The next professional network will not look like LinkedIn
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First, the analysis is woefully limited to specialized aspects pertaining to only the tech industry. A lot of the disruptive forces linked in the article are highly ill specific to very limited situations.
Second, the analysis doesn’t explain why it’s bad that LinkedIn appeals to businesses and recruiters. Why is that a problem? It appeals so well to them that basically all companies are on LinkedIn in some way, and that means that young people coming into the marketplace will go there to find work. They don’t have to enjoy it or even log in that often to justify keeping an active account.
Personally, I know at least a few people who do not have a Facebook account at all, but they do have a LinkedIn, because that’s where the jobs are.
Finally, making the assumption that LinkedIn itself won’t change over time is completely shortsighted. It’s owned by one of the better managed companies out there (Microsoft) with tons of resources to make changes.
Accusing LinkedIn of being a relic of the past is like accusing Azure DevOps of being exactly the same as the old TeamForge Services - a woefully outdated view that only someone with zero recent exposure would take.
It doesn’t matter that the LinkedIn feed is a stupid waste of time, the jobs platform and InMail are the bread and butter of the platform and the reason why anyone’s there in the first place.
And by the way, if you’re looking for a job, give the Premium free trial a chance. The extra pieces of data you get on each listing can be really useful (although potentially not $40 a month useful), and there isn’t really another job website that can give them to you.
ADDED: To your broader points, a resume (especially for experienced people) has long been one of those things that you need to have and that people may use to roughly gauge potential fit. But very few people are making decisions based on only a resume, especially for senior positions. And portfolios, in whatever form, have always tended to trump resumes in certain fields. (Which can admittedly be problematic in software because some have portfolios they can share and other, potentially equally skilled developers, do not.)
I've received countless job opportunities through LinkedIn. My current position, I reached out to a former colleague to join that company via LinkedIn. It worked well.
I will admit that I am probably an outlier here, but I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago once I realized that the only thing I was getting out of it was recruiter spam. No real upside, only downside.
TBH I get the recruiter spam that I'm sure most get, but it's easily ignored, and not really that invasive.
Someone reaching out to you from a company is a huge leg up over applying directly somewhere: you already know they’re interested.
I’m not sure how they would have found me otherwise. My personal website? Through word of mouth and connections?
It’s only spam when you’re not considering a job change.
I’m one of those. I’m on linked in because that’s where I can connect with others in my industry. I don’t care what they do for vacation or their political views but I am interested in their take on issues we’re mutually encountering.
I’m also not looking for work for me but I’m on the lookout for talented folks and former members of my team. If they need a role or if something sounds like them, I can link them up
Could you provide example(s) of what the extra data are, and how these data are useful for a job search?
I did a year ago and was pretty disappointed. It might be my location or my niche, but it didn't really help me in any way.
It actually matches a certain pattern of uselessness from LinkedIn for my purposes (generating leads for freelance jobs). I get notifications saying "23 people saw your profile this week" - and none contacted me, so are you just rubbing it in? It would be useful if it tried to tell me something about why they don't ping me, but as far as I remember there was nothing of the sort. And of course the sales product is extra (and extra-pricy) and the ads are extra (and does anyone actually look at them?)...
Over time I found it to be very useful. It's my chance to see what's going on in my network and connect with 1st or even 2nd level contacts on specific topics like: events, product releases, partnerships, awards etc. It's very easy to use any of these topics as opportunities to approach somebody via the post itself. In 99% of the cases you get a response. So more than a job seeking platform, it is a business platform for the employed.
For posterity can you link to her connection to webflow?
It doesn’t change the quality of her argument.
I'm not a developer so I don't get a lot of recruiter spam, but the ones that do contact me usually have very relevant openings for my experience.
Indeed and LinkedIn are basically the only job sites these days so you need an account to use it.
I wish I could block certain employers or be able to tell LinkedIn to quit telling me about jobs from certain companies.
I hate being on any social networks, and I feel like LinkedIn has declined in quality over the years, but I stay with LinkedIn.
The primary reason is that you never know when you are going to be thrust into the job market, and its the key place to find future opportunities, identify gatekeepers and leverage your professional rolodex when an opportunity to earn an income is on the line.
This is an extremely niche persona among professional careers, overrepresented on HN.
No, you find the people who are posting their latest work on LinkedIn. A lot of niche field professionals won't do that.
- Why can't I see the path to other users anymore? That used to be a thing you always got. Now sometimes even a level 2 connection page won't tell you who the common friend is.
