Once you start doing stuff on the business end of things it's really useful:
• You've got a conf call with 3 people from a company and you want to figure out what their roles there are and other useful bits (where they studied, where they've worked, and other tidbits that can warm up a conversation).
• You want to figure out the rough size of a company you're doing a sales call with.
• You're cold calling and you want to figure out who to cold call.
• You meet a half dozen people at a networking event and would rather have their LinkedIn info than their business card for future reference.
• You want an intro to somebody who you suspect is only a contact or two away, but don't know which contact or two.
• You want to background check a potential consultant / hire and want to figure out who to run those checks by.
Before I started a company I found it pretty useless too. (All of the jobs I'd gotten had always come via intros in my offline personal network, so I never saw its utility there.)
Doesn't that basically mean that LinkedIn is a fool's game? In almost all of those cases, the person whose details are publicly available is putting themselves at a disadvantage in some way. Of course you like it as the person running the company/getting the advantage, but what's in it for the other guy to make sharing worthwhile?
I sit around hoping that they'll sell my email to recruiters. Y'know, for a job I actually want.
I've only had one recruiter approach me in several years on linkedin (and even he didn't have anything more interesting to sell me than DE Shaw, who had already collected my resume for their "Hey look how many people we reject" pile).
I think the key is having experience at a major corporation (Dow Jones 30 or equivalent profile). After I listed that, I went from no contacts to once every month or two.
> I sit around hoping that they'll sell my email to recruiters. Y'know, for a job I actually want.
Exactly. If they had a way to mark a job from a recruiter as irrelevant which caused their account to be flagged then they may create an actually useful service for job seekers, but until then I just keep getting emails about .net jobs in Omaha.
Yes, actually. I've been able to reconnect with past coworkers who I otherwise would have had a hard time tracking down.
I also no longer need to maintain another resume online. It IS my online resume. And instead of saying "recommendations available on request", they're right on that same page.
Finally, it's a way to find people to work with you, if you're hiring. If you're always on the "being hired" side of the equation and never on the "hiring" side, then you won't experience that, but it's hard to find good people, and it's great to have friends-of-friends available as a resource.
LinkedIn recommendations are a joke really, everyone can always get their friends to say nice things about them. E.g. one former colleague of mine, known as "Captain Panic" for well-deserved reasons, has recommendations praising him for being calm in a crisis! And I think everyone on the hire-side is well aware of this problem.
On an unrelated note, I expected that to be the website of Martina Hingis.
As someone who's been reviewing job applications lately, I would say that LinkedIn profiles are of value. It's an additional data point in looking at somebody's job history, even if it's oftentimes redundant. I don't write off recommendations either, provided they're from the right people.
> It's an additional data point in looking at somebody's job history, even if it's oftentimes redundant.
Are you trawling through LinkedIn profiles for candidates? If you use LinkedIn to research current applicants, what information would you find on LinkedIn that is missing from a traditional resume?
Having an online presence is very important as an accompaniment to a CV. I always google job applicants that I receive. If I don't find anything, I am disappointed and tend to file those applicants with the ones where I find their fully open Facebook profile showing what that person did with a stripper at their mates stag party. LinkedIn provides a good fill for the void of wanting to fully lock down your Facebook profile.
Recent uptick. LinkedIn will also "flag" recommendations from being tit-for-tat, meaning, the "savvy" now wait a week or several days before "returning the favor." Ergo, recommendation quality does not mean as much as pre-IPO (IMO). It is also saturated as of late by more spammy recruiters (I'm a recruiter..value out of LinkedIn recruiting has dropped dramatically since IPO due to the flood).
LinkedIn, however, is the "disruptive" potential company in the third-party recruiting space. It will be interesting to see if they do so :)
They made a bit dent in many contingent recruiters introducing pay-for-job posting (versus posting jobs in groups, which is SPAM heavy).
LinkedIn answers and groups, however, has gone the way of mostly spam or, those trying to establish "LinkedIn" expert status' (statusi? :D). I believe many thought that owning a large group would somehow lead to monetization. Currently, groups are only moderated by the group leaders, with LinkedIn more hands-off in the approach, killing nice networking potentials.
As a caveat, day job = LinkedIn recruiting on a 10% basis, whereas off work, I like to actually interact with the groups, Answers (not lately due to poor quality) and connect with interesting people unrelated to technical recruiting.
I got a lot of value out of it last winter when I was looking for a new job. It helped me learn a lot more about the companies and often the people who I was talking to. Two companies where we progressed to in-person interviews told me in advance the first names of the people who I would be talking to and I was able to figure out who they were and read their resumes before I went in. That made a huge difference for me in feeling comfortable during the interviews and helped me ask good questions pitched towards the actual interests of the interviewers.
I know several people, as well as myself, who are head-hunted reguarily on linked in, and have seen multiple job offers come across this table. All in all, it's not bad. But more importantly, if you've been a part of a big company and worked across teams, then keeping track of all those aquaintances is valuable - they might be your 'in' to finding a job again some day. In that regard, it is near priceless.. I don't want the other software devs on my facebook, but I do want to keep in touch.
Yes, there is a huge benefit for someone like me who has worked in many different cities. It allows me to keep in touch with people I've worked with and see where they get new positions. The key here is that it's a tool: it's only as valuable as what you put into it.
It has essentially replaced the Rolodex people used to use years ago.
If you aren't open to recruiters reaching out to you, you can make that plain and clear in your summary... "I don't speak with recruiters" or "Not looking for a position."
I have not. Furthermore, everyone I've ever asked has said that they also just have an account because they feel like they might need it some day. None of them ever actually use it.
Clearly it's not the case that no one gets any value from LinkedIn, as evidenced by the other commenters and the fact that they still exist. Perhaps its use falls along age or professional lines? I and my friends/contacts fall on the younger side of things; is it more prevalent among an older crowd? Among non-programmers? Among programmers at larger companies?
I suspect members of larger organizations benefit more. You build a very large network simply by connecting with everyone you interact with at your own organization. These large orgs also experience a lot of churn and voila, you have a large, distributed network.
I do. But I run a small development shop where besides engineering I have to wear a business development hat a lot. I've made some long lasting professional relationships with partners met via linkedin groups and I've been able to get at little bit of insight into people I'm going to be meeting with who I frequently don't know.
I think its got more value for people in sales or business development then day to day engineers. But YMMV
I use LinkedIn to vet people for a mailing list I help manage. Mostly to verify that they're real people and not accounts which a spammer will use. It's not perfect as many people don't have the address they use for the mailing list aliased on their LI account.
On the other hand, every single contact I've received from recruiters has demonstrated that not a single one managed to actually READ my LinkedIn profile.
