I'm seeing a lot of "submit your application" web forms with a required linked-in field. Would it be absolute folly to attempt to get hired without using linked-in? What are your experiences?
I have never got a job through LinkedIn, even though I get loads of contacts from recruiters - as many as 10 per week. The problem is that those contacts are poor quality. They are spammy as heck, basically mass emailing anyone who has a specific search phrase anywhere in their profile.
For the last year my profile bio has opened with the statement "Recruiters: Please tell me what your favourite colour is if you want me to respond to your message." Not one recruiter has actually done that. They literally do not even look at your profile.
I feel like the quality issue is only getting worse over time. Yesterday I received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter that began with "I wanted to reach out as it is almost the end of the year" ...
The same recruiter previously emailed me in December and did not use that phrase, so it's not like he always copy-and-pastes the same thing. However, in his December message, he misspelled my name (which is only 4 letters long), and never even mentioned which company he is hiring for -- it was only apparent in his signature line.
This was a Google recruiter, hiring for staff+ level SWE roles.
My personal pet peeve is when recruiters talk about the qualifications and tech stack at length but completely leave out what the product / company is.
I know there are a lot of devs out there, particularly junior and intermediates, who are looking to work with their favourite tools or something they've not worked with before. But after 25 years in the industry, having worked with several "stacks" and programming languages and worked through many popular paradigm shifts, I care far more about what I'm building than I do what tools I'm using to build it.
A really common one I get is emails about Java jobs where the recruiter praises me for all my Java skills and experience and talks about how I would be the perfect candidate for the job they have. The thing is nowhere in my profile does it say I have Java experience (I'm all C#/.Net), however it does mention JavaScript in a few places. They couldn't be any more obvious with their laziness.
Yea that's the best, when they start out saying how they went over your profile and all the amazing things you've done in XXX language even though that's not listed on your profile at all!
I sometimes get messages where they are searching for candidates with C# or Java experience, also telling me that I seem like a perfect candidate. I do have a little bit of that but for the past ten years I have only been working with embedded sw development (C and C++) so obviously they didn’t read very carefully. I have gotten good contact with good recruiters using LinkedIn as well though so it varies quite a lot.
I think we have this post every few months on this site, so let me explain how recruiting works.
There's 3 types/market for recruiters and they almost never overlap.
The first are "body shop style" recruiters. It's basically a numbers game where they try to cold-call as much people with githubs/linkedin or blogs that reference programming. They don't know programming (not even what's the difference between languages or front-end/back-end) and are looking for a list of buzzwords. They'll send copy-pasted messages (you can tell because it references tech you never used or never even claimed to have used). If you respond (and really you shouldn't) you won't be able to get any relevant information about the position because... they don't have it. These recruiters are often contracted by external firms in "best value countries" and are given canned response to message you. That's probably what the author encountered.
Second type are professional recruiters. Their salary is by commissions will often be a percentage of your salary. They are knowledgeable about programming and tech (often former engineers who wanted a break from coding!). They typically are looking to match specific profiles to specific jobs at client companies. This goes all the way to recruiters specialized in C-Suite executives (and you can picture the commission finding a CEO will bring in). Their messages will be personalized and you shouldn't hesitate to reply back even if you aren't looking for a job. They know that most great software engineers are almost never openly looking for a job so their goal is to be on good terms with a large number of talented developers so that the minute they start looking for a job they can match them with positions. You'll know when you encounter one.
Third type is basically referrals. A players attract A players, smart companies know it. Make sure your referral bonus is a percentage of total comp. It's probably the most effective way of recruiting (it has an insane signal to noise ratio). But you only get access to that type of network by... bringing value and being part of it in the first place!
My point was more that even Google -- a company with a 1.9 trillion dollar market cap -- is now relying on cut-and-paste-error recruiters, even when sourcing for roles which pay $500k+.
I've seen a lot of cringey recruitment communications over the years, but rarely encountered it for very senior roles at top companies in the past. Seems way more common now.
In my experience, Google and Amazon recruiter emails tend to be the most poorly written, confusing and unprofessional emails I receive from recruiters.
My counter anecdote 1 I’d never really used LinkedIn much, but a FAANG recruiter found me on it. That’s how I got my interview, which I passed, which changed my life for the better.
Mass recruiters are the problem here. I’ve never tried the brown M&M strategy, Instead I prefer to just tell them no thanks when it’s not interesting.
I am a programmer and indirectly got my current job via Linkedin. In 2019, a big four accounting firm contacted me on Linkedin to do consulting work for them. I would not have thought of applying to them but since they reached out I talked to them and was hired, and was placed at a Fortune 100 company. A year later (2020) I was hired by the F100 company.
Recruiters from Meta/Facebook and other companies have reached out to me since then. The non-spammy ones directly from companies I respond to, but told them I am not currently interviewing.
In your settings you can check if you're active looking, casually browsing etc. If you're marked as actively looking you might get more incoming.
This doesn’t apply to folks who want contacts for what’s in their profile, but: sometimes you’d like employers to know what relevant adjacent skills you have, without recruiters hitting them as search terms.
For that purpose, I masked all of my software terms like “java” from my EE profile with homoglyphs: humans can read them, but they don’t match search terms.
Lifehack: put an emoji as the first character in your name. If a recruiter includes that emoji in a message, such as “ Hi :fire: John,”, then you know that it’s spammy.
It's interesting what happens when certain recruiters send a follow up message when I don't answer first time. When that happens I tell them to read my profile carefully. Some then get it and send me a colour and a few have got a bit shirty saying I am being unprofessional or that I am being unreasonable expecting them to read my profile given the pressures they are under.
True, but DoubleGlazing didn't answer the first time. That isn't someone who "needs a job more than they don't want to be inconvenienced". That's a recruiter that wants to find someone to fill a job more than they want to respect your desire to not be inconvenienced. And I don't have any sympathy.
