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Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

#41

Post by ryanmercer »

AlexandrB wrote: post #8
reidjs wrote: post #4

It would be a red flag for me if they are younger/early career, but if you are older and have a good resume and/or portfolio website I wouldn’t care.

Out of curiosity, why would it be a red flag? All it indicates that the applicant doesn't use LinkedIn.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

#43

Post by zmb_ »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

#44

Post by bennyp101 »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

#46

Post by summertime42 »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

#47

Post by lumost »

picardo wrote: post #45

It might be useful for sourcers and recruiters, but the interviewers never look at your Linkedin profile.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

#48

Post by gregdoesit »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

#49

Post by bmitc »

bennyp101 wrote: post #44

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…

> 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.

A trend I've seen is the absolute bombardment of overly flowery "I'm leaving my current company and joining this other". It's exasperating.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have to use LinkedIn to get hired?

#50

Post by gigatexal »

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).

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