Genuine Question
Is Linked-in any good? Is it a good career move or just another Fakebook used by losers and not movers?
LinkedIn says it will sell off an extra $1bn worth of stock to raise funds to buy new systems, tout better services and potentially snap up other firms. The social network for the gainfully employed hasn't said when it expects the sale to take place. The website had around $900m in cash and short-term investments as of the end …
Think Facebook for suits, and all that implies.
I canned my account a long time ago because I kept getting spammed by slave-traders - apparently little has changed. It got to the point where I now have a mail filter which sinkholes everything that appears to come from linkedin.com.
LinkedIn can be simultaneously useful and intensely annoying. The service makes money by selling premium access to your personal data. e.g. to recruitment agents. So if you're looking for job then yes it's useful to fill out a profile, including all the relevant keywords.
Where it gets annoying is that once you begin showing up in agent's search results, they will invite you into their network and then mercilessly spam you with job vacancies regardless of the relevance of the role or not. So if you say Java in your skills, and you're in 3 or 4 agent's network you might get the same role spammed to you 3 or 4 times. Repeat several times a day forever and it becomes annoying.
I found it so annoying that I've disconnected from every agent and ignore their invites. They can still send me InMail but they can't just spam me and everyone in the top 50 results in their network which I suspect is all they do most of the time.
Personally I do not have a Linked-in account, as mentioned above it's like facebook for suits.
What I do get though are regular emails from people who have Linked-in accounts and that must have my email address in their address book. I hate the bastards.....
For me Linked-in is on par with those that sell little blue pills.
It is not a question of it being any good. It is a question of what you can do with it. The ball is in your court and you're playing in the big leagues now. It is time to step up to the plate and hit in some wins if you want to make it here. So put on your uniform, get your game face on and leverage your social media connections to reach out to high leverage partners that can push this thing past the finish line. This is a marathon, not a sprint, so get up to speed and keep the tender full, you're going to be burning a lot of midnight oil.
It can be a good way to catch up with former colleagues you've lost touch with, and see if anyone is recruiting.
I've helped a couple of former colleagues I'd not seen in about 10 years get interviews with my company or other people I knew that were hiring.
The problem with the internet is that access to it isn't IQ tested, and no site is immune to that.
Yes you get some recruiter spam on it but its job search and recommendations are actually relevant unlike the joke that is the main jobsite searches these days.
They have some very good automated job search heuristics with no effort required from the user other than populating your initial profile.
Just like I would think Farcebook can work well if you really use it for real friends and family (and not 500000000 "friends" that spam each other with selfies), so LinkedIn works well when used right.
I found my 2 most recent jobs through LI, by networking with recruiters, having a complete profile that matches my CV, qualified recommendations from former co-workers and thinking twice about what groups I join and what I then post on groups I did join. Ignore the majority - make that VAST majority - if invites, stay out of LION, and it's a really useful tool. YMMV, but for me far more useful than your typical job boards, from Monster to Seek.
The idea behind Linked-In is great but human nature kills it. Recruiters spam for quantity. Professionals hoard senseless connections and recommendations to improve their perceived standing. The noise generated by that overwhelms attempts to get anything serious done. I kept my account lean and clean but I found no way to stop Linked-In's own HR department from spamming me with their job openings until I closed my account. Hopefully that $1,000,000,000 can buy some professional hygiene tools. (And they better upgrade Maude Ave at their new HQ so I don't get killed bicycling to work)
I though ti was a great idea. Initially. Then thre seems to be no real purpose to it whatsoever.
One of the major annoyances, other than spam, was that when I entered my addresss it would assume that I was living on the opposite coast in a town over an hour's drive away. No amount of corrections would fix that and when I received a reply from LinkedIn HQ saying that things were working as intended and they weren't going to fix this feature, I decided that if they couldn't be arsed then neithe could I.
I don't miss it at all even though all those people selling those "Danger - Floor Wet" signs may be missing me.
Not good for your current career. as everyone assumes your looking for work. employers for some reason dont like that.
Plus got fed up of being offered non existant jobs by agencies trawling for CV's
Dont do FB either now. not interested who had what for tea. and whats happening on corrie.