Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

> LinkedIn's bread and butter seems to be spammers in India with addresses from New Jersey.

I've had to deal with those. The answer is to ruthlessly block/reject anyone you have doubts about. Thankfully most of these put up a very poor show and just a quick look at the quality of their website will tell you whether they're telling the truth. Frankly, you don't even need to dig that far - even just the quality/suitability of the roles they pitch will be a good enough indicator.

At least in the UK however there are decent local recruitment agencies that are worth having on your side. They don't proactively reach out (at least not as much as the aforementioned spammers) so you may need to seek them out yourself but if you get in touch and explain them your situation they will be helpful either now or in the future.

Whether this applies to the US is a different story however. When searching for jobs in my niche I often see tons of US-based positions posted by the aforementioned spammers, so it may very well be that US-focused recruitment has been completely overtaken by them.

Same. I actually had like 20 recruiters on LinkedIn I talked to, and a few of those got to late stage interviews, but Hired has the advantage that those reaching out to me already sort of agreed to the compensation I posted, instead of me having to ask and recruiters being elusive on LinkedIn.

Also almost everyone on LinkedIn had ~20% lower salary ranges they were offering than what I asking for on Hired, which was just a little higher than what Hired recommended after I took their short skills survey, so I think LinkedIn just has a bunch of recruiters stuck with offering low salaries for their clients and trying their damnedest for you not to notice.

It's LinkedIn over all others

In my opinion, LinkedIn's most valuable assets are the ability to get discovered by recruiters/hiring managers and as a way to conduct outreach. I would not recommend posting resumes on Indeed, as that may cheapen your brand a bit.

Let the recruiters come to you. Optimize your LinkedIn profile so you get incoming traffic. Make sure keywords that a recruiter would search for are on the profile, in the body and skills section. As an example, a recruiter is less likely to search "software engineer" (too many hits), but rather might search "Python" to get a narrower result, or even something more narrow like "Numpy" to reduce the noise. Also be sure you have a fair amount of connections, which expands your ability to be found. There are additional settings.

Working with a couple recruiters can be useful if they are good at what they do and aren't just looking for a quick buck. You should be able to tell the difference (are they asking what YOU want, or are they just pitching every job to you and hoping you agree to be presented?).

Also use LinkedIn for outreach. Did you see a job posted somewhere that interests you? Write a short message to a recruiter at the company on Linkedin (instead of applying) to find out how to get some dialogue going.

Source: Former tech recruiter that now writes resumes and gives job search advice with a focus on tech.