Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is LinkedIn Still Relevant?
LinkedIn had 590 million members -- though back in 2016 Microsoft conceded that less than 25% of the service's members were active. Yet CNBC recently shared estimates that 95% of recruiters are using LinkedIn to find candidates, and touted a new tool called "LinkedIn Hashtags" which lets companies highlight policies like "#dogfriendly" or "#freelunch".
But is LinkedIn really helpful for job-seekers? An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: I'm on unemployment and am looking for a new job, and I've been told "Oh, you need to be on LinkedIn if you want to be taken seriously!" So I go there, and it looks like Facebook or something, wants to scrape my email contacts, upload pictures, and so on.
Is LinkedIn really necessary, or is it just a ruse to get me to give them all sorts of personal information like all other social media sites?
"I'm also unemployed and looking for a job," adds another anonymous Slashdot reader, "and have all my crap on Linkedin and Indeed, and have been using them to apply left and right. If they aren't useful anymore I'm essentially sitting on my hands doing nothing." But Slashdot reader tomhath insists that LinkedIn "was never relevant. Their motto was that you didn't exist if you're not there -- but that was only their marketing hype, not reality."
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Is LinkedIn still relevant?
But is LinkedIn really helpful for job-seekers? An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: I'm on unemployment and am looking for a new job, and I've been told "Oh, you need to be on LinkedIn if you want to be taken seriously!" So I go there, and it looks like Facebook or something, wants to scrape my email contacts, upload pictures, and so on.
Is LinkedIn really necessary, or is it just a ruse to get me to give them all sorts of personal information like all other social media sites?
"I'm also unemployed and looking for a job," adds another anonymous Slashdot reader, "and have all my crap on Linkedin and Indeed, and have been using them to apply left and right. If they aren't useful anymore I'm essentially sitting on my hands doing nothing." But Slashdot reader tomhath insists that LinkedIn "was never relevant. Their motto was that you didn't exist if you're not there -- but that was only their marketing hype, not reality."
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Is LinkedIn still relevant?
Sound like people blaming others for their inability to find work. I am on LinkedIn, and found it a useful tool when I was looking for a better job... and that's how I ended up with my current employer (2+ years now). I also maintain contact with the many friends I've made over the years through LinkedIn, even an old childhood friend I hadn't seen in 40 years.
LinkedIn is a tool, and isn't to blame if you can't use it properly. IT is most certainly still relevant, since, as the OP states, 95% of recruiters are using it, some better than others. Filter the noise, be active, and it can help you find a job, but none of that matters if you don't do the rest of the work... interview well, have your goals set, be likeable and above all, have good soft skills.
This isn't hard... but apparently we'll continue to see these posts on Slashdot, questioning the relevancy of LinkedIn, every month or so, because coming up with new stories apparently is hard.
Linked-In was definitely more useful in the past, before MS bought them. Did you know that Linked-In has discussion forums? They do, and I found them to be somewhat useful in the past. The first thing Microsoft did was bury the forums something like three or four clicks away from the home page. The first couple of times it took me several minutes to find their forums section, after Microsoft splashed their redesigned UI all over the site. The forums are now a ghost-town.
I used to be able to tag my contacts with labels. I had tags for my cow-orkers and headhunters. For some inexplicable reason Microsoft got rid of the contact labels.
In general, Linked-In obviously tries to suck down your address book and contacts, and grab whatever they can from you. And, they go about it in, pretty much, the expected fashion. Hey, you want to sign up with us? Great! What's your E-mail address? Oh, it's @gmail.com, great! Please enter your Gmail password here: [_______]. Ummm... no.
But you can skip all that, and then proceed and lock down your privacy controls. After that, Linked-In has very little value, but you can't really beat the price. I don't see much harm from giving my basic contact details and technical skills. My Linked-In page is mostly blank. Only years of experience, and my technical background. I don't even list any past employers. I still get occasional link requests from headhunters, gushing about how well I'm qualified for whatever job they're hunting for. I always accept their link request, and send a polite "not right now" note.
It only takes a few moments to do that, but I believe that this will be useful to me at some point. The way I see it, when it is time for me to search for my next job, I'll just flip a few settings, make a pro-forma change to my profile, and Linked-In should then spam all those headhunters on my behalf. I believe there's some value in this: turning the tables on the headhunters. Their obvious intent is always to grab my Linked-In contacts.
The default privacy settings allows your contacts to see all your other contacts. You can turn it off, so only you see all your contacts, and everyone else only sees your total number of contacts. So, the headhunters don't get anything from me, and the next time I'm job hunting it's an easy way to spam a bunch of headhunters.
Job hunting is a game of numbers. 99% of headhunters are a waste of oxygen. But that means that you simply need to spam a hundred of them, to get a good lead. Ok, sounds good to me. That's the only value Linked-In has, to me: making it easy to spam a lot of headhunters, when you need to do that.