> Just seems like GGP is trying to avoid being hired by a string of people not detail oriented.
I'd add that recruiters that spam people without any criteria or attention are a telltale sign that you are already expected to be treated as disposable and unworthy of attention even way before you are even made an offer.
Pretty much. I have always found that it is better to send out fewer customised job applications, rather than send out loads that are all the same.
I wish recruiters would do the same. If I engage with recruiters that use the scatter gun approach then it is inevtable that they will be wasting my time as they just aren't interested in detail and effort.
I had one send me a 4th follow up email this morning which seems excessive. The funny thing is, all the emails are spammy - it's clear that she sends all 4 of these to everyone on some schedule.
Spam sandwiches can be tasty though: that's how I got my current job. A recruiter sent me a LinkedIn message that was either intended for someone else, or she forgot to change the name at the beginning of the message.
Didn't matter; got job. I just replied "Hi Rebecca, I'm not Bhargav, but that position looks interesting" Fast forward a few months and I'm at a new place that seems pretty nice so far.
While I understand the sentiment and don't like LinkedIn, I would assume a recruiter view in the app shows aggregated data, or they would be looking at hundreds of profiles everyday.
I also did something similar saying that "My rates start at $150", and recruiters were still contacting me for $13.
There is a high likelihood that that those scatter-gun recruiters aren't placing people into appropriate jobs.
Most recruiters have one goal, get candidates into a job - any job. Then they get their fee. They do not have an obligation to get a candidate in to the most suitable job. In my experience they will happily lie, flatter and cajole you in to doing their bidding and taking a job that is not right for you.
I don't want to deal with recruiters like that and that's why I try to filter them out.
Recruiter sends out spam to everybody fitting X parameters.
If you find the company and position interesting you can respond.
A recruiter will actually look at your profile and if they think you’re a good match, go from there.
I still find it useful overall because once you respond to the recruiter, you have a decent in with the company. You do need to wait for actually good positions to come in (which would be true anyway if they were looking at your profile), but you can literally just ignore them all until you are looking to actually job hop.
This is why I deleted my LinkedIn profile and would suggest others to the same. It has become nothing more than a spammy network that collects way too much personal information.
> This is why I deleted my LinkedIn profile and would suggest others to the same. It has become nothing more than a spammy network that collects way too much personal information.
Could you please elaborate on your concerns? I mean, LinkedIn is a professional network whose whole point is to allow people like you and me to expose personal details we chose to disclose to recruiters and companies with the goal, direct or indirect, of advancing our career.
Knowing this, how exactly can anyone complain that a service whose sole point is to allow you share your profile info with recruiters is sharing your profile info with recruiters?
If you create a professional profile, yet still opt out of looking for new work, LinkedIn still sells your data to recruiters and not just public data but your hidden data as well and allows recruiters to pay a small fee to obtain private information that you have intentionally hidden and to contact you about jobs that you've specifically said you don't want to be contacted about.
I suggest putting the blurb somewhere in your employment history. Your LinkedIn profile gets scraped and imported by various recruiting software. They often don't import the bio blurb (although they probably should).
This won't eliminate the spam, but will increase your chance of a recruiter seeing the blurb.
Are you trying to force them to see the blurb though? Van Halen could have put a callout to the brown M&M clause in a very prominent place in the contract, had a lot more venues see the clause and, by so doing, make it no longer a useful measurement of their attention to detail and level of effort.
Would you find any utility in an app, or a service, or something ... that would interact with recruiters on your behalf, screening offers so you only ever see the 2% that might be interesting?
Same here. have worked 13 years in senior Data Analytics roles and I got an alert recently from LinkedIn that I would be a perfect fit as a Data Analytics Trainee...
Wasn't LinkedIn the one who used to access people's emails to farm contacts? They did it by testing the password signed up to LinkedIn against common mail services (Hotmail). If the users used the same password across both services then their email got trawled.
The first “trick” you linked to was a bug in a library that they already open sourced before the issue was raised. Pretty clear that it wasn’t nefarious or intentional and shows they didn’t in fact copy the clipboard contents.
Former engineering manager here. LinkedIn is useful to get “sourced” for jobs. Sourcing refers to recruiters proactively searching for qualified candidates for a given job.
The first place recruiters go to source for positions - especially for those that are harder to fill - is LinkedIn.
So no: you absolutely don’t need to have LinkedIn to get hired if you apply directly. LinkedIn makes it easier for companies to find and contact you.
Anecdotally, my last three jobs in my career have come from LinkedIn outreaches (Skype, Skyscanner, Uber). These were opportunities I would have not come across, as I was not actively looking, but they found me at the right moment. Before I always applied directly.
There are a lot of business comms and networkers on linked as well as your standard social network content, in but the greatest value is what it provides to recruiters.
Recruiters use linked in as a 'direct sourcing' (head hunting) tool.
LinkedIn provides a recruiter with a whole recruitment toolset to make their jobs very easy.
The flip side of this is that LinkedIn can sometimes bring you lots of unwanted messages from recruiters offering worse jobs that also pay less than what you currently make
I've gotten hired due to LinkedIn exactly once, and it was helpful. However, that's not how I "use" it. LinkedIn's best use is what it was intended for: a professional networking social media space. Here's how I've used it successfully.
Put your resume on LinkedIn. Send connect requests to people you've worked with and who you'd be willing to work with again. Accept connect requests from people you've either worked with or know from professional networking (meet ups, conferences, user groups, open source project collaborators).
Why?
If someone asks for your Resume, you can first point to your LinkedIn profile (less of a pain).
If someone has a job opening, they'll have a way to contact YOU about the opportunity (yes - I've had this happen multiple times).
