Edit: misunderstood "referrals" for "references" so edited my reply out. No, I've never asked for referrals from past colleagues.
Didn’t my new employer want me to update my LinkedIn? That never came up, but if it would have I would have delayed. Why should I support their business model.
At its most basic, this is a cult of qualification which no longer provides real value, it fails for a number of reasons I won't get into here.
When you disqualify arbitrarily, and can't find anyone because of that, its your fault for disqualifying everyone, not the market's fault for not having the ballerina that doesn't exist.
Want a programmer in a language thats only 10 years old with 15 years of direct experience? You aren't going to find it even when the creator of that language applies.
You pay to have the work done. That is the only legitimate requirement for hiring someone and remaining employed, and you can't go and change the requirements later when they show they can do more. Doesn't matter if they moonlight, are overemployed etc. That view to disqualify such people are in fact monopolistic practices designed to disenfranchise wages that are already low and distorted because of money-printing, they are not red-flags.
Its like the flawed type of thinking that "We need someone to do this work, but this guy is so overqualified he'll leave first chance; so we won't hire anyone".
You hire to have a job done. You don't get to be an arbitrary slave master. The moment you lose sight of this is the moment you ignore your immediate needs, and drive your company on a path towards failure, and if its a consolidated large company, that failure and bad decisionmaking will impact a lot more people because of the centralization/concentration.
Financial engineering can decouple the need for immediate action, but the tradeoff is that the risk of not doing things you should have done becomes far greater to your long-term sustainability, and its completely invisible. There is no place for deception and coercion in the hiring process. If the job doesn't exist, don't jam communication channels. Jamming channels is tortuous interference.
The answer is simple...
Require that they come in and show up physically to the office to verify their CV/application/Driver's License, and at that time since there will be cost on the business side, also cross-check if they fit other open positions you have, or if they are interested in hearing about other positions (the answer will almost certainly be yes). Rapidly promoting from within naturally bubbles the competent to positions without a lot of external risk like what you've described.
This is how you build a resilient pipeline of talent, and vet the soft skills people who would be good at the job that you'll never find through an interview except by moonshot chance. When you structure it from the get-go to exclude excessively and use bad indicators, you have bad data in and get bad outcomes out.
> LinkedIn Profile is a good way to sort through.
Its not, there are plenty of fake LinkedIn Profiles. You can't stand out as a real human when you have pigeonholed everyone into a circular peg and set the sieve requirements to a square peg. Forcing people to all go through a online centralized portal, even when they show up in person, is what promotes these perverse incentives. Not rocket science.
As a business you can do a lot to solve problems, and there's no way you can stand out as a human among the noise of digital artifacts where bots mimic real humans in the same digital environment. Go physical.
I've friends who are executives that do hiring, their main complaints were we've tried to hire people for X positions, and our top 10 candidates were all fake, we spent months on this with numerous interviews (cost) and have to start all over from scratch.
I pointed out the answer is rather stupid simple. Go old school verify the inputs are real at the beginning of the process, not at the end after you sunk all those costs. That's what they've been doing since then and it works.
Finding the right talent is a cost you have to pay that you can't push off on other businesses through use of products or services where that business may lie/misrepresent because each business is different, and if you depend upon that one pipeline for talent they can and will eventually cause issues where you can't find talent.
The attitude you seem to have mirrors the same things I see in people who simply don't want to pay the cost to get competent people, and by extension don't want to actually be in business.
Also, conditions worsen when you spoil an entire labor pool over decades through bad management in consolidated hands, it gets harder and costlier to find qualified labor. Its the nature of ponzi; costs go up unti outflows exceed inflows.
If you don't get ahead of the labor crunch, it will crush you, and most competent people given the adverse circumstances in hiring are now retraining resulting in brain-drain, a hollowing out and watering down of the competency in the labor pool. What happens when you can't find qualified people at any cost because your practices drove them to other sectors. They won't come back because they wrote it off as a bad investment. Its psychologically sticky.
People always have a choice, even when others try to make it so they don't.
If anybody used to enjoy working with you and they know of something it, should be easy enough from then on.
It used to be a thing of the past - people don't seem to bother now. Go ahead and create the profile. Search and connect with your colleagues.
You can also make one, add people, and then ask for a few references. "I just finally made a linkedin in 2025 on a lark" is a perfectly cromulent icebreaker/reason to ask.
And arguably even a negative signal. Productive people have jobs to do instead of grinding Monopoly karma. Yes, this absolutely includes LinkedIn thought leadership.
