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Comment by lemevi | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn has never been interesting to me for anything other than looking at what past coworkers have been up to. I've never once had an experience where LinkedIn led to a job and in fact after I deleted my account my recruiter email volume dropped by an order of magnitude. I've also read that potential employers search candidates LinkedIn contacts to see if there are any existing employees and if so ask them about the candidate. Governments, employers, media, LinkedIn itself and malicious types frequently use all that personal information people add on LinkedIn to cause harm.

The users are what is for sale on this site. I'm not a LinkedIn user, it's not worth it.

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My 2c: My previous company was circling the drain (lost main customer, slowly downsized from max of ~25 to me being #5 when I left.)

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.

Same here - a light LI update and recruiters are all over me. Alternatively, one month of subscribing to LinkedIn Premium (or whatever) got me some great leads at good companies - it was very easy to target the right level of higher-ups - but I had a good gig by the time I got the ball rolling with them. So I can agree with the complaints but in another sense it's one of those technologies that's like having a superpower compared to the old days of job hunting when I graduated from college in 2003.

> The users are what is for sale on this site.

Isn't that true of pretty much every advertising driven site?

Full disclosure: I used to work at LI.

I haven't been on LinkedIn in a while, but are there ads on it? From my perspective LinkedIn is probably the most obnoxious social media site (in a doesn't-even-try-to-hide-it way).

Advertising accounts for about 25% of revenue.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-LinkedIns-business-model

Although this was my experience as a FT employee, since I've switched to consulting, LinkedIn has brought me leads and some of those have converted. No active advertising by me either, just the fact that people in my network know that I'm working independently now has caused them to ping me with projects.

Not only that but I found when I didn't have a LinkedIn account, the recruiters who found me were of much higher quality. They found my github account, my blog, etc, and actually had potential jobs that I found interesting. On LinkedIn, they just stuff their emails into a giant cannon and spray away.

Everything you write is pretty terrific except somehow you think it's bad?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

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.

Agreed. Even when I was actively looking for a job, LinkedIn was no help. I deleted my account years ago and have never missed it, even a little.

I have a hard time believing employers use this site to recruit? I have a fake account I put up years ago. I get requests--daily--from people I don't know?

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!

Recruiters add liquidity to the labor market. I really don't see how they are a bad thing.

As in high frequency trading, additional liquidity also equates to addition volatility. That can be good or bad, but a market needs to have enormous "stickiness" for additional liquidity to be an unalloyed benefit. Labor markets are a good example, with search costs high on both sides of the table, so maybe we grant that point.

But there's relatively little evidence that recruiters actually reduce search costs, rather than shifting them around on balance sheets.

I would argue that the job markets are incredibly sticky. With HFT, dollars are fungible and shares usually don't have a regional preference for their buyers. There also isn't a resource cost of acquiring, training, and integrating a new share into your portfolio.

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.

> 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.

I dislike receiving emails from recruiters, especially when they're multiple times per day when I've never indicated to anyone in anyway that I'm looking for work. The fastest and easiest way I have reduced recruiter email was by just deleting my LinkedIn account. I got them down to like once or twice a week that way. Now I don't get any because any of the ones that continued to email I've asked them to stop.

I consider myself lucky if I get more than one a month. I understand the problem that you and others have with deluges of crap, but some of us are appreciative of any interest we get. The "hot" market seems to be rather geographically and specialty limited.

Recruiter emails are basically spam built from templates. They'll include jobs for which I'm obviously not qualified for if the recruiter knew anything about me. I've received emails that still had the template variables in them or had wrong names.

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.

Most of my recruiter contacts have been direct recruiters of companies, so when I move forward I am dealing directly with the employer.

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.

I consider myself lucky if I get more than one a month. I understand the problem that you and others have with deluges of crap, but some of us are appreciative of any interest we get.

Also, hot Russian girls want to meet you tonight!

Adding fake liquidity actually removes liquidity.

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.

In your hypothetical you would contract a real estate agent who would use their expertise in the market to pick the best offers. Getting 100 offers would mean more competition and the likely hood that your agent finds an even better offer than if you had only received 10.

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.

But the liquidity isn't fake, hence why the firms pay recruiters rather than waiting for the actually-interested people to beat a path to their door. The jobs are real, as are the candidates willing to actually show up to an interview. If you have a job and no suitable candidates, sourcing them is a valuable service, even if a few people get annoyed by the recruiters (better by them than by the employer...) along the way.

Have you ever dealt with a recruiter?

Scum that spam people are like real estate agents sponsoring the PTA meeting -- they are trolling for listings.

Plenty thanks, and on the rare occasions I've actually been remotely interested in the job they're promoting they've been more effective st getting me interviews than responding to actual employers' paid listings with carefully crafted cover letters.

This is a fairly low bar for calling another human scum

Thanks to people like this who pass out resumes without authorization and shop candidates, I lost out on a key job opportunity at a time where I was in a pretty bad personal situation, and the job market was not so great.

So maybe I'm mean, but I have no respect whatsoever for contingency recruiters.

The jobs aren't always real, and the candidates aren't always even remotely qualified for them.

Recruiters have a serious "market for lemons" problem. Some are good, a lot are terrible spammy bucket shops. Dealing with the bad ones just increases your transaction costs.

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