If someone with a job opening pings you (hiring manager or team member NOT A RECRUITER!) you can "introduce" people and help a former co-worker find a job or contract work (I've done this a couple of times).
From time to time you'll get pings from former co-workers who might not have another way to contact you - It's nice to talk shop over beers.
Summary: LinkedIn lets you keep your professional network separate from your personal network.
As a counter to your anecdote, my last three jobs have come through LinkedIn and I use it as the SOLE platform for anything work-related. I refuse to apply for a job that doesn't ingest my LinkedIn profile information; my resume is just a PDF copy of my LinkedIn profile (which is fully public too); and I tell people to go to my LinkedIn profile because business cards died 20+ years ago.
I just completed a successful job search, including landing a great senior level IC role at a large tech company. I do not have LinkedIn (or GitHub etc.).
Based on what I've read and heard from hiring managers, I optimized two things: CV and video call setup. My CV was customized for every application, a single page dense with information but designed to be easy to skim and pattern match to the role requirements. For video calls, I had a high quality camera, microphone, lighting and background arrangement. There are tons of guides for YouTuber setups, which I followed.
I have no control experiment (it could be due to a hot job market or my experience profile) but I was honestly quite surprised how effective it all seemed.
I agree that video call setup is important. I’d suggest it is way undervalued.
People don’t understand how important production quality is. Virtual backgrounds and automatic cropping / lighting adjust can be good but aren’t as good as getting it right in the first place.
Setting up quality video conference production for remote interviewing is often easier than buying and caring for all of the clothes in the grooming often needed for in person interviewing.
I love the callout for a video call setup - have something more than just a pixelated camera and blank wall in the background! Things like lighting and ability to see and hear you can make or break an interview if not at least make you stand out for being clearer than the rest.
> My CV was customized for every application, a single page dense with information but designed to be easy to skim and pattern match to the role requirements.
I'm interested to see how you did this. Would you be willing to share a copy?
As an employer, I find LinkedIn profiles faster (and thus nicer) to screen (we're a company that doesn't ask for a set application format) - since you don't have to adjust your brain to the format! I'm less likely to miss stuff, but might skim faster versus reading your story.
That said, if someone just sends me (I'm cofounder, post series B startup) an email directly which is well thought out connecting your skills with what we're working on, I will 100% read it / consider it. This ticks a box that you're interested in what we're working on - which we need to feel to hire you.
I do not now look at the vast majority of submissions, since the vast majority of those are generic, so we have a full time recruiter looking through.
Last 2 gigs were directly through LinkedIn, so to me, it's a huge win. If a good recruiter/lead contacts me, I get their email and add them to my 'rolodex' so I can contact them when I need a future job.
However, 98% of it is total and complete garbage. Unfollow everyone. Follow 2-5 people you actually care about. Ignore spam messages - don't even get emotional about your time being wasted - just delete it and move on.
I blocked all email from linkedin on my mail server back in 2005 or so when they were relentlessly spamming _every_ email address they could find. I still have them blocked. I never bothered to create a linkedin account because from what I hear, 99.9% of the content is inane self-promotion and a never ending stream of begging from low-quality recruiters with low-quality offers.
100% of all the jobs I've had in my two-decades-long technology career have been from my real, in-person social network. "Hey bityard, I work at this cool place and think you should too."
Oh man that was terrible. I graduated in late 2004, got a job in 2005 and I literally got 10 e-mails from linked in per week to all of my e-mail addresses.
It's why, to this day, I do not have a linked in profile. Obviously if my family were starving I'd do what it takes to get a job, but given that programming jobs are fairly easy to find, I am not signing up.
I am a midlevel frontend developer. I had to look for a job one time per year for the last 3 years.
3 years ago I tried everything. I applied to (literally) hundreds of position. More than 100 on LinkedIn, which led to nothing (50% ghosted, 50% automated rejection). Applied to a few from HN (“Who is hiring”), a couple of interviews, no offer. A fez dozens on AngelList, a few interviews, one offer, got hired.
2 years ago I mostly gave up on LinkedIn. Still applied to a couple of dozens there, same result of 50% ghosted 50% automated rejection. Applied to a few dozens on AngelList, a few interviews, no offers. This time, on HN, I applied to all positions that I could be a match (for two “Who is hiring” threads). A few interviews, got hired by one of those.
Last year I ditched LinkedIn completely for applications. I did not apply for a single job there (but kept my profile updated and I could see that my profile was visited by people from the companies I was applying). Applied to all of HN positions of December’s thread, several interviews, two offers. Applied to about 20 positions on AngelList, a few interviews, one offer, which I ended up accepting.
So LinkedIn is a complete waste of my time when applying to jobs there, but I believe keeping a profile there helps a little (although probably a good enough resume file could do the job).
Some caveats, with more experience my application-to-interview-to-offer ratio improved a lot, except on LinkedIn. There a couple of reasons for this I think. Big companies use LinkedIn more. Big companies have more silly (imo) requirements, having a CS degree (I don’t) or the recruiter recognizing where I studied (I went to college in Brazil).
Also, this last time I was back living in Brazil, so I wanted companies that hire globally remote and that’s mostly small companies that don’t use LinkedIn for hiring.
Seconding that. The quality of positions on Linkedin is not just down, I found them essentially worthless (applied to less than 100 positions but still a lot). Some positions are there for more than 1 year (and shown as recently posted), dead links, some links lead to job boards that force you to register with them just to show the job description, etc etc.
The "Home" page feed is full of inspirational quotes/memes and heartwarming videos, so they're building a social network which I have no need for. I only have the profile because recruiters/employers increasingly require LinkedIn profile with your application.
I deleted my LinkedIn account some time ago because every contact it generated was useless spam and people I have never heard of asking to be in my "professional network". If I ever want to move, I don't need LinkedIn; people in the relevant competing companies to mine know who I am. People just starting out don't have that luxury and may feel that they have to put up with it.
