Poll: Is linkedin only for consultants and the unemployed? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Is linkedin only for consultants and the unemployed?

43 pointsveyron54 comments

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) is pricing tonight , and of course CNBC power lunch analyzed the situation. One of the analysts explicitly said what I joked about: LinkedIn is only for consultants and the unemployed. I wonder what HN readers think

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LinkedIn is amazing. Its such a boring, stupid website but a lot of business gets done through it.

My firm has gotten a ton of work through LinkedIn, usually from clients of ours recommending friends via LinkedIn.

So while I rarely log into the website, it definitely sends me money and so its quite valuable in my eyes.

Disclaimer: I am a consultant. :)

"He's on Linkedin, Lemon. He might as well be dead." -- Jack on 30 Rock.

I think that the utility it serves is perhaps not how they present it. I see it as a Facebook of your work history perhaps. These are people you've met along the way, may be able to help you in the future, but generally it doesn't provide the sort of advantageous network effects you may get from, say, a key conference or social event, or just simply doing great work. This is just my experience, but I'd love hear the experiences of others.

I used to tell my nieces/nephews I was on LinkedIn instead of Facebook. They would usually say what's LinkedIn and my half joking reply was "it's like Facebook for grownups". The interesting thing is that through LinkedIn I reconnected with a few friends from college which eventually led me to get on Facebook to connect with others.

LinkedIn has two specific purposes for me.

1. Get rid of the need for a rolodex of business cards.

2. Allow me to track people's work history over the long-term when I meet people with whom I think I'd be interested in working some day in the future.

A year ago I would have voted Yes, however I was recently recruited[1] via LinkedIn (while employed) so I voted No.

[1]: http://www.thepursuitofquality.com/post/51/how-online-profil... tldr; A recruiter found me via StackOverflow, followed the SO profile to my blog, and then contacted me via LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is great for sales people who need to know who to call at large companies. Say I want to reach a director of business development at Cisco. LinkedIn will tell me who to call. Amazing.

Where LinkedIn fails in my opnion (and why we work so hard on http://letslunch.com) is connecting people. When is the last time you "met" someone new on LinkedIn? Their introductions (what they call InMail) simply don't work: no one pays attention to them.

Uh. Having sent about 30 inMails in the last 10 days, I got about an 70% reply rate which is pretty darn good for cold contacts.

Most people I have cold emailed have not replied from inMail. I find people are more likely to respond when you email their work email directly. It feels more personal. You can usually figure it out using the name, than researching the companies email naming scheme. Most places are either Joe.Schmoe@xyz.com or Joe_Schmoe@xyz.com just do a google search for something like "jones@xyz.com" or some other common last name if it is a big company. This will usually help you figure out the email. Then just send the email to the address.. if you get the wrong joe schmoe 8/10 they are used to getting email for the other guy, so they just forward it along.

Well, inMails let you see who is sending you a message including who you know in common and for some reason, I must fit the profile of someone people want to reply to.

When you've been in business for a couple of decades, it is a great way to track down people from the past. I'm constantly finding that the person I want to reach is only one or two steps removed from me. Much easier to contact people when you don't have to cold call.

Circumstances change and I'm constantly surprised by people whom I thought were not particularly ambitious end up in very influential positions.

At the end of the day, LinkedIn is just another tool, but a very powerful and useful one.

Do they, tho'? Or do they just claim to on the Internet?

A constant source of amusement for me is the recommendations, which are really just people getting their mates to praise them now references are supposed to come only from HR. People with more than say 5 recommendations, that are particularly gushing, you should probably conclude the opposite...

Although I've been on LinkedIn for years it's had no significant utility value for me.

i think this is a false dichotomy. there's a lot of shades of gray between "employed = not using linkedin" and "unemployed/contracter = using linkedin"

i mean, i'm gainfully employed, but i maintain a portfolio type of website.

I was just thinking about this today. I check it once a week and all I ever see are connections being made. Guess this is good for sales people or recruiters looking for intro's.

If I am Product Manager or CEO at LinkedIn, I would buy or create ODesk on top of LinkedIn's data. They have all the professionals and work history.

Almost everyone is unemployed at some point.

Although I haven't pursued any offers i've gotten some nice leads for positions with saleforce, amazon kindle, amazon web services, disney interactive, blackberry, bigfish games, netflix and a couple of smaller names via linkedin.

So i find it useful in that sense. The leads are often of a higher quality (actual hire managers, in-house hr) than what I get from email and head hunter voice messages.

I was very close to nabbing a book deal with packt through the service as well.

