LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
1. To start with, they sneaked in the request to access all your email contacts and constantly spam them in your name which can be embarrassing at times to say the least.
2. Their mobile apps do the same with your phone contacts, cleverly hiding the checkmark (in smallest font) to disallow the uploading of contacts. I have unknowingly let them look through my contacts at least two different times prompting me to never install their app again.
3. Letting others know that you viewed their profile. This is fine as long as you know about this feature but I bet that a bunch of us were taken by surprise in the early days to find out that our "online research" on someone was not private unless if you're incognito.
4. Charging you beyond the free trial period without any email or notification about it. I agree that many businesses do this but some of them like Amazon and Netflix are nice enough to allow you to disable the future payments before the trail ends. Also they tend to notify you about the payments.
5. Letting people have access to my email and other contact info even when I haven't accepted their request to connect. This may have been fixed with the recent change but may just have been one of those hidden features that led to their popularity with the recruiter world in the first place.
I am sure I missed out a bunch of other things here but these are the reasons why I can never trust LinkedIn.
- They also employed a MTM attack on your mobile "Intro App" https://threatpost.com/linkedin-intro-app-equivalent-to-man-...
- Have you noticed that the LI News feed is a high-noise collection of crap?
- and on and on
"Monetizing your users" is rapidly making that site useless for almost everyone.
I accept any friend request from recruiters/colleagues and beyond that never ever use the site.
My justification is I like getting job specs, and the cost is essentially nothing. Sure I hate that it's got a side panel asking me to connect with an old Wheel of Time fansite e-friend from Norway who was in my email contacts and I've not spoken to in some 15 years but it's hardly the end of the world.
Less so in terms of content / context.
Dear god this site is wretched.
I've not looked back and my life is exactly as it was, minus a few unwanted emails.
The users are what is for sale on this site. I'm not a LinkedIn user, it's not worth it.
But there's relatively little evidence that recruiters actually reduce search costs, rather than shifting them around on balance sheets.
Recruiters typically work for for-profit businesses, that maximize returns on sales, meaning they are going to try to charge organizations slightly less than it would cost the organization to do it in house.
The increased liquidity in job markets drops the amount of time it takes to match a job opening with a job seeker, which eliminates inefficiencies. You're not factoring in the income difference someone makes by being placed in the ideal job sooner.
I don't know how you can tell what I'm factoring in or not, since I deliberately avoided this calculation. It can benefit either employees or employers, depending on elasticity / market power. In other words: you're not factoring how much faster expensive senior employees can be replaced with recent grads ;).
That said, there is also a cost to sloppy, spammy recruiting, illustrated in the other responses: it can end up increasing stickiness if enough people start ignoring all recruiting communication because it is all spam. That makes it even harder/more expensive to recruit, and grows the market for recruiters. There are some nasty incentive structures in there.
Having followed up on recruiter emails a couple of times I have to also state that it is a less pleasant experience than going through the employer directly. All your communication is through the recruiter and you get no feedback at all. In the case you have done an on site interview and you got to meet people, having be the recruiter telling you that the employer wasn't looking to move forward, with no explanation whatsoever, makes a bad experience even worse.
In other words, these aren't lists that I think anyone would want to be on. I agree that some areas are better for jobs than others which is why I live where I do.
That said, I haven't found dealing with employers directly to give me any more understanding of my background or information about my progress than dealing with third-party recruiters.
I have certainly received my share of terrible recruiter emails, but only from posting my resume on job boards. LinkedIn has been a steady stream of mostly good hits, with the not-so-good hits coming directly from companies.
Also, hot Russian girls want to meet you tonight!
Imagine if you were selling your house, and I created a service that would bombard you with 10 fake potential buyers a day. You only have time to deal with 2 buyers a day. Chances are, you'll miss out on everyone who is actually interested.
While LinkedIn does not intend to create fake recruitment attempts, it works out the same in the end.
If you have a high quality house, er - I mean, if you have skills that are in demand, I highly recommend you get an agent (like hired.com), because you're probably missing out on those good offers.
Scum that spam people are like real estate agents sponsoring the PTA meeting -- they are trolling for listings.
So maybe I'm mean, but I have no respect whatsoever for contingency recruiters.
I think it would be a better site if it didn't focus on this networking "friends" thing? Let people pad their resume! Let them lie about their abilities? It seems like it turned into another Facebook? "
I get this daily:
"Hi ,
I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn."
From strangers? I don't know why these people want me on their professional network. As a job I listed: I manage __________ID. I am in control of it--most of the time. It's a strenuous position, but I can't get anyone to take over the job!
Isn't that true of pretty much every advertising driven site?
Full disclosure: I used to work at LI.
When I'm the "thing" being sold, the onus is on the vendor to provide a value that keeps me there.
LinkedIn seems determined to be as anti-user as possible, and as someone who values my privacy instead of social networks, I understand where OP is coming from.
Just deleted my LinkedIn account because there is no value for me there.
