Hacker News Reader

Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

I also upgraded to LinkedIn Premium and started reaching out to engineers in my 2nd degree network. These people were complete strangers, and I had no reason to think they might be interested in Kapwing. This tactic definitely didn’t work. Not only did I not get a single response to my messages, I got one angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop pinging people at her company.

Does anyone find LinkedIn useful? The importance some people put on having an updated LinkedIn profile with updated contact lists seems outrageously disproportional to the actual value the site provides. It seems odd, too. Social media site around making business contact, keeping your cv online, yadda yadda... but the promise of the platform never seems to have materialized.

View on HN

I've gotten my last two jobs through LinkedIn (and likely otherwise wouldn't even know about the companies). Yes, the signal/noise ratio is very very EXTREMELY low, but the variance (all on the upside, there's really no downside to LinkedIn) is well worth it.

(To clarify: this weren't just "last two jobs in the past 4 months while I was job hopping aggressively", but rather, 1 job that allowed me to from a low-income country to a high-income country, and another where I've significantly progressed in the past 4 years and have no intention of leaving it anytime soon as I expect the progress to continue.)

Yeah, I find it super useful as an employee. You can get tons of spam mail but it's worth it when that company you really want to work for reaches out.

Of course, that means from a recruiter's perspective, when you are cold-messaging you need to be able to differentiate from the other cold-messages people are receiving, get their attention, seem like some place they would want to work, and be attractive enough that people are willing to quit their current job for you. That's hard if you're not a recognizable name and, with all due respect, not working on something really sexy. Otherwise you are just noise.

LinkedIn is very useful to people outside of the tech community, especially those in law, accounting, and HR. It's also fairly useful for people in other white-collar job fields.

Anecdota, but still data: I know close to a dozen people "1st degree network contacts" (i.e., former co-workers) who found new jobs through LinkedIn...without needing to go through a recruiter. I used a recruiter to find my current position...but I found the recruiter through LinkedIn.

All but useless for agri/bio/medtech and optics/physics/chem. I've gotten nothing but spammers and black-holes. LI has a nasty habit of not taking job openings offline when they are closed. So even though the job search returns results, the companies/firms aren't hiring anymore and haven't for months to years. As such, even for lead generation of companies to contact it's useless as the firm may not even exist anymore and you just send emails into void. The few times you do get a job that is 'live', it's usually just a spammer from India or the Philippines (4/5 times) that then sells your data onwards and you get a burst of spam calls for about 3 months afterwards.

Avoid at all costs.

I never got contacted by FAANGs until I got on Linkedin and made my account public. Seems like it has value in exposing people to big companies that otherwise might not have you in their network.

It’s been great for me as an experienced finance/investment banking professional. I’ve gotten two great jobs from it.

I’ve never experienced a bad recruiter or the level of spam I hear about from software engineers. About 3-5 approach me per year, and they tend to be very legitimate and well connected/informed.

I find it useful in the biotech field for putting people in touch with other people and finding people that can introduce me to interesting people. For example, a paper author that I want to speak with I'll look them up on LinkedIn, hope for a connection, then get an introduction.

I’ve been contacted by all of the FANG companies through LinkedIn with matching and interesting (to me at least) opportunities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com