I've found internal referral to be the only reliable way to get an interview at competitive companies. Generally I think the below is true when it comes to getting interviews.
- Internal Referral (this is the best way)
- Twitter leading to internal referral
- Inbound recruiter leading to interview (only happens if you've already succeeded at 1 or 2 previously).
---
- Have gone to famous school like MIT or Stanford.
There are a lot of ways to get an internal referral, but most involve making friends with someone who already works at a place or knows someone who does. You can do this by making friends on twitter, HN, github projects etc. Moving to an area that has a lot of the industry (SF Bay) if possible helps too, though with remote work is less important now.
I think mileage may vary depending on location, role, and YOE. I didn't go to a top/famous school, but I do have 20+ years of experience, including Principal level IC and several years of management experience as tech lead manager, manager of managers, and executive (at a small startup, so not a huge org) experience.
Of the six rounds of interview/job offers I've gone through since 2016, 5 were the result of a recruiter finding me on. LinkedIn. Caveat for one of those was that one of those was a reachout from a big name tech company a couple years previous, so I then reached directly out that recruiter. For another big name tech company, I submitted my resume directly through their online portal and got a call the next day.
My LinkedIn spam level is probably about 75%, which isn't actually a terrible ratio. I consider spam to be something that's clearly irrelevant to my role or far too junior. For the spam, I ignore, and for the others I always reply with a polite "thanks, but no thanks" which people generally respect and has occasionally led to a more appropriate job link.
Yeah I think you’re right, I suppose I was thinking in the context of early career or first job. I think you get more attention if you have a lot of YOE.
I've been lucky enough to get almost all my recent jobs off LinkedIn,
The Easy Apply is straight up revolutionary, because you don't need to wade through a 20-page job application anymore. I don't need to answer a personality quiz to apply for a job . Job .
That said, I absolutely hate the photos on LinkedIn. My physical appearance and my qualifications are two different things.
For the original question, I'd just say to put 'n/a' or similar in the LinkedIn field, or whatever gets you past that box but indicates that you don't participate in LinkedIn. If that alone causes your application to be rejected, you probably don't want to go through that channel anyway.
No. I quit LinkedIn quite a while back when they made my physical location a hard requirement, and it's been a net plus. LI was never a primary job hunting channel, though. Mostly, it's a cesspool of spam.
In recent years though, I've had more inbound interest due to my online presence, and haven't done any proactive job seeking activities.
YMMV. If I were applying to Microsoft, for example, I'd probably create a LI account.
Hiring is a signal to noise problem. Know the signal they're filtering for, filtering tools in use, and you'll get an interview. If they're asking for a linked in profile, then it's a tool in use.
No. I have never used LinkedIn to apply for a job, and have received multiple offers (and solicitations to interview) without ever having one. But I've also never worked or applied at a place that seemed to expect me to have a LinkedIn.
In my experience, having a personal website has all of the upsides of being on a "professional" social network with none of the downsides.
No, except for companies that require you to submit your resume with a required LinkedIn field. /eyeroll...
If that company is one that you really want to work for, perhaps try finding an alternative way of applying. See if you know anybody there and get them to submit your resume. Having an internal referral is good for them, and probably helps your chances vs. coming in via a web form.
If you are personally opposed to setting up a LinkedIn profile, the fact that the firm requires one for submitting your resume, probably indicates that they aren't a good match for you.
You do not need LinkedIn. I closed my account there early last year, and have never regretted it or feel that I miss out on anything. Instead, needless distraction has been removed. I was on LinkedIn for 12 years, and never once got a consulting gig from it; rather, those all came from colleagues, Craigslist, and DICE. I looked for new opportunities this past autumn, and found _plenty_ without LinkedIn.
YMMV, and for me a key factor is that LI is heavily slanted to full-time employment. For consultants, its value proposition isn't so great.
I never used LinkedIn to land a job. I once received a relevant offer (compiler specialist located less than 500km away that requires relocating; the recruiter actually did a good job). I never got a ton of spammy offers, but I got enough to delete LinkedIn.
But YMMV. I also don’t have Facebook; I use GitHub as a portfolio page and do have some open source going on there.
Witnessing what happened to Marak, who broke his own npm libraries and got locked out of GitHub, my conclusion is that the platform does not operate on the user’s terms. Yet another mega corp.
I haven't updated my LinkedIn in around five years. Definitely not a requirement. I do keep an up-to-date CV and just pass that along. Could always try putting n/a in the field and writing a note, or finding a hiring manager or someone in HR to mail directly.
From the hiring side--I've done quite a bit--I never thought twice about whether someone had a LinkedIn or CV. I do think it's lazy not to provide anything on one's background, though. It helps me guide the conversation towards a candidate's strengths.
I have never got a job via LinkedIn, and when I did have an account years ago when it first started, I closed it because of the crazy amount of spam I used to get from it.
It's a social media account. Instead of posting about how great your cats are, you post about how great this article that you wrote is.
I guess if you MUST have one, just put a link to your own site with CV and stuff that you want - then its there for normal people to see, and those that insist on using a social media platform to decide if they should hire you or not.
I landed my current job at one of the absolutely top paying companies through LinkedIn. Meta contacted me a short while ago and while I wouldn't want to work for them they did find me through LinkedIn and it was a serious recruiter directly from them not some third party shady stuff.
It's my #2 source of jobs after TopTal for the last 10 years and comes before word of mouth. I don't think there are any other sources though one guy hunted me down through a YouTube comment which I thought was pretty cool.
Anything. Legacy to green fields but loads of green fields for me. A lot of startups but also a few well-known names. I did mobile.
After a one week trial you either get hired and paid 100% or rejected and paid 50%. Unless you totally fucked up. The client never pays anything but sometimes they try to abuse it. But >90% good.
