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LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

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Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#52
post #47
post #31

Linked in is the king of dark patterns and practices. I was foolish enough to sign up for a free 30 trial period (of course handing over credit card details with the expectation they wont just automatically charging me and seek my permission before charging). I didn’t check my cc statements for a few months and there you have it ...linked in charged me every month after the trail period ended.

I get what you're saying but your trial subscription example isn't that unusual. A better example of dark patterns is how they repeatedly try to get you to sync your email contacts by sneaking it in at random points, where you may accidentally click through it. Their website has also become a minefield of upsell links, some disguised as benign engagement (e.g. "Add a new skill") while others are much more spammy (e.g…

[deleted]

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#53
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiters add liquidity to the labor market. I really don't see how they are a bad thing.

As in high frequency trading, additional liquidity also equates to addition volatility. That can be good or bad, but a market needs to have enormous "stickiness" for additional liquidity to be an unalloyed benefit. Labor markets are a good example, with search costs high on both sides of the table, so maybe we grant that point. But there's relatively little evidence that recruiters actually reduce search costs, rathe…

I would argue that the job markets are incredibly sticky. With HFT, dollars are fungible and shares usually don't have a regional preference for their buyers. There also isn't a resource cost of acquiring, training, and integrating a new share into your portfolio.

Recruiters typically work for for-profit businesses, that maximize returns on sales, meaning they are going to try to charge organizations slightly less than it would cost the organization to do it in house.

The increased liquidity in job markets drops the amount of time it takes to match a job opening with a job seeker, which eliminates inefficiencies. You're not factoring in the income difference someone makes by being placed in the ideal job sooner.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#54
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor you! How rude of those recruiters offering you money and a career! I know I hate it when people offer me ways of feeding my family.

> after I deleted my account my recruiter email volume dropped by an order of magnitude. Normal people consider that a feature of Linked In, not a bug.

For a sense of perspective, it's about the signal to noise ratio. Recruiter spam can be as bad as any other kind of spam if it gets to a high enough volume to overwhelm your inbox, especially when you aren't looking, or when they're way off base. For instance, if you're an architect who designs buildings and the recruiters are trying to offer you software architect positions. Not sure why these recruiters think they're adding value here.

Personally, I set up gmail filters to auto-archive all emails from LinkedIn.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#55
post #9

LinkedIn has never been interesting to me for anything other than looking at what past coworkers have been up to. I've never once had an experience where LinkedIn led to a job and in fact after I deleted my account my recruiter email volume dropped by an order of magnitude. I've also read that potential employers search candidates LinkedIn contacts to see if there are any existing employees and if so ask them about t…

Agreed. Even when I was actively looking for a job, LinkedIn was no help. I deleted my account years ago and have never missed it, even a little.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#56
post #22
post #9

LinkedIn has never been interesting to me for anything other than looking at what past coworkers have been up to. I've never once had an experience where LinkedIn led to a job and in fact after I deleted my account my recruiter email volume dropped by an order of magnitude. I've also read that potential employers search candidates LinkedIn contacts to see if there are any existing employees and if so ask them about t…

Recruiters add liquidity to the labor market. I really don't see how they are a bad thing.

Recruiters have a serious "market for lemons" problem. Some are good, a lot are terrible spammy bucket shops. Dealing with the bad ones just increases your transaction costs.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#57
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that all business professionals can be catered to by the same service. I wonder if some (e.g., recruiters) have needs nearly diametrically opposed to others (e.g., developers). Or maybe it's just a matter of getting the feature set right, something that seems rather off on LinkedIn now.

I think this is probably right. For example, the LinkedIn competitor OilPro is doing extremely well focusing on a specific oil and gas market segment. I think "LinkedIn for Computer Scientists" or more specific genres would do as well as OilPro.

Isn't that StackOverflow careers?

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#58
post #42
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe something like h-resume? http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume

Serendipitously, I also found something similar this weekend, but specifying one's resume in JSON rather than XML: https://jsonresume.org/

Did that at one point. Lost the JSON file in a hard drive death though :/ The day prior to the crash I had wrote a note to put it in a git repo and then forgot. Otherwise it's a pretty nice way to manage a resume.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#59
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself lucky if I get more than one a month. I understand the problem that you and others have with deluges of crap, but some of us are appreciative of any interest we get. The "hot" market seems to be rather geographically and specialty limited.

Recruiter emails are basically spam built from templates. They'll include jobs for which I'm obviously not qualified for if the recruiter knew anything about me. I've received emails that still had the template variables in them or had wrong names. Having followed up on recruiter emails a couple of times I have to also state that it is a less pleasant experience than going through the employer directly. All your comm…

Most of my recruiter contacts have been direct recruiters of companies, so when I move forward I am dealing directly with the employer.

That said, I haven't found dealing with employers directly to give me any more understanding of my background or information about my progress than dealing with third-party recruiters.

I have certainly received my share of terrible recruiter emails, but only from posting my resume on job boards. LinkedIn has been a steady stream of mostly good hits, with the not-so-good hits coming directly from companies.

Re: LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts

#60
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiters add liquidity to the labor market. I really don't see how they are a bad thing.

Adding fake liquidity actually removes liquidity. Imagine if you were selling your house, and I created a service that would bombard you with 10 fake potential buyers a day. You only have time to deal with 2 buyers a day. Chances are, you'll miss out on everyone who is actually interested. While LinkedIn does not intend to create fake recruitment attempts, it works out the same in the end.

In your hypothetical you would contract a real estate agent who would use their expertise in the market to pick the best offers. Getting 100 offers would mean more competition and the likely hood that your agent finds an even better offer than if you had only received 10.

If you have a high quality house, er - I mean, if you have skills that are in demand, I highly recommend you get an agent (like hired.com), because you're probably missing out on those good offers.

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