Ask HN: Do you use LinkedIn? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you use LinkedIn?

15 pointswaqasaday24 comments

LinkedIn has allowed me to experience what it's like to be a pretty girl on a dating site, except that my suitors are idiot recruiters offering terrible jobs I don't want.

Probably the best tool for b2b customer development and b2c professional services ever created. Testing concepts early by having documented third party validation on domain expertise is pretty invaluable. https://hunter.io/ maps emails, where people are far more responsive, however referencing having looked them up on Linkedin to qualify the relevance of your outreach is overwhelmingly effective.

There are a bunch of tools to map LinkedIn profiles to emails. I've found https://www.nymeria.io to be best so far, especially if you want personal emails as well as business emails...

I have a profile set up there, but so far it's been useless to me other than to stay in touch with one or two others from a prior job. I hate their "news feed". None of the content is ever relevant or useful. The design is poor.

They also make poor use of notifications. My "friend requests" always shows 1 new notification- but it's a fake notification trying to get you to send out invites. I find user-hostile actions like that very off-putting.

Considering deleting the account, but I'm curious if just "having a profile/presence" on the service is useful or desired by employers? Not sure if I'm "losing out" on anything by not having an account.

The one thing I do like is that others you've worked with can "endorse" you for certain skills, but in reality I'm not sure how useful that is, ultimately.

Interesting, I too have considered deleting the account few times.

In my opinion, the endorsement feature is totally useless and doesn't represent any real value.

The only thing useful in LinkedIn case is that sometime I want to connect to a person, and upon looking at their LinkedIn I can find that they are connected to someone in my network.

I've thought about deleting as well, but then I realised that it can't hurt to just have it sitting there so people can connect if they feel the need.

I update mine every so often, never reply to any recruiters and connect with a few colleagues I know who use it religiously. Best way to use it in my opinion.

I got my previous job by a recruiter finding me on LinkedIn, who actually matched my profile to the job.

My most recent interview, the first thing the interviewing manager asked was to connect via LinkeIn.

I have received a lot of job offers through LinkedIn, but none of them ever appealed to me, so as far as my career prospects go it doesn't add much value. But it's nice to keep in touch with former colleagues, and to be able to see at a glance what your network is up to professionally.

I do not want to use LinkedIn. It is clearly not there to help me do anything except quantify myself to recruiters, which often becomes just another awful interview experience followed by a bad offer. And of course, used as a surveillance platform for my personal information, for the benefit of the creators of LinkedIn.

Yes, and although I'd probably land a job in a day from it - I hate it and will likely delete it soon.

If you're only interested in it for job hunting, there's WAY better options.

I reopened my LinkedIn account after a long absence once I got into management. One of the first thing clients are going to do before hopping in a meeting with you is to pull up your LinkedIn page, and it's a way to show them you know WTF you're talking about. I keep joking with my team that I still need to add the obligatory "smiling white guy in a suit" headshot to my profile.

I also find interesting management/leadership articles in my feed. So, Twitter for deep down geeky tech stuff, LinkedIn for the business side, Facebook for what my niece had for dinner. Each serves a different purpose.

As a recent graduate (actively looking for a job) I have been using LinkedIn for a while, and I am very disappointed.

I get around one response per 50 applications I send via the platform.

Recruiters don't classify their posts correctly, so when I search for "entry-level" positions, I get mostly positions that require 5 years of experience, or just list all possible web technologies so they land more search queries, etc...

Example : I search for a position with PHP/JavaScript listed as technologies. Then when contacted by the recruiter it turns out to be a JavaEE position, but "knowing PHP and JavaScript is a plus".

I'd close my account if I wasn't this desperate.

Edit: Added example

Have you considered using AngelList?

I've tried AngelList, as a recent grad. It's been a disappointment. I've managed to snag several interviews. They were classified into one of the following:

1) Unprofessional -- schedule an interview, then never show up.

2) Unpaid/low salary -- startup interviews you for a founding member role for $35k/year in Boston.

3) Requires deep knowledge -- startup expects you to know everything and have incredible experience about their listed tech.

I'd also prefer sending in my resume over just using their profile template. AngelList seems to rely on having live projects up for showcasing purposes.

I'm primarily looking for positions in France where AngelList does not seem to be that popular. *

* Citation needed

I use LinkedIn to promote my training activities and to find connections -- for example, I used it to find a connection to the CEO of GitLab which resulting in a partnership that has already brought in additional training income (plus a really cool partner!!).

I used to write recommendations and have gotten some nice recommendations back. But then LinkedIn changed their UI and buried the recommendations.

So many recruiter requests. Current contract is from LinkedIn. Was able to negotiate pretty hard just from the sheer quantity of offers.

Linkedin uses me.

My employer kinda mandates using LinkedIn... I have a couple of IFTTT recipes set up so that it looks as if I'm super active, while I only check once every other week to accept random friend requests.

I am curious if any of you actively use LinkedIn, if yes how? Or may be you can share tips on making use of LinkedIn, for hiring, networking or publishing content.

Depends where you live. I can give you the San Francisco Bay Area use of linkedin

1. sharing linkedin accounts is more natural than sharing FB accounts here. And I'm talking about social events, friends, meeting someone new. Not about formal stuff... It's really your social profile here. The rest people don't really care anymore since it's all about networking

2. Looking for jobs. If you're looking for jobs and you're not on linkedin then you're invisible in the Bay Area. Plus, all companies career websites ask for your linkedin profile

3. You can lie to a lot of people about your career. Linkedin acts as your professional ID too.

I use it for networking with recruiters. I get to see jobs that are posted from 50+ people (I have a small network) and get to decide what I want to reach out for. I was able to land a gig at a clearing company because I saw a post that a recruiter was looking for developers for a trading company and I wanted to break into the industry but didn't have enough experience in what they were looking for. I reached out and they found a job that worked for me.

Overall still ok but spam & tinderisation diluting its value fast.

No. It's blocked in Russia.

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