The submit your application is supposed to make it easier. One click instead of filling out all the information yourself. Most forms I saw had the option to just manually put it in too
I have a decidedly love/hate relationship with LinkedIn.
Almost all of my work for the past decade has come via way of LinkedIn or referrals, and usually the referrals from older colleagues are because they could find me on LinkedIn. You don't _need_ a LinkedIn profile, and you're not obligated to provide it on a job application. Having a LinkedIn profile is a useful automated marketing tool, and a more extensive, cultivated version of your resume/C.V.
I have also found, that as an engineer/developer, that I don't use LinkedIn the way the majority of engineers/developers use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a marketing tool and should be used as such.
LinkedIn is also full of low-quality recruiter spam and people not even glancing at your profile before reaching out with a 6 month/$20 an hour contract Java position on the other side of the country.
Pro tip: never ever ever ever put your phone number in your resume or on a jobs site. If you have to put a number, get a google voice number and don't forward calls.
I have 753 voicemails from recruiters. And I'm not in demand. (I have 5x as many e-mails from recruiters, so I also recommend not putting your personal e-mail in your resume)
Not necessarily. Those truly in the top 1-5% of their fields will likely have the pick-of-the-litter when it comes to jobs because of word-of-mouth.
Anecdote alert: I joined a small firm in Hamburg, Germany after leaving another startup in the same location. When the new team I had joined was talking about how the company was looking to launch a new product and was in desperate need of a ReactJS dev I showed them something an old friend from the previous job had done and they wanted to offer him the job without even interviewing! The interview that did occur was more or less a formality -- assessing cultural fit and such. He was hired and is happy; I've since moved on but that experience never left me. I kid you not he is one the best ReactJS devs I've ever seen (not that I am in the ecosystem but the things he has built and his knowledge of CSS and JS etc -- he could just a lot done very quickly).
I've landed at least 2-3 major jobs through LinkedIn. My current job and one in 2015 that moved me from making 5 figures at a local company to making 6 figures contracting remotely with a digital agency and it lasted 5 years. Also, part of this was making connections in the open source community, and optimizing my profiles, getting as many connections as possible. Taking on any interview I could get even if I wasn't interested in the job, just for the interview experience. I think there is a lot more to it than just throwing up a fresh empty LinkedIn profile. You've got to work hard to make it good and to make connections both on and off LinkedIn. And make sure you work on your soft skills, those have often won me jobs over more qualified candidates.
I got hired via LinkedIn, but it wasn't necessary to have an account to get the job. The position I got hired for had a job announcement on the corporate website. LinkedIn was just another source of job listings. LinkedIN was a great tool for discovering positions, whereas without LinkedIn, I would have missed them.
There is the usual job opportunity spams, which for IT Security is not bad. I have received several initial introduction from recruiters from respected companies.
What I like about LinkedIn is that I can find out instantly if I know someone who already works at the company I am interested in applying. Being able to ask someone about the company's culture can help you make the decision if you want to accept employment or skip to the next one.
It is the only social network that I find worth engaging with and by that I mean just create your profile and fill in some of your data so recruiters have an idea of what you can do. You don't NEED it to get hired but it sure has helped me find new jobs more than once.
We can’t read the mind of your hiring manager, but most places don’t strictly require a LinkedIn.
However, it’s so easy that you might as well just do it. You can have it set up and filled out in 10 minutes and it’s an easy link for people to pass around when discussing you as a candidate.
yes, but no, it isn't "just 10 minutes", you should give it the care and attention you'd give to your cv or any other professional presentation of yourself.
No. I'd just post a link to your resume in that spot. Companies like it but no one will hard pass on you because you dont have one. That being said making it easier for companies to hire you/reach out to you is good if you are actively searching for a new job.
A funny fact: if you apply for a job at LinkedIn, they ask you to upload a resume instead of autofilling with data they already have. There are good reasons for this of course (e.g., public vs private info), but does provoke some WTF the first time you see it.
My question would be to HN. Has anyone ever actually gotten a job through LinkedIn? As far as I'm aware its just a public resume site that some HR departments check sometimes to see if you seem legit.
More than anything it's just a recruiter spam farm.
I used LinkedIn to get a job. There was a company I wanted to work for. I reached out to a recruiter at the company on LinkedIn via DM. He set up some time to talk that day, and a formal interview happened a week later. Couldn't have been easier.
I've gotten hired twice via a linkedin "Stumble Upon" type process, but not used it to apply for a job (successfully, anyways). I typically have done that with the recruiter or company directly.
I don't switch jobs that often. My career has been at only 4 companies over 20 years so far.
I agree with other comments here, your LinkedIn profile is useful for showing people what you're about and what you can do at a high level. I know people who don't have linkedin because they are in-person networkers. They go to conferences to build relationships, and when they need a new job they work that social network that they built into their "little black book" by hand.
LinkedIn is a great way to build connections and have people. People send me private messages asking if I'm interested in their job position. Thus, If I have time to accept those proposals, I might find myself being hired through LinkedIn.
LinkedIn eliminates friction better than anything else in my opinion. Applying to a job with a single click is brilliant. I wouldn't bother with anything else unless I was targeting something specific like climate, startups, etc.
No. When I attempted to create a LinkedIn a few years ago they flagged my account as spam and requested a photo ID. They will not get one from me.
GitHub under Microsoft also flagged a new-ish work related GitHub account as spam. They eventually reversed the suspension after four/five months. Luckily my day-to-day work does not have GitHub in the loop. On one occasion a co-worker did me a favor and submitted a PR for me.
* In LinkedIn's case I used some Czech in my profile. Maybe that made it seem suspicious.
* GitHub doesn't like when you delete a GitHub account, wait some amount of time, then create another GitHub account with the same email address.
