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Comment by ben1040 | Hacker News Reader

I am honestly questioning the utility of LinkedIn in general. It seems to be a sink for recruiter messages when people don't know how to otherwise contact me. I know when someone is hiring bioinformatics developers locally, because within an hour I get LinkedIn messages from six different recruiters who are all trying to pitch the exact same job.

I am not sure how it could be useful in a job search scenario. I don't perceive it as any less annoying to send someone a cold-email just because they are a FOAF on LinkedIn. Am I wrong on this?

I've been on there for 8 years and have accumulated a ton of connections, but I've been tempted to just delete the account. I have avoided doing it though because I have this idea that if someone Googled me and found no LinkedIn profile, they'd think I don't care about my career.

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It's a pretty useful tool if you are in a role where you network for a living - sales, marketing, etc. Or if you are actively are looking for a job and aren't in highly specialized niche with a talent shortage.

How could it be useful in a job search scenario? Let's say you want to work at X company and you have a friend, or a friend of a friend who works there. You ask them to refer you into their company, and since companies typically will favor internal referrals, you are more likely to get hired.

A large percentage of jobs are filled without ever even being posted online, so for most people networking is their best bet at landing a new job.

Unless its entirely unwieldy and you get tons and tons of emails from friends of friends who are hounding you all the time, then its pretty much common courtesy to help someone out who asks you for help on LinkedIn or otherwise.

Being contacted by recruiters all the time is another story, but thats kind of the trade off you make when you sign up for a free professional networking tool.

Don't want to deal with recruiters contacting you but still want to keep your LinkedIn account? Let people know you don't respond to messages on your profile and unsubscribe from emails or create an email filter. Or even just filter out emails from the word "recruiter" & LinkedIn and that will probably catch most of it.

I boycott them with the idea that I don't want any single company to become any sort of de facto resume & hiring service, which they already try to bill themselves as. Ostensibly, if you use their service, you don't need a resume or a list of references -- it's all right there!

I also have grave reservations about giving so much of my personal info (job, job history, colleagues, etc.) to a for-profit entity that has every motivation to capitalize on that data while having few reasons not to.

I'll network the old-fashioned way, thank you.

I am unclear on why you see low-effort resume and reference services as a bad thing.

I don't trust them with my data.

This stems back from a few years ago when they automatically created an account for me based on information that a 3rd party had provided. I don't know if they still do that, but it told me all I needed to know about them.

What drives me crazy about LinkedIn is that Google isn't going after it with Google+. If Google had a "Resume upload" feature, it would slaughter LinkedIn, by allowing various circles of interest, friends, etc to cohabitate with the work stuff. You don't have to worry about sharing with your boss....

I like the technologists at LinkedIn, but I fucking hate the product. It's bullshit. The "Communities" are nothing but recruiter spam, I have people who have never worked with me in particular fields voting me up in these areas (if you have never worked with me on a project involving web dev, why would you upvote me for that skill)....

LinkedIn never rethought the resume. They just took it and put it online with Facebook clone features.

Umm... LinkedIn is older than Facebook. They didn't just 'put it online with Facebook clone features', there wasn't a facebook to clone...

I happen to be looking for a bioinformatics developer, perhaps we can speak when it is least convenient for you. ;)

seriously, though, I completely agree.

I've been on LinkedIn for a while, without engaging with it that much. In the early days, if someone sent you an invite to connect, there was an option "I don't know this person," with the implication that they would be somehow censured for spamming someone they didn't know.

That option is long gone, but I don't know when it disappeared. Does anyone know when this happened? If anything, that's a sign of when it jumped the proverbial shark.

It's still there, but I think the flow has changed a little bit. You can either Accept or Ignore an invite. If you press Ignore, you're messaged with, "Invitation ignored and archived. More options: I Don't Know [name] or Report as Spam."

There is also the endorsements, which LinkedIn can use to measure how well you know the person.

I just think its useful to quickly be able to see an overview of someones career, but yeah, I agree, I wish it wasn't so spammy.

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