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Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#83

Post by huac »

fnl wrote: post #63
mendicantB wrote: post #42

Your analysis is extremely flawed. I really appreciate your sharing the data with us and I like your service. But, this is a poorly done and a far from subtle plug of your business at the cost of LinkedIn. 1) Technical ability vs # of endorsements Jesus. Hiding stats that you don't like through aggregations? And please read up on Simspons Paradox, which is clearly the case here just by looking at your plot. Try a bas…

Here's another, even worse example: > It turns out that people’s interview language of choice matched their most endorsed language on LinkedIn just under 50% of the time, so, you know, just slightly worse than flipping a coin. A coin has 2 sides. How many programming languages are there, again?

And what's the distribution over the languages, in terms of 'preferred interview programming language'?

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#84

Post by jstandard »

colinbartlett wrote: post #64
ben1040 wrote: post #8

I've been considering just deleting my LI account. It essentially has just been a sink for terrible recruiter mail; in 12 years of having an account I don't think I've once received any sort of actionable message through it. I've also turned off the endorsements because I was just getting driveby endorsements for things like J2EE. Is there a job-search downside to deleting your account, provided you have a decent Goo…

I am personally astonished that LinkedIn is still a thing. For me, it was the most obviously useless of all the social networks and it was the first one I deleted, upwards of 7 years ago now. The other social networks eventually followed but LinkedIn just gave me zero value from day one. It was nothing but recruiter spam. Do people actually get work and jobs out of LinkedIn? Or is is just a way to keep up with what o…

Here's an opposite perspective. I get plenty of value out of LinkedIn, both in personal and in business.

Personally, it's a great business card replacement. If I'm at networking events, conferences, etc. I also prefer to have my personal (Facebook) and business (LinkedIn) networks separate since I use them for very different purposes. On occasion, I've also leveraged groups to get specific advice I wasn't easily able to find elsewhere.

In running my company, LinkedIn also creates a quick talent pipeline and allows candidates to get a rough understanding of who will be interviewing them so we don't need to spend precious interview time answering their questions about our backgrounds.

I don't know of any replacements that do all of these things under one roof reasonable well. I do know of a few individual tools that offer incremental improvements over what LinkedIn offers, particularly in the area of finding qualified candidates, but in other areas (ex. digital business card) LinkedIn is the only real game in town.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#85

Post by stingraycharles »

fnl wrote: post #63
mendicantB wrote: post #42

Your analysis is extremely flawed. I really appreciate your sharing the data with us and I like your service. But, this is a poorly done and a far from subtle plug of your business at the cost of LinkedIn. 1) Technical ability vs # of endorsements Jesus. Hiding stats that you don't like through aggregations? And please read up on Simspons Paradox, which is clearly the case here just by looking at your plot. Try a bas…

Here's another, even worse example: > It turns out that people’s interview language of choice matched their most endorsed language on LinkedIn just under 50% of the time, so, you know, just slightly worse than flipping a coin. A coin has 2 sides. How many programming languages are there, again?

Yeah reading that made me realise the whole article is just spam.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#86

Post by usgroup »

fnl wrote: post #63
mendicantB wrote: post #42

Your analysis is extremely flawed. I really appreciate your sharing the data with us and I like your service. But, this is a poorly done and a far from subtle plug of your business at the cost of LinkedIn. 1) Technical ability vs # of endorsements Jesus. Hiding stats that you don't like through aggregations? And please read up on Simspons Paradox, which is clearly the case here just by looking at your plot. Try a bas…

Here's another, even worse example: > It turns out that people’s interview language of choice matched their most endorsed language on LinkedIn just under 50% of the time, so, you know, just slightly worse than flipping a coin. A coin has 2 sides. How many programming languages are there, again?

language of choice == linkedin endorsed lang -> {TRUE,FALSE}

Yet if there was no relationship between the two entities and there were N languages, one would expect the random probability of TRUE to be N/N^2 = 1/N.

Although, the writer doesn't seem to allege that he's comparing to random or anything like that.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#87

Post by mulmen »

fnl wrote: post #63
mendicantB wrote: post #42

Your analysis is extremely flawed. I really appreciate your sharing the data with us and I like your service. But, this is a poorly done and a far from subtle plug of your business at the cost of LinkedIn. 1) Technical ability vs # of endorsements Jesus. Hiding stats that you don't like through aggregations? And please read up on Simspons Paradox, which is clearly the case here just by looking at your plot. Try a bas…

Here's another, even worse example: > It turns out that people’s interview language of choice matched their most endorsed language on LinkedIn just under 50% of the time, so, you know, just slightly worse than flipping a coin. A coin has 2 sides. How many programming languages are there, again?

I read that as flipping a coin to predict if the most-endorsed language will be the language of choice in an interview. I make no claim to the statistical usefulness of such a statement.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#88

Post by Spooky23 »

mendicantB wrote: post #42

Your analysis is extremely flawed. I really appreciate your sharing the data with us and I like your service. But, this is a poorly done and a far from subtle plug of your business at the cost of LinkedIn. 1) Technical ability vs # of endorsements Jesus. Hiding stats that you don't like through aggregations? And please read up on Simspons Paradox, which is clearly the case here just by looking at your plot. Try a bas…

IMO, abusing endorsements like this isn't very useful. At best, it's sort of replaces some attribute of a reference. Endorsement is really feedback to validate the field that somebody works in and is probably not a bozo.

If you're interviewing a mid-career programmer, and her endorsements are all for accounting and financial related things, you may have a fit issue to explore. Likewise, if you have a candidate with 200 connections and 3 endorsements, and that's atypical for the industry, you may want to focus more heavily on real reference checking.

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