- Why can't I categorize my contacts anymore? There's still how-tos about how to do this, and they for some odd reason removed the ability to do this. LI is a much more promiscuous network than FB or others, so I need to be able to throw all the recruiters in one bucket, people I've worked with in another, and interesting people who've added me with zero other contact in yet another. I'm happy to spend the time doing the labelling, but I can't.
The content discovery and discussion features really aren't very good relative to other niche sites either.
She is an angel investor and owns a fund that invests in the type of professional networks she is promoting. She is even an angel investor for a company that she directly promotes in the post (Webflow).
LinkedIn is sufficient the way it currently is.
1. Connect and contact professional peers
2. Contact recruiters
3. Display bare minimum work experience and look up this information of peers
4. Link to specialized work and portfolio e.g. github
That covers the majority of consumer use cases and anything more complicates the website.
I think there are definitely issues with LinkedIn though. What I don't like about LinkedIn is how scammy it feels. They've tried to get me to enter my e-mail password in the past so they could get all my contacts... No thanks. Then there's the issue of being contacted by recruiters all the time even though I have my profile set to not looking for a job. I also wish there was a way to also say "not willing to relocate" (is there?).
Lastly, I think the website could be more streamlined/simplified and better looking. That pic she posted from the LinkedIn interface in 2003. I like it better than the way the website looks now. So simple and straightforward.
IMO, LinkedIn is "ripe for disruption". It's coasting on the network effect. The network effect is a powerful thing, but it didn't stop MySpace from getting killed despite its 100 million users.
Would that stop recruiters from asking?
It's not just linkedin, the whole concept of a resume was to facilitate an unskilled middle manager who could manage labor in a commoditized way. Today, hiring managers know what they want, and talent competes globally. Teenagers especially understand that the difference between them and their parents is they are entering into a global talent market with a steep distribution curve. Growing up with social media threw them into the world of elite competition that previously only ivy league students were exposed to (thanks, Zuck). Resumes can't capture the differentiation they need to compete and leverage their real skills.
The infrastructure around resumes was all about legitimizing that broker role for recruiters and enabling generalist HR managers, where those roles could be replaced by tech tomorrow, (or like 3-4 weeks, suppose I should launch).
Would that be...a distilled list of relevant skills and experience? How is a resume (digital or paper) not that? What exactly is your proposed alternative?
Also, you speak to global competition as if that’s a universal trait of most jobs. That doesn’t really line up to reality. Many or most jobs can’t be performed remotely, and many or most jobs located far away have local equivalents (i.e. it’s not worth moving hundreds of miles away to drive a bus or put up drywall).
Global competition for most jobs is very much a reality. I live in a country that spans an entire continent, as do americans. Many people cross continents and borders to get construction and trade jobs, which include driving heavy vehicles and hanging drywall, and the solution covers them as well. Exciting times.
Being able to write a reasonable essay may not differentiate you, but not being able to sure does.
Devil's Advocate: Do you contact the bottom 80%? When you encounter a dud in the top 20%, do you consider that a potential failure in filtering, or do you say "thank god we filtered out the other 80% who must be worse than this candidate!"
It sounds to me like a process rife with feedback loops.
To clarify, I don't consider anyone a "dud". I'll happily work with someone at any skill level as long as they want to learn and aren't a jerk. By "not worth contacting", I just mean that they're clearly dominated by the top 20% of the candidates, in terms of likely success in the role.
Is there noise in all of this? Sure. Am I a genius? Yes, but not when it comes to hiring. ;-)
I've been crapped on plenty by the hiring process (esp those FAANG weenies), so I try to be kind to everyone.
I'm saying, you're taking 20%, claiming it's the top 20%, and saying they're the ones who will be successful in the role.
But if you're only ever talking to that "top 20%", then you don't know whether they're really the best.
In my limited experience, there tends to be a fairly pronounced cutoff below which candidates obviously lack the basic skills or inclination for the position, or even didn't bother to read the job spec at all.
This is a salient observation. The discussion mostly focuses on employer->employee mismatch, but this statement illustrates how the employee is also losing out (and in effect, all employers): Hidden skills, uncaptured by a traditional resume and hiring process, are never leveraged.
Mostly soft skills, I imagine, but the most important qualities to me as a hiring manager (communication, honesty, ability to learn new things with eagerness) aren't signals which can be derived with this process. We need a platform which highlights these skills in an indirect way, giving value to its users beyond acting as a professional virtue beacon.
