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Comment by 8organicbits | Hacker News Reader

Is LinkedIn a good place to find jobs? I deleted my account a decade back over some privacy slight and I thought it was just some weird blogging platform for posturing now. Is it worthwhile as a jobs platform?

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No platform is really a good place to find jobs, but if you - like the average job seeker - think of things mostly in terms of volume of available jobs, it'll win at that, as will the other incumbents. (The trade-off is that, precisely because they're the default and open to everyone, your chance of getting each job is very low. But you only figure that out after using the platform, and conversion is half the battle from the perspective of someone operating the platform.)

In general though, applications are always a terrible way to find a job. They're a last resort when your networks and other connections and "ins" fail.

I'm sure it varies a lot by type of job, but in my field it is not the first or even fifth place I would look for a new job. There's a lot of noise and postings can often be stale or in some cases are missing details, maybe because they were scraped from other job boards. If you have a large network, you may hear about upcoming jobs directly from colleagues' posts, but I think the general job search features on LinkedIn are pretty useless.

That said, I did learn some time ago that you can use various search operators (Boolean, parentheses, and quotes) which make it a little easier to actually get relevant job search results.

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