My job hunting was basically updating my profile on LI and light searching.
Contacted by a Recruiter. They updated my resume to look more professional. Working as a contractor-to-hire at a state IT position.
There is a lot of spam, and I have no interest in the "facebook lite" feel of the site... but I got a 20% raise, will get about the same when/if I get hired - with state position benefits.
Site is worth it for me for, honestly, the minimal amount of effort I put in to keep my resume updated and do slight interaction with those on the site.
This has not always been the case. I used to get the hated torrent of "I see you have 12 years of development experience, how about this entry level position!!!" crap, but I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Either recruiters are getting better, or something I put in my profile has quieted down the garbage.
Either way, I don't think there's much that I've put on that site that I'd feel the need to "export" so the topic of this article seems to be a non-issue. You folks don't have alternate copies of your resume and contacts somewhere?
I also ran a fun experiment where I set up another LinkedIn profile nearly identical to my own, changing the name and gender and writing a very terse summary for each job. Boy, does he get a lot of random spam. I wonder if by writing a more detailed description of my skills/experience/contributions, I somehow generate better inbound messages...
Speaking to the point about "what would you export", I definitely have contacts who I am only connected through via LinkedIn; a key example being former colleagues whose personal email addresses I never got, and whose work emails I barely remember. I think it depends on the kind of network you have built there, though. The more work you've put into your LinkedIn connection pool, the more you want to export it.
Alternate hypothesis: bad recruiters looking for software developers filter by gender...
To be honest, I've had two emails from recruiters in three years, both highly targeted to specific terms in my profile, and I nearly accepted one of the jobs. Skipping those horrible spam-magnet keywords altogether is a good start.
It would be an interesting experiment to create lots of identical profiles with single variables changed to see how they each perform, but that's likely against LinkedIn's terms of service. They should add the ability to A/B test tweaks like this and let you optimize your profile for whatever level of recruiter interest you'd like.
Yes, it has led to actual, paying jobs. It takes some management on my part, but it's a lot easier than hunting around from site to site, or going to meetups, or any of that other stuff.
Do I get spammed? Sure. That's why I have a specific email account for them. Some of the spam is quite informative. I learn about openings early on, and can often find the hiring company by taking the text of the spam and searching the various job boards.
I get genuine requests, too. I take the time to respond to those just as genuinely.
For all the talk of the importance of networking around here, I'm kind of surprised at the antipathy. It's very low effort, just a few minutes a week.
I regard a lot of the complaints as symptomatic of the overall industry. I finally started going to meetups, and the signal-to-noise is just as bad, if not worse.
This would be great if it could be automated somehow: paste email to a macro job board and get links to matching posts.
I don't get the hate either. When it comes time for your next job search, it's incredibly valuable to have a consolidated list of everyone you've ever worked with where you can see where they work now. When I was looking for some part time work while launching my (bootstrapped) startup, I reached out to about 50 people from my LinkedIn network and it worked out great for me.
As for spam, I just filter and/or ignore it (yes, I get a ton of it, maybe 10+ recruiter emails a day).
as much as i may or may not like linkedin(i dont much), i think this little bit of info is useful when judging the reasoning behind the decision to turn it off.
thus, i can not explain why they went full stupid instead of just fixing the issue.
I can only surmise they made this change to make it harder for (more) people to bail because they know how dreadful using their site is now and this is an easier "fix" than a Dominos-style mea culpa and positive changes.
While I don't think LinkedIn is the shining star, it's definitely not one of the worst websites I've ever used; it's actually been quite helpful for connecting with people.
I'm a calm person but I needed serious gmail filter tinkering to catch all those we-want-you-to-join-or-feel-bad emails.
Interface-wise it's not that bad, but I don't use all the features (free user) and don't spend much time on there.
Ironically, LinkedIn is the only site I've encountered where non-members get more access than (free-tier) signed in users. I regularly open a profile in a private window via Google search because it won't show me 3rd-degree connections without paying for them, but will happily share those profiles with Googlers...
As with many others, I get these constantly: "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn." with seemingly no way to disable them. You can stop them for that one person's 'invitation', but invariably someone else will start the process over again. I have a filter set up that sends all LI email to trash
> Ironically, LinkedIn is the only site I've encountered where non-members get more access than (free-tier) signed in users.
I can't even imagine how this is defensible. This kind of behavior doesn't give me any reason to want to make an account.
Even if you consider the number of design dark patterns used and deliberate content obfuscation to be justifiable from a business perspective, they manage to screw up things they don't have an excuse for. The jobs board has an abundance of jobs, unrivalled data to match people with them, and yet shows me very few, with very poor relevance, and big, shiny logos in lieu of a decent headline. LinkedIn Groups was the clunkiest discussion service I've ever seen (although they seem to have tightened it up a bit) which must be part of the reason why article spam vastly exceeds anyone's desire to have significant discussions in there. The UI feels cheap, tacky and glossy and my browser feels like it's choking on the infinite scroll. Even the part of the site which is well executed also happens to be the repository of the world's dullest linkbait...