How else do you track your old work colleagues and ask for a job when they get hired at a place to work? Recruiters are there too, but if you know someone it can ease the hunt especially if you do good work and they remember you.
No, but employers usually look at it for past work experience and positions. All of this will be on your CV/resume anyway. I believe that I get a lot more recruiters reaching out because of it (for better or worse).
My two most recent job changes have been via LinkedIn. My profile is minimal (no photo, just a short blurb and a super-old copy/paste of my resume).
The first was an ex-colleague recruiting me directly for a position he was trying to fill. LinkedIn was just the easiest way for him to find me since we were already connected there.
The other was random recruiter spam, to which I always respond with my standard blurb - basically "Is this position fully remote and what's the salary range?" They came back with a number 40% higher than what I was making then, so I pursued it.
I never found a job via LinkedIn. I found a job via GitHub but I mainly found jobs in my personal network.
At first they were cheap startups, then they turned into better paying companies.
The jobs I get offered on LinkedIn are mostly paying less than 50% of what I'm making via personal contacts. A few can get to 90% of what I'm making.
I tolerate LinkedIn because I'm too lazy to have a CV and because it's nice to gauge how the market is changing by looking at their salary ranges. I also add everyone and ignore them if they're selling services / jobs I'm not interested in.
Participated in a lot of hiring at a hyper growth startup in London.
The recruiters get your CV, go to your linkedin. See if it matches good enough. Look throug your linked to see if there is something they can use (they are human resource after all) and then maybe push you one up in the hiring pipeline process. Next step is reading / skimming the other stuff you sent over.
Without linkedin you and they have more work in the first step, so even though I hate linkedin with a passion and use its stream mostly as an art project, for jobsearches you should use it.
No, but look at it this way. From a UX perspective, we're familiar with reducing friction to get people to sign up for our product, whatever it is. Even with some irelevent friction, you'll get some sign-ups, but you'll get more with a more optimized flow. Same for linked in. Is it possible? Yes, you'll get many answers saying they didn't. So you don't have to, but why make it hard for employees to hire you. Especially if you're at the start of your career.
Obviously it is not a requirement but it's quite helpful, even if LinkedIn is a dreadful web site in so many ways. I've gotten 3 of my last 4 jobs as a result of LinkedIn inmails (including 1 MAMAA).
Applying for open jobs is always going to be a numbers game that most candidates will lose. On the other hand there is no better way that I know of to passively receive inquiries from companies. Most of them are irrelevant or garbage but it only takes one good one to be your next job.
Disappointed to have gone through the thread only to discover there's really no middle ground- either you're going to be inundated with low-quality recruiters whose signal is arguably no better than random chance, or a recruiter glances at it to source a candidate they already know about. It's probably better to go the route of making a personal technical blog and building interesting connections through it and your Github.
Definitely not! I deactivated my linked in 5 years ago and got emails from Amazon, Snapchat, and some stealth company that didn't want to disclose their name since Monday. I think it's not as necessary on the engineering side, but I did pass all the rounds of interviews @twitter but have a manager pass on me because i didn't have a linkedin profile (this was through a 3rd party contracting agency and not the FTE application route)
No. But it is useful and solves a lot of problems for me.
It's pretty easy to see who you and the interviewer know in common. That way we can get references and pass the interviews more easily. I'm very experienced and at my level, if I didn't have references it would be unacceptable. LinkedIn lets people instantly see who we both know so they can ask about me and get a reliable answer.
I do the same when I'm hiring. It helps with my confidence level.
Very useful. Right now I am getting about 10 messages a day from recruiters, but maybe 1/25 of them are worth a second look. They are either geographically not ideal, things I don't want to do, or things I don't really have experience with (and my LinkedIn profile doesn't even mention)
It's more useful for applying directly to companies. I was getting jobs from Indeed but it seems like 3 of the last 4 were from LinkedIn.
I'm not a recruiter, but I am a (design) manager frequently on interview panels.
LinkedIn is useful for me behind looking at the design portfolio (most important), and the resume. I'll scan the connections to see if we have a mutual friend, college, previous job, etc as a topic to talk about in the interview, and it frequently brings up a great discussion that might not have happened otherwise. Definitely not required, though.
It could signal that this person goes against the grain, maybe has a disagreeable personality, too cool to join the herd, might put up a fight about being asked to do other things. Some of these qualities can be very valuable, but most hiring managers don't know how to leverage these qualities. Tech people might be impressed, but hiring managers who live their lives in LinkedIn could be put off. Imagine trying to get a job as a recruiter without a LinkedIn profile. That would be impressive.
It's just... odd. It's a signal that the candidate has some reason for not wanting a LinkedIn account, which could range from a messy history to a passionate belief in not having an online record. All of which _might_ translate to a difficult candidate who isn't prepared to make it easier for the employer.
As ever with these kind of eccentricities, if the candidate is good enough they can pull it off, but otherwise it's a orange flag.
Agreed that there's a signal among those who decline to dump their work history publicly into the hands of the largest company in the world and its recruiter flock in exchange for maybe job leads. It is eccentric, unfortunately.
But reading that signal partially will filter out improperly. Aside from privacy, candidates who value their time don't want to be disturbed unless they have initiated.
Someone whose LI profile doesn't exist (or has just 'go to my site') is more experienced at the game.
Not the person you are replying to, but one of the first classes on my "let's get a bachelors starting at 36 years old" required us to create a LinkedIn profile as an assignment if we didn't already have one. I think they've just become a de facto thing that is expected.
> I think they've just become a de facto thing that is expected.
Good god! Where in the world are you?
Here in Blightty, it wasn't that long ago having a linkedin account would count against some of our candidates.... as a candidate must have had their head in the sand not to be aware of the toxic behaviour of linkedin (spamming personal contacts) [1].
