51–57 of 57 posts
I've never hired or seen anyone hired in the past 5 years at least that did not have a LinkedIn account. I don't think it's a prerequisite but pretty much everyone has one. I worked with a U.S. company with an office in Poland all of the devs there had LinkedIn accounts if that's any indication.
LI is slightly useful for finding a job (at the expense of getting lots of recruiter spam). But it won't get you a job, and won't prevent you from getting a job. If it ever does prevent you from getting a job, trust me, you didn't want to work at that company anyway. (It's like companies that ask for your Facebook account and/or password. WTF?)
LI is also useful if you have no other web presence. But if you are a technology guy, what better way to say it than a custom domain name?
As a hiring manager, I find LinkedIn worse than useless for evaluating candidates. It's much simpler and easier to read their experience via their Resume compared the the kinda ugly LI formatting. Trying to glean info from their "connections" is useless, since many people connect at the drop of a hat. (i.e. being 2 links away from Bill Gates doesn't tell me anything about your coding ability.) The "recommendations" are also useless, because it's just one random internet user you don't trust vouching for another random internet user that you don't trust. Even the "skills" listing is broken: There is no "meaning" to +1 a skill, so people +1 skills they THINK their connections are good at and there's not objectivity to it.
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Why do you keep it then?
I get recruiter spam mainly. I keep it just in case I might actually need that recruiter spam.
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But sounds like you might be well-connected (friends in the business). That's huge. A Polish immigrant would be a different deal.
I have almost always got jobs by sending resumes out, I have no social network to fall back on. I have a job, I will not start a linkedin profile. Sending resumes will get you jobs, knowing people is not the only way.
Right now, yes. That was true in 1998, too. In 2001, if you didn't know someone you were welcome to wait in the unemployment line with everyone else. You don't need an account on some data-grubber, but I would suggest very strongly that you invest in some kind of professional network. That doesn't mean a web site, it means a group of people you've worked with who can vouch for your skills and would like to work with you again. There will come a time that you will be nowhere without it.
http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ I don't find much value in LinkedIn. I did at first, but then it was overrun by recruiters.
Having so many recruiters is the value. I get multiple recruiters a week messaging me on LinkedIn, and it's growing constantly. By the time I'm job hunting I'll be able to message a lot of recruiters all at once.
I always look someone up by LinkedIn before meeting them. Usually people do the same for me. It's a good way to see who you know in common (better than Facebook on a business level) and in general saves a lot of time. Almost everyone I meet for work has a linkedin profile -- though literally just yesterday I (independently) met two people without a linkedin profile: one a quasi-celeb and the other someone simply so s…
Yep. That's why I closed my LI account -- it was part of a process aimed at reducing my inbox load. Yes, I had them filtered into their own folder, but it still used up space and increased cognitive load to deal with them...and if you're not going to deal with them (say, by sending them directly to the trash), what's the point?