I'm not saying that it's any worse than any other sites, but LinkedIn has always felt like a shady company, like they're not on the users side.
I was really hoping that the Google+ reboot would fulfill the niche market that LinkedIn dominates, but it did not.
Of course, I really don't want to spam them while I am rewriting prose about jobs until it's done, though, so it'd have been nicer if the spamming didn't happen until I pushed some kind of "publish" button.
Of course, that will only give you a public view of a profile, but it seems to hide your identity nonetheless.
The website itself is awful to use, but the community is even worse. It is now just a tool for shameless recruiters to spam left and right.
I spent a lot of time working on my profile, clearly explaining that I reject connection requests from strangers, that I ignore messages for open jobs which don't include a certain set of items and I still get spammed all day long.
The problem is LinkedIn gets its money from recruiters who signed up for premium accounts so they cater to them.
I never thought about it that way, but it makes perfect sense. I deleted my account sometime last year (I think), and I deal with no shitty recruiters now.
3 days sounds an awful lot as if human intervention were required. What purpose would this serve?
Lock-in is the only answer that makes any kind of rational sense. The harder you make it to get your data out of any software/website the more friction you add to people who may want to try alternatives.
If it were really about protecting user privacy they could just have you re-enter your password to download the contacts, which is the industry standard thing to do when someone is logged in but doing something you think needs extra protection against them having accidentally left themselves logged in on a public system.
3 days is a good number for someone rage-quitting to let it slip off their radar and just lazily remain a user, not really a useful time period for security purposes.
There is a "download all my facebook data" option, but that only gives you a plain "firstname lastname" list. No contact information there either.
I want to be in whole control of my public data, that's why getting a domain and posting a blog is maybe more tedious but better at the end.
This behavior being so common is one of the reasons I have a nearly gut-level aversion to services that OFFER a free trial.
I much prefer a free tier of service, with a clear indication of the upsell options. For services I like (like Toggl) that have a free tier of service, I am still skittish of the trials of "pro" tiers, precisely out of the fear that it might be a hassle to cancel, rather than a "we assume you're going to cancel".
Everything I recall reading about setting up a subscription service suggests that the default-to-stay-subscribed method leads to more revenue (as people forget), and as customers we're accustomed to think, "well, that WAS my fault ...". In a normal subscription scenario, even, that probably is nicer to customers. However, for a __trial__, I would prefer to see an end of the paid service, rather than to start receiving bills.
A better example of dark patterns is how they repeatedly try to get you to sync your email contacts by sneaking it in at random points, where you may accidentally click through it.
Their website has also become a minefield of upsell links, some disguised as benign engagement (e.g. "Add a new skill") while others are much more spammy (e.g. "Follow this unrelated business which promotes through us").
There are some API standards for background checks between businesses and agencies, so that could be a good place to start. You could offer authenticated profiles, where people can't lie on their resume about where they worked.
Of course, LI could just implement this if you became too competitive to them.
Can you list some or are you referring to LinkedIn?
It might be what Checkr is sitting on top of.
Can you explain this? I can add any company and whatever job title and list of responsibilities I want without any verification.
It also let's you make better judgements on likelihood they're lying. It's not impossible to create an authentic-looking fake profile, but generally speaking if you see someone claiming to work for X company and connected to lots of employees from X company it's a safe bet that they worked there.
Disclaimer: I'm the Co-Founder of Resumonk.
First, I think that LinkedIn includes too many features. Influencers, groups, pulse and stuff like that. I'm still trying to find a use for groups. Something more focused on networking would be great.
Second, as I mentioned in a previous message, LinkedIn caters to recruiters because that's how they get their money, and to me it makes it insufferable. There is this running joke "Being a developer on LinkedIn is like being a woman on match.com".
I believe it would be really hard to monetize a sane and clean website for professionals without turning into this spamming juggernaut.
Anything that eases communication and discoverability between companies and professionals without either getting flooded with barely-relevant matches.
Or maybe it's just a matter of getting the feature set right, something that seems rather off on LinkedIn now.
Some instant low-friction point-to-point type of communication could make job hunting interesting and fun. It would be nice to send a quick video message with low-pressure to ask about a job. Maybe it could keep you in the mind of the company for jobs that aren't available now but will be coming up in the future.
We do have a way to go in terms of optimising the site, but we are currently only open to a small number of alpha users. I can safely say that by the time we open the floodgates to the general public, these issues will have been addressed.
Thanks for the feedback!
LinkedIn is so ridiculous that it now limits how many searches per month you can do. Not only that, but the $30/month service I am trialing does not increase/remove the limit!!
However I get lots of connection requests from recruiters. I always accept them. I figure that greatly dilutes whatever value linkedin might have once had because most of my connections are recruiters who wadte their time on me because I dont log in a whole lot.