No, I work full time at a start up that's doing a lot of hiring. I use it as one tool among many when doing some background searching on people interviewing for spots on my team. If we have any shared associations, I'll ping those people to see what their opinion is.

Sometimes you also get an alternate picture of work history on linkedin that their resume doesn't show you. Some jobs that they might have omitted/dropped/expanded in comparison.

LinkedIn has a great structured search tool. Try finding a better list of Perl programmers in the Bay Area who went to [school you went to] or worked at [bigco you worked at]. Or try finding a better way to run ads targeting facilities managers in the Midwest.

LI's big problem is that most people don't have a good reason to keep coming back, so the average reliability of their profiles is in gradual decline. But they're trying to mitigate that with their Twitter partnership, which is causing some of the big business-y blogs (Business Insider, Mashable) to tout them as a sharing option.

Meanwhile, the tiny minority of their audience that consists of HR professionals and active job-seekers will always be responsible for most of their pageviews. That's just the nature of the service.

(I did a pre-IPO writeup of Linke dIn covering lots of these points; it's gotten some traction: http://www.digitalduediligenceadvisors.com/linkedins-ipo-fil... )

It's useful if you're trying to raise seed/series A. Part of due diligence is looking at not just the size of your professional network and what you've accomplished but looking at the type of people you've worked on teams with and how your work was received.

A players have a positive network effect: You'll probably be more likely to have A player associations and recommendations.

You need to segment the audience a bit more - I am on the technical marketing and business development side of a large corporation and linkedin is an essential tool for keeping track of people as they move from company to company as well as within a company.

There is additional value in seeing who knows who and how I can get introduced to key decision makers at other companies.

No. It's also for nosy people.

Linked in is a must for start-ups, unemployed people, people searching for better jobs, people keeping up to date on industry standards and standards committees, meet-ups, events. It's also a public list of who is connected to whom, because it shows who you really know. Another good point is that, the questions that get answered by experts, presumably unemployed, or in search of consulting gigs, are really good answers and the information on that site is sometimes genius for developers.

Also recruiters, sales drones, and professional networkers lol ... get lots of contacts from those.

not as much for entrepreneurs and senior management types

it's a good tool... working in a small industry, if I am in a position to hire or do business with someone, I can usually find someone I know who worked with them and do my own due diligence without depending on their hand-picked references.

I voted yes, but maybe it's because I haven't found a way to use it yet. I don't use it to hire or sell social media services, so to me, it's almost worthless.

maybe it's because I haven't found a way to use it yet

For this same reason, I'm leaning towards "No" or abstention.

Sure, but how long have you been using it? I've been a user for at least 2-3 years and I'm about to give up.

I was recently recruited while employed via LinkedIn, so it's not only for the unemployed. Additionally, it helped me land the job because I saw that the two owners and I had some mutual colleagues from the past. I'm almost certain that we wouldn't have discovered that without LinkedIn (or at least not during the course of the interview).

No. I've started joining groups in my country regarding development and simply posting my opinions in discussions. This has led me to become a wee bit more known than I was before, and I've had several huge IT recruiters add me to LinkedIn.

I know adding someone doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it's still a contact after all...

LinkedIn has been quite useful to me personally and professionally. - I was contacted and hired because a recruiter found me thru LinkedIn. - The best thing I like about linkedin is its search tool. I have also noticed the quality of traffic, both organic and paid, from LinkedIn is of high quality for b2b lead gen purposes.

Even if you're not looking to hire or get hired it's a great platform for bizdev. Consider you're interested in working with/purchasing from/selling to company X, you can use linkedin to figure out what indirect connections you have to people in those companies.

LinkedIn is how Google recruiters kept track of me for many years before I sought them out for an interview in 2008. I work at Google today because I made a simple call back to the recruiter and got my phone interview scheduled the next day.

Google seems to do lots of things to keep track of potential hires. A year ago, I received an email from a Google recruiter that gave the impression of being written personally and directly to me, with wording like "we've reviewed your resume", "the engineering team think you'll fit in" and "they would like to talk to you". It was almost perfectly crafted to create the illusion that a team of people in my specific profession had spent time looking at my information, and really wanted to talk to me. The illusion was broken by looking at the email address they sent the email to - it was a tagged address that only had been used once in a Debian mailing list many years ago.

I asked the recruiter for an explanation about this practice, but they never got back to me.

I am an open networker on LinkedIn, and here is my opinion.

Pros: 1. Good way for recruiters to find you. (I am a consultant) 2. Good way to keep in contact with co-workers (past and current).

Cons: 1. Too much spam, way too much spam.

Not at all. I can honestly say LinkedIN is one of our top lead sources.