So I decided to give it a try with my new startup. We setup ad campaigns to ensure we had a traditional marketing channel that we could scale and then I started posting on LinkedIn. The results have been mind blowing. In 7 months I went form 1,000 followers to over 30,000 followers[0]. I was just named #4 in LinkedIn's Top Voices for 2019 for Software Development.
A single post that goes viral on LinkedIn can generate $500,000-$2M in new sales opportunities for us and it costs us nothing. By developing a social media presence, we've been able to grow our company to $2M in annualized revenue (we aren't SaaS, so it's not ARR) without any outside funding. And we are profitable.
So yeah, I think LinkedIn is pretty great.
[0] Me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsweeney21/
Shameless plug for our new startup: https://www.facetdev.com/
I started by accepting every connection I received. In month 5 I switch the default "Connect" button in my profile to follow because I was at 20,000 connections. LinkedIn has a max of 30K connections.
Fraudulent LinkedIn profiles are a big problem, too.
I get a few of these each week:
"I came across your profile and thought we might mutually benefit from connecting. I help business generate 1,000 high quality leads a month..."
[0]: https://twitter.com/tylertringas/status/1202990875120459776 [1]: https://www.mightynetworks.com/
If anyone reading this is ever in Santa Barbara, let me know if you want to grab a coffee or a beer! :)
Exactly.
Facebook's main layout is already very professional-looking (except for the ads and games), and they market it for internal social networks.
Bolting on resumes and job searching, letting users have a professional face to their page... wouldn't be a huge stretch.
And yeah, Twitter is the water-cooler/street-corner, it conflates the professional and the personal in its culture.
You might think I'm exaggerating, but frankly, even the search product has seen a massive decline since 2009.
[0]: based on testimonials from googlers and xooglers here on HN.
[1][2]: based on observations.
In any case, given Facebook's long-standing issues with privacy controls and user trust, it would probably be a super bad look trying to also take on LinkedIn's ultra-sleazy business model of selling access to search tools, info on who looked at your profile, etc.
How would you demonstrate a skilled manager's capabilities without a resume that shows rapid advancement and dealing with increasingly higher responsibilities?
I'm not personally pining for a website that makes arbitrary ratings for such things.
Finance people aren't going to have a Github. Healthcare professionals have no idea what Dribbble is. Girlboss is a niche network and its job listings are a drop in the bucket compared to what LinkedIn has.
> If the new American Dream is defined by “creative expression, online influence and extreme optionality” over linear moves up the corporate ladder, then LinkedIn is enough to make any Millennial or Gen Z jobseeker cringe.
The author must live in a pretty sheltered world if she thinks millennials are cringing at LinkedIn as opposed to applying to a million job listings across all networks for the slim chance of even getting an interview.
Young and inexperiencee jobseekers make up a good chunk of LinkedIn's audience. Not a single recruiter is reaching out to them. LinkedIn is valuable because it gives them one way of finding people at organizations who may be willing to chat with them and give them a plain English breakdown of the skills needed at those jobs. The HR-penned job descriptions are hilariously inaccurate in many jobs and can appear to be designed to actively discourage people from applying due to the absurd requirements they post.
You can see more here (random interesting video from the platform) https://joinhub.com/posts/2hZQ9FZp?rc=James-Watling-4505
I like LinkedIn because it a very low bs social network, and I would really appreciate for it to stay that way.
Your LinkedIn feed must be completely different than mine, because the shit I see shared there by monetized narcissists ("influencers") is far worse than even my Facebook feed.
After that I started asking people if they had EVER gotten a job on LinkedIn. One person said yes. Several people said the know one person who had gotten a job on LinkedIn. I have asked a lot of people.
Based on this I seriously doubt it is a good use of time for most job seekers. At the end of the day, it's another social media site that gives you a little endorphin rush when someone "likes" your status — but its not much (if anything) more.
For me it's like a floodgate and my current and a couple of past job roles were from LinkedIn contacts only.
The claimed AI based engine from the co-founders previously behind adtech at bloomreach and newsfeed at facebook make it all the more spooky.
whatever new system comes it better have stronger privacy controls and more free form resumes.
There’s no way you can get “crawled” if your settings are correct.
Bravado is a professional network for sales professionals.
And the recruiter hate is also unjustified.
urks. i quit it a while ago and i am very happy with it. I honestly was reluctant at first because I run my own business and thought it might be necessary, but quitting it didn't impact my business at all...
Yes, I'm being a grammar Nazi. And no, that's not a bad thing. We speak English, and while a lot of it's rules are archaic and silly, this instance is not one of those silly rules. It's basic English.