Comment by martinshen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinshen | Hacker News Reader

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Personally, I've used LinkedIn for recruiting tech talent, being recruited and most recently, doing biz dev (aka sales).

Stray observations: 1. LinkedIn has too many products like sales navigator that attempt to force you through a specific workflow. While it can work, it feels a lot like a misguided tracking system.

2. LinkedIn is most useful as an online resume. Whenever I am meeting someone new or want a refresher, I check LinkedIn. I think everyone does this in North America. This doubles as a useful social sign in tool for biz apps.

3. Older people (40+) in non tech positions respond surprisingly often to InMail. They respond far more often than young techies (who probably get too many messages). This is surprising and extremely useful for my job.

4. LinkedIn needs contact management in context of career. For example: simply stating when you made this contact is crucial.

5. LinkedIn needs a way to show how active a profile is or at least indicate if a profile is no longer responsive. There are millions of LinkedIn profiles that are inactive but LinkedIn encourages you to pay to message them.

6. There needs to be an indicator for how close you are to a specific contact. 99% of the time your mutual contacts are useless. This is especially true for "active users" like myself who see no major disadvantage personally for adding as many contacts as possible.

My whole point is that LinkedIn has an extremely valuable service. It is missing some features and product focus. Many of my above suggestions also help refocus LinkedIn's integrity.

Overall LinkedIn falls into this strange low integrity (in this case, spammy) but somehow successful company. The question is are they going to clean up their act. I think they will.

I'm pretty sure (3) is a generational thing. I and plenty of 20-somethings I know won't answer their phone if they don't recognize the number, yet my parents get up and run for the phone when their landline rings during dinner time. When someone unknown tries to reach you their default mindset is "But what if it's an emergency?" and ours is "It's probably spam"

As for point 6: I only connect with people I know. Every once in a while I get a connection request from some random person , but I always say no if I don't know them (even if we are in the same industry).

I think the whole value of connections is diluted otherwise. A connection doesn't mean anything. So that's what I see as the disadvantage of adding as many contacts as possible.

I agree with you in principle and in the past only accepted connection requests from people I know as well. However, I think LinkedIn's promise as professional social network has really diminished over the years and mostly functions as nothing more than a job board at this point. I probably have about 100 recruiters I have never met in person in my network. As a contract dev updating my profile serves as a way to push notify these people that I'm in the market. It's really the only value I see left in the platform.

It's your choice to add 100 random recruiters to your network. But then, don't complain that you are being spammed by recruiters.

Not who you were replying to, but I don't add people that I don't know to my network, and I still get spammed by recruiters constantly.

I've "unfriended" recruiters I've mistakenly added in the past.

However, if you're looking for talent, it is helpful to have such "connectors" in your network - without those recruiters, when I was doing a check on my network I didn't see some of the people I was trying to hire - this was only the case when I had switched jobs/domains.

Wow, how do you unfriend people? I've looked for a way for years.

Linkedin -> Connections tab -> filter by "connections only" -> find the one you wanna unfriend in the list and mouse over it -> "more" -> remove connection

That is just about as buried as I thought it would be if indeed it was possible. Classic LinkedIn, thanks!

I get spammed by them via initial contact / add connection requests.

I literally have 0 recruiters in my list of contacts.

Me too keep getting spammed by recruiters. And the handful number of recruiters I'm connected actually don't bother spamming me LOL

The strongest contacts should be those that have overlapping resume entries, i.e colleagues, former colleagues and people you may have studied with. Other contacts should have an optional tag (friend/family/random recruiter/...) and would have a lot less weight. Being connected with someone because you worked 5 years with someone they worked 10 years with earlier is a lot closer than you having responded to the same recruiter once. LinkedIn has all this info and should really use it.

It does however show the conflict again: recruiters are their bread and butter, so they may want to be careful outing them as people with huge weak networks that appear to be spam nets.

A huge network for a recruiter is not weak. That is his bread and butter. Often, a valuable interaction with a recruiter is very brief: he found you a job. Similar for people in Sales, Business development, Consultant, ...

The problem is that the connection feature in LinkedIn covers 2 vastly different use case. What is regular for you ( and me ), a network of people we have worked with and developed a relationship and that overlap your competences in some fashion and eventually become an implicit reference for what you put in your resume. What is regular for recruiter is a network of customer to which you have provided services. You will look at a recruiter connection to double check if he is indeed in contact with all the major investment banks as he pretend, not to double check he indeed worked at company X on project Y in the past.

The weighting should be almost the opposite for a recruiter. If he has worked 5 year in HR in a company 10 years ago, those connections are less interesting that the one he has made in his current position.

Problem is that all the use case are treated the same in linked in and most people mix and match different type of contacts in their connection.

I reply to messages from random people who ask to connect with an email telling them that if they have a reason they want to talk to me, please send me an email about it.

Most people never reply, so I presume they are just trying to bump up their numbers.

Or maybe, like me, they accidentally clicked the button that sends out contact requests to all (or maybe just a lot of?) your "suggested contacts". D'oh!

Connections don't mean anything except for raising your own profile and improving your position in search results. I have 939 contacts on LinkedIn right now and my experience has not changed from when I had 50.

Large list of contacts in your industry allows you to quickly vet new contact or prove to new contacts that you are not a newbie in your industry.

That's how connections who you do not personally know - help.

#4 already kind of exists. You can annotate every contact on LinkedIn with how you met, and all sorts of other context.

I agree with your overall point that they need to focus their product and drive it forward more than they've done in the past. I have some friends there and from what it sounds like, that's exactly what they're doing.

Re-vamping Groups, re-vamping mobile, cutting out dark patterns (e.g. they've reduced email volume almost 60% I believe through a regulation mechanism that they call Air Traffic Controller).

How do you annotate contacts? I see you can add tags to them. Is that how you are doing it?

When you go to someone's profile and you're connected to them, there's a section called "Relationship". On there you can add tags, notes, or reminders. That's what I'm talking about.

I think you're using tags, but notes are also a great way to annotate contacts.

Again, I personally don't use these features that much, but I just wanted to point out that they do exist and people can probably get some significant value out of them. Perhaps part of it is a discover problem?

LinkedIn has been focusing on too many far-flung 'features' without a plan for tying them together into a seamless experience. The current cluttered site is the outcome of such disjointed thinking. They want people to come to the site and 'engage,' but then they also encourage alot of low-quality content on the site, along with sprinkles of irrelevant ads on top.

At the end of the day, the CEO is responsible for this mess. He's never at a loss for encouraging buzzwords, but maybe it's time for a change and someone with new vision.

It struck me a couple years ago as a castle with 100 rooms and no hallways. It's a bit better now, but navigation still can get very tangled.

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