My recruiter used it to try to find people with very rare skills. She kept on coming up with the people in my company in the group the opening was in - so it worked, but wasn’t very useful.
I have a group for a conference I’m involved with, and that is useful as a means of getting info out. I accept invitations from people who send them who are in my field, but never issue them. However the people LinkedIn shows as being close to my by whatever metric they use actually are.
A recruiter from Google called me based on my profile. Wasn’t a good match, but it was fun. I would have been the oldest person Google probably ever hired.
They might have grabbed mine anyway. Rumor is that buried in the TOS of their smartphone apps is permission for LI to grab your contacts from your phone. So the one day I tried their useless app, which had a worse UI than using the tiny web browser on my phone, may have cost me my entire contact list. I have not yet confirmed whether or not LI are bestids.
I have this delusional fantasy that someday, someone who wants to hire me will look me up on LinkedIn, read my contacts, find one in common, say Wayne, then call Wayne and ask, “Is this Arkcon a good candidate?” And be satisfied by the dialog. LinkedIn will currently facilitate this, if you ask it to “Find a reference for …”
As it stands now, there are companies where HR is just fine with demanding I provide them with 3 to 5 professional references, with work phone, home phone, Company Name, Company Address, when I worked with them, in what capacity. If that changes, or I’ve lost track, I’m out of luck. If the reference happens to be overseas when they deign to call, “Ohh … sorry I woke you, can we talk about Arkcon’s qualifications?”
Yes, some companies do accept email as a reference contact method, coordinate a time to call, maybe provide questions in the email, but some insist on this old fashioned way. Many companies require that when giving a reference to another company regarding a former employee, they do nothing but confirm dates of employment, to avoid litigation.
Because the resume is seen by only the people you send it to. Most employers do not check backgrounds beyond your last couple of employers.
The LinkedIn profile is seen by people who knew you when you were attending Podunk State College, not Prestigious University in 1992-1996.
Same with job responsibilities. If I don’t really manage a $100m budget at my current job, my current boss and coworkers might look askance at my claiming to on my LinkedIn profile. But I know my current employer has a strict policy of not providing any more information than dates of employment and generic last job title (“Manager II”) to any enquiry. So it’s a risk reward game on the resume. The risk is now higher because of LinkedIn.
I’ve posted before that two of my bosses 15-20 years ago claimed to go to the main state university (University of Kansas, University of Oklahoma) when they actually went to (say) Pittsburg State and Central Oklahoma.
Another consultant claimed he was a University of California grad, which we all assumed meant Berkeley. He actually went to UC-Irvine, which we found when we looked up his profile on LinkedIn. His employer, a small consulting outfit updated their web page when we told them we found it deceptive.
Note that when we made jokes about him going from the Peoples Republic of Berkeley to the Peoples Republic of Cambridge (MA), he played right along about how similar the culture was in some ways and how different it was in others. In this case we are talking about a guy in the early part if his career, when the quality of school you graduated from is actually relevant.
Echoed. You are a mindless yearning buffoon propping up someone else’s whackoff startop that does its best to look useful – perhaps its only redeeming quality is to “somehow” summon people you my actually know or have met in the past. This is called trolling on the web and I’m sure some nice boy out there has you’re email address – I thought I quit more than a year ago yet I still get their incessant, useless spam.
What annoys me is how many people I actually DO know who think this thing will every get them a job anywhere. Dream on. You might get some schmuck at LinkedIn a job.
LinkedIn isn’t the be-all-end-all of social networking sites, but it is useful.
I’m on it for a few reasons. First, to advertise to potential employers (I’m employed and not looking for a new job right now, but you never know.) I get probably 2-3 messages a month from recruiters. Probably 1-2 are relevant and jobs I would actually be a decent fit for. That’s not bad.
A lot of our customers are on LinkedIn as well. This is useful. I very rarely initiate a link with a customer, but they do with me all the time. Fantastic. Free info on their background. Helps me understand who they are, what they know, and where they’ve been.
I do request a link to all of my colleagues, present and past. Not just good to know info, after 10 years in my field it’s useful to see very quickly who might be a good fit for a position at our company with whatever our current needs are. I actually had a really, really great lead from Linkedin on a guy who used to work for us. He left us for family issues some years back and had jumped around for a few years before landing at a competitor. Said competitor downsized this year and he got cut. I saw it right away and was able to tell our upper management - “Hire this guy. He’s fantastic.”
…he ended up getting snapped up by one of our distributors before we could act, and pity for us but good for him. Not really so bad for us since he’s still selling our product.
A third benefit is that you get to talk everyone up with the “endorse” function. I’ve been surprised - I listed what I thought were my basic expertises, and then people I’ve worked with jump on them and “endorse” me for them. Nice little bump for any future recruitment.
I joined primarily to recommend a friend, and since then I’ve done the same for a few others. In my field there are a lot of layoffs and at the same time a lot of companies hiring, and the recommendation of someone who has a lot of experience and connections with people who one knows to be technically competent can help us all to stay employed.
That said, their way of getting people to endorse each other can inflate the picture readers of a person’s profile may get. They’ll typically throw up pictures and names of several people at once with keywords and you can click on something that asks you to endorse all of them at once for those keywords. If you feel the word doesn’t fit or you just don’t know if they qualify you can uncheck that person or something like that, but it takes more effort to actually try to be honest, so some people might just go ahead and give endorsements they wouldn’t in other circumstances. I have received endorsements from several people for things I would not feel comfortable claiming much knowledge of.
I’m a programmer. A recruitment consultant contacting you via LinkedIn seems to be the number one way of getting a new job. I actually took a three month break from it, never logging in, as my British politeness kicked in and I felt I had to reply to everyone. It was stressing me out.
I really find endorsement inflation to be pretty off putting as well. Its nice to have endorsements, but I do trim them from my overzealous contacts. As its been said before, maintaining professional contacts across jobs is difficult, and important when you’re looking for your next position. There’s always someone in any field who’s going to claim its not important, and I think that’s naive, but then again, I can’t provide any proof the LinkedIn helps.
I do that too. If people want to endorse me for stuff related to civil litigation, fine. But people keep adding random endorsements that I haven’t listed as actual skills.