Why do you need LinkedIn? (non-recruiters) | Hacker News Reader

Why do you need LinkedIn? (non-recruiters)

7 pointsTedShiller10 comments

I'm not a recruiter, and I deleted my LinkedIn account over 15 years ago, and found I have never needed it. If someone asks me for my LinkedIn, I give my email address instead. This works quite well.

What would happen if you deleted your LinkedIn account?

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I use it to research people. I'm over 50 so I don't get recruiter spam, just countless job shops offering to redo my web site or iOS app or SEO something or another. I have a grandfather'd "pro" account at $160/year which usually pays for itself once a year.

I've never made a LinkedIn account and I've never felt handicapped by not having one. Everyone I know only mentions LinkedIn to complain about recruiter spam but then also looks at me baffled when I say I never made one, but then never are able to give a good suggestion for why I would want one. Having said that people looked at me like I was crazy for not ever making a Facebook account but these days more and more of those same people are deleting theirs, so as much as there is the trap of thinking I know better than everyone else I'm sticking with my gut and mind that, like Facebook, LinkedIn isn't something most people need, and definitely not something that I need

LinkedIn helps me keep in touch with people that I worked with at past jobs. Yes you can swap emails/phone numbers but emails frequently get buried, people may change phone numbers as they move, additionally emails don't have any discoverability (eg what is Victor who I worked with 8 years ago doing these days... ohh he is working at company XYZ, that's interesting I am considering applying at company XYZ maybe I can ask him what he thinks of the company from the inside).

The recruiter spam is a small price to pay for the incredible professional value that LinkedIn provides for me.

A friend once said that Linkedin is like a place with hostages that are instructed to be happy all the time.

It's just a place where a bunch of corporates and startup people say how cool they are.

However surprisingly I heard that for the folks who are looking to fundraise is the best place to be. So I guess if you're not looking for work or funding no? There's Polywork (https://polywork.com) that tries to replace linkedin. Gotta wait to see if it works out.

I used LinkedIn for:

* my online resume: prospective employers can check out that my experience matches my resume, and recommendations too.

* my online rolodex: business contacts change jobs, no need to hunt down new email/phone #s.

And I ignore recruiters.

I used to have one, with all my personal details on there, but deleted after I found the platform was drowning in spam, and recruiters would cold-call me at 3AM in the morning, from some weird country. I have thinned down my resume in recent years and only have the bare essentials on there. I host the .PDF of it on my homepage & I've found this adds a more human touch to your resume, since you can prove you can run a website, which is a good signal from the get-go.

I have found my last 3 jobs using LinkedIn.

I suppose some use it for the same reason why some use Youtube to post videos which is discoverability, especially those early in their career. I keep an account around just to see what various companies are up to. ... financial insight. I use an email canary with LI.

Sales. It’s a must-have for b2b founders.

The only things that happened when I deleted my LinkedIn account were the following:

1. I stopped getting as much spam, especially from shady tech recruiters and randos from India trying to "network". No great loss there.

2. I occasionally have idiot managers at my day job complaining that they can't find me on the internet. Apparently these managers think that LinkedIn is the internet the way some boomers do with Facebook.

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