Ask HN: How would you fix Linkedin? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you fix Linkedin?

10 pointsPrakashBhatta13 comments

If you were the CEO of Linkedin,What steps would you take to fix it?

Don't ask users when opening the mobile app to send mass invites to anyone they have ever talked to on the phone via text message or email. I uninstalled the app as soon as I saw that.

Stop the eMail bombardment. All eMails I get from LinkedIn go directly to Spam because of this, even the useful ones. Also, cease the dark pattern that makes you accidentally invite people to LinkedIn.

They made it look like Facebook recently and it's painful to browse on a desktop. They use only a few pixels width instead of the whole screen. So, I'd fire one or two UX people. The rest is ok... also get rid of a bunch of useless notifications because no one cares about your birthday on linkedin.

I'd start by making it faster. Every time I click somewhere I have to wait and watch a spinner.

It would be helpful to be able to post jobs as "remote" rather than requiring they be posted in an a geo-location.

For their platform to be a recruitment platform, they should fix targeting, suggested hires. The algorithms behind it are in a dark age. Their tools to load jobs and suggest skills are terrible. The ability to customise jobs is woeful and they do not really make it easy to spread jobs into groups.

Buy AngelList, let people login using their linkedin and autofill their profiles, let recruiters in a "Recruiters" group, not your "Network" which is basically a friends list.

To be honest, if I was the CEO of Linkedin, I will be happy overall. Here is why. The stock IPO'ed at $45 and it is sitting at $190 today. So I will say that it is going well. Who cares about those stupid users, eh ? Remember, the primary goal of any for profit company is to make profit for their shareholders, period. Everything else is a side effect.

Now, if I was the actual user of linkedin, we are talking a whole different situation.

>the primary goal of any for profit company is to make profit

I couldn't agree more.

But they haven't turned a profit since 2013.

What's even more annoying is that it took me 10 minutes of googling to figure out what their annual net results are. Revenue shows up as the first result on google, but if you want to see the net result, you actually have to look through their quarterly reports.

From the CEO's perspective I'm not convinced it is broken. See the top comment [1] from a recent thread:

"Every part of the UI has been A/B tested and placed there to maximize what linked-in values."

[1] Ask HN: Why LinkedIn's UI is so terrible? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13629283

It's like saying "every line of code has been tested, we don't think the UI is broken"...

Thats how you reach a local maxima.

Stop nagging for app downloads when using mobile devices.

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