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?
I mean, employers just throw out most resumes they get for an opening. So does that mean you should no longer have or update your resumes?
LinkedIn is basically an online resume repository. Being active on LinkedIn doesn't mean you can ignore other good advice on job hunting (networking, etc.).
I've used LinkedIn to hire lots of professional people across various projects. Its certainly more 'relevant' than any other website in my experience.
And if you aren't on there, it does raise the question of why you aren't. And that, despite me wishing otherwise, raises a bit of a red flag.
Except I'd argue it is.
Last year I was in the midst of a job search, and putting up the "I'm actively looking for a job" flag on LinkedIn was plenty useful.
Granted in some ways it's like being a single girl on a dating site where you get inundated with interested parties, forcing you to wade through them and find the good ones.
I'm actually in my current job because of it, making it the first time I got a job not due to me reaching out first, but because of a company or it's agents doing so.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
... as a friend of me told me that it was a great way to keep a professional contact as people changed organizations and therefore changed email.
However, I think I've sent about 5 or so messages through LinkedIn to people I used to work with. That's not a lot.
I do, however, get a ton of connection requests from recruiters world wide. Nothing as ever come out of that.
So... the net value so far is, I think, is negative.
Why am I still in there? Well, partly because I'm too lazy to leave, but also because I'm "afraid to miss out". At some point I will probably realize that I'm not actually missing anything important.
Maybe that point in time is... right now.
You need a professional presence, they provide a repository. Curate that carefully (but with as little personal information as possible), ignore the rest.
When I was active on linkedin, I would get calls like these daily from people with heavy Indian accents.
>Hello sir, we are looking for someone that knows Windows server. Do you know Windows Server?
>Yes
>Do you know about file sharing?
>Yes
>Do you know about TCP/IP
>Yes
>Are you familiar with Cisco?
>Yes.
>You sound perfect for this client of mine, they are a fortune 500 company. Starting salary is $250,000 USD a year. I just need the last 4 digits of your SSI for a background check.
This is just like the IRS scammer phone calls but with a twist, they're preying on people with no job, no money and desperate for work. As soon as I stopped being active on linkedin, the calls stopped.
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.
And that's what Linkedin is- its a list of all your contacts, except you don't have to work to keep in contact with them- they update their own info as it changes. And its separate from your personal network.
Nobody actually cares about the social networking portion. Its just a place to hold your resume and keep a list of your connections.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I got my current job through a LinkedIn contact, and LinkedIn is the first place recruiters go to look for people with a specific skillset. It's a necessary evil.
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Yeah, I guess I "opted out" of that social media aspect. I never understood people posting streams of stuff on LinkedIn—the negatives (you might unknowingly piss off someone who was considering you for a position) far outweigh the positives (someone looking for a candidate notices you), and unlike other social media, the impact on your job prospect is direct and purposefully so.
LinkedIn is useful for what it started out as. Do you want a public copy of your resume out there where people can see it, but you don't want to bother with maintaining a personal website (not to mention most personal websites don't get much traffic anyway)? Then LinkedIn is very useful for that. Are you expecting LinkedIn to just deliver best jobs to you? In that case the blame lies with unreasonable expectations, not what LinkedIn can or can't do.
I mean, employers just throw out most resumes they get for an opening.
They throw out most resumes because they are poorly written or from people that aren't even remotely qualified for the position.
We auto-reject, without feedback, any resume that has spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, or doesn't contain the word "Java" when someone is applying to be a Java programmer. That cleans out 60-70% of them, leaving far fewer for a human to read.
I'm a hiring manager and I throw out most resumes I get for a position, probably >90%. But I do read them all, even if it takes one minute to read most resumes. Every single one thrown is because the person has no real interest or motivation in getting the job.
Number one thing by a country mile folks - include a cover letter. Just two paragraphs that you've written specifically to me, on why you're interested in the job and perhaps how you experience applies, and you're almost guaranteed a deep look or an interview. For cripes sake, most people don't think at all and the form-letter style "objective" sections I see all the time make it apparent they're spamming the exact same document to whatever they can find.
As a high end architect at a large company, I can confirm that your advice cuts both ways. I constantly get told about "great" 6 month contract-to-hire opportunities in podunk NJ despite the fact that I clearly state I'm a FTE with benefits who is happy in FL and that I despise snow.
"any resume that has spelling errors"
What can I do about *job reqs* that have spelling errors? I have seen a significant number of job titles that include "principle engineer".