I know MS and recruiters love to push the 'it matters' line, but I'd ask the reader -- who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
Who would you rather interview: someone who has a great resume, and a strong LinkedIn profile, and connections to a strong peer community who can endorse them, or a faceless rando that shows up in your inbox with a PDF, amongst thousands of others, with zero referrals?
I'm not endorsing LI grind -- I too hate it, but ignore at your own peril. OP seems to be in a rather precarious situation, so maybe it would help being a bit less dogmatic.
As I said:
> anything past where you've worked on LinkedIn is a waste of time
Because everything on LinkedIn literally exists to be farmed. And why wouldn't it? LinkedIn's customers are recruiters. Users are the currency.
OP would be better served by actually networking with their peers. Not in app-mediated (and -monetized) ways, but in normal social human ways.
Sometimes it's like people forgot how to say "Hey, want to grab a coffee and catch up? What's been going on with you?"
Exactly this. And recruiters are the ones finding candidates and scheduling interviews.
You may not like it. I certainly don't. But that's the world we live in.
> "Hey, want to grab a coffee and catch up?"
This and the comment above are not at odds. If you're looking for a job like OP, at minimum you should do both.
Wrong question. This is not about the hiring stage.
Who would I rather move on to a phone screen: someone with an empty or nonexistent linkedin profile, or someone with a profile which matches their resume and has many connections to other people who worked at the same companies?
While I hate to have to say it is the latter, that's where we are today with AI-generated fake resumes.
I have 344 resumes left to review tonight. Those that don't match their linkedin profile history have no chance (unless they are a direct colleague referral).
> anything past where you've worked on LinkedIn is a waste of time
Putting your work history in LinkedIn is the maximum amount of effort you should make. Any additional effort, beyond that, is a waste of your time.
I hardly use LinkedIn, but it does show work history. As someone else said there was a flurry of “endorsements” but I haven’t seen many since.
I would suggest creating the linkedin profile but be sure to fully populate the job descriptions for each job (or as far back as you care to go) and spend some time looking up past colleagues from each one and send them invites to connect.
I'm finding that a completely blank linkedin profile (listing only companies but zero detail) is a bigger red flag than not having a linkedin profile.
But having a profile with job description info and a network of connections from each job adds credibility. When a resume looks borderline suspicious, I dig through the persons connections in linkedin to see if it looks like they really worked at each of those places. Even better if I find any shared connections, which is a stronger signal that I'm looking at a real person not an AI bot.
Also, building that network of connections can be a source of job leads on its own.
I'm in a terrible position for when I need to find a normal job, and comments like this don't let me forget it!
From where I sit, it's a tool for marketers and recruiters to gather data and it's otherwise completely useless.
Whether I like LinkedIn or not is completely irrelevant. I play the game, add connections, post a few banal “Thought Leadership” posts, ask for recommendations, etc.
My remote job at BigTech fell into my lap in mid 2020 and at 46 because an internal recruiter reached out to me, I got my next job two years ago within a week after I started looking because of targeted LinkedIn outreach. My current job also fell into my lap two weeks after I started looking because an internal recruiter reached out to me.
It does absolutely no good being good at your job if no one knows it.
I think even in the current job market, someone would give me a job or a contract relatively quickly if I needed one based on my network, LinkedIn profile, and positive impressions I’ve made in my niche over the past 7 years.
I’m not bragging, I’m old. I should have that type of experience and network.
I think that's the key difference. For strategy folks, it makes sense to demonstrate this kind of work through that kind of channel. But LinkedIn posts aren't relevant for non-networking roles.
How does LinkedIn factor into your experience and network is what I mean. You can’t tell me people cold call you through linkedin. If people contact you it might be through linkedin, but that’s only because their friends have been talking about you. LinkedIn isn’t what gives you work, it’s the fact that you’ve done good work for others.
Yeah and LI is a terrible way to show it.
There is a better way, and will be a better way. With time.
For now I agree - have to play the game.
What “better way” is there?
As opposed to claiming whatever the hell you want in resume.pdf.
I gave two examples of secondary sources, but what I’m really getting at here is that the numbers and noise are so, so high now (not to mention staffing firm fronts and foreign actors) that I usually need more signal than a solid-looking resume before investing even 30’ in a screening call.
Last I checked, verification requires people to install the app. No thanks.
If I disclose an email address that's directly traceable to my current employer---or even one provided to me by professional organizations I'm registered with---as adequate "social proof" (whatever that means) that I'm not "likely a bot/scammer", and a company's hiring manager is too blind to see the signal, then I'd write that off as a hidden trap passively dodged with confident relief.