The United States, this was at a private 4-year university. I've seen gobs of job postings on company websites that, on the application section, ask for your LinkedIn profile link as well and my current employer is a very active user as are virtually all of the c-level employees.
I have been offered 2 contract positions without linked-in profiles
So my answer it is not necessary.
I mostly use linked-in to post articles of interest to me in the various groups as a way to promote open source code repos from authors who publish their software as well as their findings
It is my hope that by posting such articles/work I will encourage more authors to publish their code so we can all grow together
From my own experience, Linkedin is currently the best place to get your profile discovered by a potential employer. There are others too like triplebyte, workatastartup, etc. but linkedin is the biggest.
If you are seeking a job then you are better off contacting and reaching out yourself. But even in this case having a linkedin profile, lots of connections and references help potential employers screen you later in the process.
I think the problem is not discovery but the problem is that only garbage comes from LinkedIn. I've never gotten a job that was worthwhile from LinkedIn.
I have never got a job via LinkedIn but I believe for applying for jobs I have more a brute force approach.
Apply for anything and everything you see that remotely relates to you.
- Believe in yourself and your skills
- Hiring managers are as clueless as you are, don't sweat
- X Years of experience is just GOOD TO HAVE, even less would be good
- Let the other people judge if you are right fit or not. Don't be the judge even before applying.
Since 2014, all offers I received were from companies which found me in LinkedIn, and some of them were exceptionally good. The secret is in building your network, not just adding every single recruiter, but picking up contacts who may fit your career goals. Currently I have about 600 contacts all over the world, and referrals from almost all Big Tech companies.
I understand the desire to not use LinkedIn, but for those of you not using who are either interested in being hire or in doing hiring, what’s the alternative?
From what I’ve seen everything else is fairly similar, just smaller scale.
I prefer to work with people who I’ve worked with before, and come in via referrals and to hire the same way, but sometimes your pool of contacts isn’t big enough to do that exclusively.
We post our jobs on job boards like stackoverflow. People find our jobs there (or on our corporate job board site) and then apply. We review their resumes, select a few for phone interviews, select 2-4 for in-person or zoom interviews, then either offer the job or keep looking.
Right, so you don’t “source” people who aren’t actively looking.
That’s a great approach, and by nature you’re prefiltering for those interested enough in the position to apply for it, but I don’t think it covers all the cases that people use LinkedIn for when hiring/being hired.
I've spent the last 6 years advising clients on resumes, interviews, linkedin strategies. Pivoted to supporting companies hiring.
The vast majority of clients did research on the platform and then were "checked out" by employers. The submit by linkedin attempts seemed to go into dark hole. Better to make a contact at the company and/or apply direct if you can.
You can definitely do it without Linked In, but Linked In can really help. Everybody who interviews you is going to look for your Linked In profile and it will be a little weird if you're not on there.
Obviously this is just my anecdotal experience, but I've been on all sides of hiring at many different companies, at several startups and a couple of big corps too.
To me LinkedIn is simply a marketplace for resumes that recruiters research to find people they match to their positions. They then contact you. It's also for maintaining a professional network of current and former work associates to get possible job leads if you're looking or they need to hire.
All the other stuff seems like filler material to me so I ignore it all.
LinkedIn has been a great tool for me and was instrumental in getting my latest job. What started as an answer to a call for technical writers ended up in a full time job in my industry (web hosting) with people I'd never have known otherwise. So yeah. Why not? Sure, there are downsides to LinkedIn, but get what you want out of it, ignore the rest.
Back when I used to work as a consultant I got 3 good clients mostly via LinkedIn, including a Fortune 500 company that cold messaged me.
As for regular employment, there's often a multitude of ways to apply, so LinkedIn isn't necessary. If you need a good LinkedIn profile to get hired, well, that's another debate.
I don't, not with what I want and where I want to work. But others might want different things and work at different places and if those places expect LinkedIn profiles they might think it's suspicious if you don't have one. I'd personally not want to work at such a place but that's not a position everyone else can have or has.
Yes the company and website is garbage but if you're seriously trying to land a job at big tech companies you need to get on there, post a picture of you and add your friends/co-workers, etc.
Applying through LinkedIn is easy.
HR loves LinkedIn.
It makes your Resume stand out if you can back it up with a decent profile.
The wide range of answers to this has been really helpful. What I'm getting out of it is this: If you're a linked-in refuser (like I've been so far) then it limits you somewhat, filtering out some potential employers, but possibly in a good way.
I haven't used it to get a job yet. But I do use it to keep a look out for future jobs, it's worth having. Every week I get a couple of messages from recruiters and it's just nice to know what the going rate is for different jobs and sometimes something might catch your eye.
I haven't run into a required LinkedIn field before.
But, I have used LinkedIn to apply, as many employers have a direct application system through LinkedIn (approx. 1-click application if your profile is up-to-date). Success rate getting interviews this way was good given the low effort to apply.
I've never had a linkedin account and refuse to due to all their spamming etc. I guess I have gotten comments about that, and there is no way to know if I missed out on any job possibilities from it. But I've always been able to find something without it.
I joined LinkedIn early on. When I was working as an individual contributor I first thought it was super effective and I became a "LiON" who tried to build as large and as open a network as I possibly could.
At that time I got numerous jobs thanks to my LinkedIn profile. On top of that I would tell anybody who was listening, particularly anyone who was struggling in job searches, that they should join LinkedIn too.
I went through a phase of business development for a new idea and found that LinkedIn attracted an unlimited number of bullshitters to the point that I was starting to become a bullshitter. I was getting sick and tired of the spam email I was getting. I was angry and resentful all the time and starting to feel guilty for thinking horrible racist thoughts like "They should rename it to linked.in", etc. It just seemed everybody was a "consultant" named "Joe Blow" who had a company called "Joe Blow Incorporated" or a personal trainer, life coach, etc.
