Not much use to me as a retired old guy, but is LinkedIn worth anything to people?
This is better suited to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
It isn’t awful as mere “social media.” You can link to friends of friends, and just chat.
But, yeah, it’s mostly designed for professional linking, to colleagues and co-workers. It isn’t ideal for gushing about baseball or art museums. It isn’t wrong to do that there, it just isn’t optimum use of the resource.
I mostly use it as an address book of old colleagues. And if I’m looking for a job, I use it to see if anyone I know works at a company I’m interested in. On the very rare occasion that I post new research to my blog, I link to it on LI to help get eyes on it.
That’s about it for me. It doesn’t take any of my time, so it’s worth it to me for those benefits.
We used it to look for people with a specific skill set once. Didn’t get anyone. And though I’m retired, and say so on LinkedIn, I still get job offers (in the loose sense.)
I could possibly see it come in handy at some point, bur professionally as already mentioned.
I joined linkedin specifically to stop my co-workers from bugging me about not having a linkedin account. Linkedin sends me annoying messages periodically and people keep endorsing me for all kinds of crap. I haven’t found any good use for it yet.
I suppose if I were looking for a job it would be useful, but I’ve had the same job for over 20 years. I wouldn’t have a clue about how to look for a job in today’s market.
My co-workers have a much different opinion about it than I do.
A friend sent me an invite a while back to sign up for this. Unfortunately I took up the offer, linked up with a few people I know and proceeded to get inundated with emails from the site updating me on how great a career my friends were having and asking me to link up with people I’d never heard of. Those emails now go straight into my junk folder…
“I joined linkedin specifically to stop my co-workers from bugging me about not having a linkedin account. Linkedin sends me annoying messages periodically and people keep endorsing me for all kinds of crap. I haven’t found any good use for it yet.”
My take also. i have tired of the constant requests to connect with people on there, even ones I see quite often IRL!
I have also heard that it is difficult to get out of it. Haven’t tried yet, but will soon.
I use it to spy on my co-workers (check out their resumes, etc) and to refuse recruiters requests to connect. That’s about all I’ve found it good for.
I did that recently. As you and ecg, I mainly joined to keep people from pestering me about it.
I finally got tired of getting emails from them, and removed my account. I simply googled how to delete it, and it turned out to be pretty straight forward.
This was a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t heard anything new from them since.
When I was interviewed for a software development job last year, the interviewers said something like “Usually we have applicants perform a technical test, but your LinkedIn profile has enough endorsements that we won’t bother.” (I got the job.)
LinkedIn had (and do they still have?) a bad reputation for spamming. When you join, it asks for permission to snarf up your address book contacts, and makes it hard for you to decline, and then spams all your contacts in your name inviting them to join. They got a lot of flack for that, and a lot of members quit in protest. Anyone know if they’re still doing that?
There was also some conflict-of-interest complaint about the way they prioritize the resumes that they will send to recruiters. IIRC it went like this: Members could pay a premium to get their resumes up-prioritized to be sent to recruiters. Recruiters could pay a premium to get the highest-rated resumes.
See the conflict there? Recruiters were paying money to get the best resumes, but what they got instead was the resumes that job-seekers paid money to get up-rated. So LinkedIn was playing them off against each other and getting money from both. Anyone know if they’re still doing that?
Hang tight, I’ll see if I can dredge up some links about that. It was several years ago.
Here 'tis.
LinkedIn Payola: Selling out employers and job hunters, Nick Corcodilos, “Ask the Headhunter”, July 22, 2013.
It’s even worse: Not only was LinkedIn accepting (and still accepting?) money from members to buy uplifted placement for their resumes that employers were paying money to get, but furthermore, employers who didn’t like that had the option to disable that feature for their resume searches. So if they did that, the members didn’t even get the up-rated benefits they paid for!
I’ve been on it for a long time and have been building my contacts DB. But I hardly use it. I’m not big on social media. I’ve started a job search so I need to go there and keep grooming my profile and start using LI to find a new job.
I have a very basic profile, it doesn’t even have a photo, and for the last couple of years I’ve had regular employment offers through LinkedIn. I’ve turned them all down, but all in all I feel it’s been worth every penny I’ve invested in it (zero).
It’s how I get my jobs.
I’m a self-employed consultant, I keep my profile up to date. While I do have several agents I get repeat jobs (or at least, repeat calls) from, every single one of them found me in linkedin. I’ve also used it to check people out; for example, the guy who replaced me in my last job was clearly very good at razzle-dazzle but based on a profile which listed 15 different jobs in 15 different SAP-related positions, he’s also a long-time believer in fake it till you make it that I wouldn’t trust as far as I can throw an adult sperm whale. Indeed, he spent the handover trying to butter me up (I’m leaving, honey, you’re barking up the wrong tree). It wasn’t a surprise to have him trying to ask for help after I’d left (I do charge for that; for you, five times my base and it’s got to be paid in advance).
One of my brothers has received hooks there (he’s not interested) and used it to check people out.
The other brother once whined to me that answering ads is useless (uh… at the time he hadn’t answered one for five years), linkedin is useless, web sites are useless, “you only get jobs from friends”. No, he only gets jobs from friends! Because he doesn’t get off his butt and his linkedin page manages to have ten typos in three paragraphs! Attenshon to diteil isn’t his forte, you see.
Used it just yesterday for the first time in a long time.
LI was very unhappy that I didn’t have a profile pic. Kept nagging and nagging.
Checked on some folks that I haven’t seen for a while.
Discovered that LI had changed their privacy settings so a lot of my info was public that shouldn’t be. Always a sign of an ethical company. :mad:
Should be great for some people. But LI is deliberately trying to ruin itself. I think this started before MS bought it but sure isn’t going to get better under them.
I find the newsfeed stream of consciousness on the home page irritating as fuck. You can’t even opt out of the sponsored ads and articles.
Then there’s the people who want to connect with you for no apparent reason.
I use it for keeping connected with former colleagues, helping them with their job searches if I can, and getting information that’s useful to me for my own job search. I’ve never had a problem with spam from them.