Absolutely stupid advice for people who actually look for a job. You're participating in a social game, with well-defined signalling functions. If you'd like to actually have a positive outcome, you'll need to make use of the signalling functions commonly recognized, even if you don't like them.
(Plus, opting out of a commonly accepted path with the reason that you personally think other signals are as good and the other side is just too blind to see them sends a large amount of information about your ability to collaborate in larger teams)
You do you. There are jobs where you can get away with this, there are people with networks that allow them to play different games. But as advice to job seekers, it's actively detrimental.
Not finding a LinkedIn page for someone can range from a neutral signal to a negative signal depending on the hiring manager. I personally don't read anything into it, but I know many hiring managers who feel that lack of a LinkedIn page is a negative sign. I don't like it, but it's how the world works some times.
A seasoned LinkedIn page is also becoming very valuable for applying to remote jobs. Remote employers are getting nervous with all of the overemployed people and fake applicants. Having a mature LinkedIn page with a decent number of connections to real people is a major positive sign for remote hiring.
It's not something you will be able to see or detect as a candidate.
OP appears to have neither.
If someone isn’t on it, the chances are significantly higher they are fake or trying be be “overemployed.”
Does not having LinkedIn mean you’re not qualified or not real? Certainly not. Does it mean I will pass your resume over when sorting through a stack of qualified applicants? Absolutely.
This isn't universal in every market. Business is very insular here and work follows referrals and introductions. You have those and you have work. Without them, Linkedin won't help.
I'm 35yr in IT; I plug into my clients in a way that I learn their processes - inc hiring. Few white collar employers here use Linkedin. I've never worked with one who did.
You refuse to change anything about your process, you aren't working to improve it, you are arguing against people telling them you don't need to do common/standard things.
This thread is a pretty good insight into why you are failing and what you need to work on.
They said it's necessary, not sufficient.
I have a couple dozen open roles right now, at a 50-person company. Each posting gets thousands of applications. Most are fakes, or AI-generated, or AI-generated fakes. Realistically, we're going to respond to 1%, maybe 2% of them, because again, 50-person team. Half the time, you get someone named Ralph McGuinness on for a quick code screen and they have a thick Mandarin accent or something equivalently implausible.
The best first filter we have at the moment is to programmatically toss out any resume that doesn't have a LinkedIn, that has a hallucinated LinkedIn that doesn't resolve, that resolves to a name that doesn't match the resume, that has no connections or history, etc.
It's an absurd state of play that hurts those of us trying to hire and those of you trying to get hired, but also a trivial hurdle for you to clear, so stop arguing and just do it.
Just saying.
I hate LinkedIn too but i very much consider it an important part of the "finding a job post pandemic" game.
I’ve seen all sort of false claims, but ultimately small programming task is best to sift out people.
You made a big jump from “post your work history” to “commit fraud”, so you can justify ignoring consensus.
Imperfect, but effective enough that this is how the world has solved for this forever.
YMMV. White collar work here follows connections and introductions - nearly exclusively. A few of my clients might have poked around Linkedin in passing but most have never used it.
As an aside, I deleted my LI because I've never had a legit contact thru it, only spam.
source: 35yrs in IT
My primary reason for this was that unfortunately some resumes seem to include quite of bit of creative writing -- creativity which the applicant could bet only I, and my company, would see. If, however, the applicant had posted similar claims about past jobs on LI, it was public for all to see so somewhat likely to be less "creative" as most people find it embarrassing to get _caught_ claiming credit for work that someone else did or giving an overblown explanation of the import of their work. This is, of course, not 100% reliable as I've seen coworkers and past employees posting on LI claiming things they were "responsible for" or "implemented" when, in fact, they only had a tiny role (or, occasionally, even no discernible role) in.
Also, if I happened to notice a "connection" that I also knew, I could potentially ask them about the applicant (using due care to make sure that the applicant wouldn't be "outed" at their current job by my doing so).
This is a good observation.. rumination.. contribution? I can't find the right descriptive noun. Anyway, I get it. Perhaps the board is divided between regions inclined to use LI and not.
Absolutely ask for referrals. You gotta painfully get on LinkedIn for maximum effectiveness -- if you're looking at a company and an ex-coworker you got along with knows someone there, ask for the introduction. It feels awkward and weird but it increases your chances somewhat.
I strongly recommend you show your CV to someone and get feedback.