances, that guy I spent 5 minutes talking to at that conference, unless I think there may be something in it for me (he's at a high/senior position at a company I may want to be at someday).

Finally, when applying to jobs, I do like being able to just click on a job on LinkedIn and apply with my profile. Upload resume and done. When they take me to the company's website and I have to register and create a profile or remember the login info from the last time I did that, it's painful. I do like that near one-click experience for the few companies which allow doing so on their LinkedIn postings.

So long story short, I think LinkedIn has some value to me, but not to the extent that they'd like to think they do. All the expansion in features they're doing, I don't use them.

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.

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.

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.