It is also fantastic for simply getting quick context on people I'm about to meet, and to find some conversation topics.

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000022753 <-- jump to 4:55 in the video to see what i was talking about

We're interviewing right now and it's useful to get a little more background. I can look at a one-page resume and then look at the LinkedIn page for more detail.

seems like the comments validate OP's point on Linkedin being big recruiting mechanism. Does it add anything more than being a Monster 2.0? I'd like to think so. It's a good global address book of my contacts.

However, the interface is quite bad. Linkedin could be so much more than it is right now.

If you wait until you're suddenly unemployed to start using LinkedIn, you're too late.

Along the same lines: What does everyone think of the new LinkedIn Today news feature?

I never use LinkedIn. Seems useless (even for business) when there's Facebook.

Strangely enough, everyone I know of at Facebook uses LinkedIn for professional networking. If even FB employees recognize the need to keep personal and professional social networks separate then perhaps you are not really using either FB and/or LinkedIn in the most optimal manner...

I very purposefully segregate my professional and personal networks. I don't want my online professional identity tied to what people might tag or say about me on FB

Its interesting to see how many employers use LinkedIn as the only way to apply.

Are you saying it happens a lot, or that it doesn't happen that often?

I have never seen that, myself.

I can't remember specific employers, (and if I did, I'm not inclinded to "out" them) but I know job recruitment site TopProspect requires LinkedIn.

As a side-note I recently moved to San Francisco and I'm looking for work as a UI Designer. At a couple interviews there have been printouts of my application, resume, and -- sure enough -- my LinkedIn profile.

Even if you don't think it counts, it shows up when employers Google you. Well, it does it you have an offbeat name like Critz.

Word. Yeah, I wasn't doubting the power of LinkedIn profiles to be public, just how gatekeeper-y they tended to be ("in between you and an opportunity, stands LinkedIn") :D

I have numerous thoughts about LinkedIn. I am kinda disappointed by it.

(I am a social software nerd, so no offense if anybody tunes out for this...)

I love the Internet. And LinkedIn is like 90% not taking advantage of the Internet. It's mostly a digital version of old school processes.

I know more people offered jobs via Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, StackOverflow, HN than LinkedIn.

I guess this all goes back to "jobs offers/business deals happen because of relationships..." LinkedIn is basically bad at cultivating relationships/communities. It started out requiring symmetric (like Facebook) relationships, which i think has many bad side-effects. Also, despite doing it years before other good QA sites, their searchable, linkable questions/advice content is weak.

Relationships aside, for presenting work/history, things like about.me/Flavors.me, despite not being made to be resumes, are also promising. (here is stuff i MADE, here is stuff i've presented, here is stuff i've coded, here is a gallery of my work, etc).

Lately LinkedIn has been making OKCupid-esque cool use of all the data they have. I love the reports they're making. But i don't feel this is really being integrated into the user's experience of what it means to be a LI member. (It's more like these reports are a by-product.)

I hold out hope. But for how long they've been around, and how many users they have, and how basic the part of life they address is... LI really makes very little out of a giant opportunity + early advantage.

Good luck on your current job hunt. I'm sure you'll get snatched up in no time. Ignore my LI rant. If it's working well for you, werq it. :-)

I love the well-informed rant. You have lots of interesting points.

As a person, I'm glad LinkedIn exists as an appropriate place for business connections. I am not always keen on having coworkers as Facebook friends.

LinkedIn does a good job of keeping track of contacts. “Is the freelance lighting designer available? Our intern from two years ago is working on a great project.”

Can LinkedIn do more and do what it does now even better? Certainly. Do I feel their current incarnation fails? Not really.

I don't want LinkedIn to be more pervasive in my life than it is. It's good enough to just "be there" and maybe give a soft email every two weeks.

Also, thanks so much for the kind words! I hope to fond a job soon, but I'm really just excited to be on the West Coast.

I recently posted a job opening on Craigslist for a UI Designer and iOS dev that asks for a Linkedin profile. They're easier to scan than most resumes (though for designers we ask for portfolios).

No, and I think it can be useful for a lot of professions.

It's a great tool for business development. Whenever I want to meet someone at X company I look at who I know there/who can introduce me there. Very valuable. You can't do that on facebook, it's too nosy/I'm not facebook friends with my business acquaintances. Also good to know their background.

Note, Facebook will look at your linkedin profile than contact you through facebook

Interesting how it is used in gov't.

My Senators reach out to me with Facebook and twitter, my congressman is on linked in. The FBI gets me via chat, the NSA #@@### NO CARRIER

Yes

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