Around the time Trump got elected I deleted most of my social media accounts including my LinkedIn account.
Since then I did two job searches without LinkedIn. In one case I went from "damn i really have to get a job" to having a job in a month, in the other case it took a few months.
As others have said, in the current climate at least if you have a good linked in profile recruiters will proactively seek you out. And I have indeed found work via these cold call recruiters. But it's not strictly necessary at all.
It helps. I got my current job through LinkedIn. Also recently, I started to get contacted by recruiters from Meta, Microsoft through LinkedIn. Most of the offers you will get won't be interesting but overall I think it is worth it.
The answer probably depends on the company, I don't remember any company requiring linkedin in their application forms but even if not, it wouldn't hurt to create and account and a rough profile. It would only take like an hour
No. I got all of my contracting jobs via HN (except the first one, which was a natural transition) and am very grateful for that. All of my clients were / are great, professionally and personally.
Got my last two jobs via LinkedIn. I don't engage much with LinkedIn beyond using it as an online resume and a job hunting tool - they basically ruined the groups feature a few years ago AFAIC.
I haven't had much luck in the last 10 years getting interviews via company's own hiring site. All my interviews come from recruiters (internal or external) pushing for me in the companies.
I think Linkdin is largely a productivity trap. There are whole articles out there about how to optimize Linkdin, but I’ve never glanced at it for the 100’s of people I’ve hired over my career.
I’ve never gotten a job from linkedin despite having an account (and references). I closed my account about 5 years ago and still manage to get competitive salaries in senior level tech jobs.
Consider also that many companies promote job ads on LinkedIN or search candidates on LinkedIN. So even without the “submit your application” LinkedIN is pretty important to get hired, imho
I've gotten a couple high quality leads via engineering managers on LinkedIn. One was of Apple. I forgot what a regex was after I got nervous though so no job
You can probably find a local job on LinkedIn but nothing decent remote.
I found my best remote job due to an announcement right here on HN. My 2nd best (and longest running) due to some open source involvement.
LinkedIn has been terrible in finding jobs. I actually tried to apply to a Google job being suggested to me and was shocked to see that I am being take to another portal to fill-in my data. I would have assumed my data being filled into LinkedIn automatically gets shared with the employees I apply to. Which means LinkedIn it not very practical.
This isn't true at all. We hire remote folks sourced from LinkedIn all the time. In fact, it's one of the best ways to find global remote candidates as most folks refer people they know, which are mostly local or centered around some economic area.
Since I work entirely remote my (previous) team is already distributed.
But LinkedIn itself has basically little support for this scenario. I noticed that although my previous startup was in SV they started promoting me local jobs as soon as I marked I'm "open for work".
I had to change my location to SV to get SV jobs but then some of those had timezone requirements, etc.
I suspect that this is going to change soon. As an industry we are now optimizing for the same set of functional interview questions across all companies while ignoring past engineer performance.
An interview is only one day with a candidate, and we’re well past the point where our functional questions are contrived to the point of selecting for interview training rather than job skills.
Consider that 8 years ago asking to reverse a singly linked list in o(1) memory and o(n) time was the difficulty bar for FB. These days you’d likely get asked to implement an optimal multidimensional DP + dfs/bfs/bsearch.
I've never used LinkedIn; I find such business models unethical (essentially: selling access to information that is provided free-of-charge by users). Their subsequent spamming of phone contacts, and aquisition by Microsoft has reenforced this opinion.
I've never had a problem getting a development job, for the past 11 years. I'm in the UK.
LinkedIn was toxic when it started..... sending spam to your email contacts saying you had invited them to join. How the fuck they gained any respectability after this is beyond me.
You don't really need LinkedIn. The quickest way to get hired is to create a technical blog, write a bunch of interesting articles, create a couple of interesting projects, and make them go viral. You'll get flooded with emails from headhunters. (This is what I did.)
> The quickest way to get hired is to create a technical blog, write a bunch of interesting articles, create a couple of interesting projects, and make them go viral.
Is obviously not quick. But tbh is a dream way to land a job.
You can totally get hired without linkedin. Where you will get hired will depend a lot on who you are and your skills.
If you're a relatively junior IC, you may not have time to build up an IRL professional network to help you get a job. You may not have a crazy in-demand resume that jumps to the top of the list for senior/staff jobs. This means you need to find jobs instead of letting them come to you.
I've seen people say that reading linkedin is the ultimate resume - standard format, easy to read and parse, and all look the same. So if you're just doing resume drops on online web forms, missing out on that tells the hiring person they have to do more work to evaluate you. That could mean its "too much work" and they just skip you. YMMV but its a risk you take.
I've heard a lot of different takes on recruiters from linkedin. As a relatively mid-level engineer at FAANG, i get constant recruiters messaging me (1 per week min). I found 50% to be not worth my time ever, and the other 50% are recruiters for big/reputable companies (eg. faang et al.) and some of them have given me interviews/leads, - i've even taken a job that started on linkedin via a recruiter cold message.
Personally, i understand why linkedin is annoying to use. It has lots of antipatterns, etc. That said, part of getting hiring is "playing the game" unless you're truly 1/1000000. By sitting out linkedin (when doing resume-drop style applications), you're signaling to the company hiring you that you either are too lazy to update a profile once a year, or your morals against linkedin are stronger than your desire to help them hire you. Its like people who don't keep their resume < 1 page. They are either truly incredible and it can't be fit on one page, or they just don't know how to or refuse to do the simple things that are expected of them.
TLDR: Unless you're special enough to make your own, or you have a strong personal network already, following the status quo may help you.
(also its LinkedIn not linked-in, skip the hyphen)
For the last year my profile bio has opened with the statement "Recruiters: Please tell me what your favourite colour is if you want me to respond to your message." Not one recruiter has actually done that. They literally do not even look at your profile.