If you have had no benefit from it, why waste your “valuable time” on it in the first place? You knew what the site’s intentions were when you signed up.
If you received a call from a headhunter, how is that not a benefit? Surely the reason most people sign up on LinkedIn is for the opportunity to be seen by others in your industry on the off chance someone might like the look of you and approach you.
Like you pointed out (the only thing in your article I agree with) if you signed up just to have a list of your friends, and friends of friends, then it was a pointless waste of time. It’s about finding others in similar backgrounds and industries who one day might be able to help you with that problem you need solving; or that someone might come to you asking for your consultancy.
I use linked in to see where past friends and colleagues are at and I love it for that. I love doing a search on people I know, including clients. I have my setting set to ‘reconnect with friends’ and not interested in getting job offers.
I did receive a few invitations to apply for a job in some places, in a market I wasn’t interested in at all. But I realized it was because one of my past job was flagged as a ‘financial’ company. (it was still wrong of that company to send this mail)
I switched that company to another ‘market type’ and I now receive absolutely nothing from linked in. You can also selectively turn off any kind of email notification.
The “invitation to connect” request I think are not sent right way. In any case, they are sent to a yahoo mail account, not my work email. My phone numbers or addresses are not in linked in – why would I ever put that info on the internet, that’s crazy. I don’t understand people who say they ‘got calls from headhunters’.
Anyway as you can tell I think I’m using linked in, and it’s not using me
A tool is only as useful as your use of it. Linked-in is useful to keep in contact with colleagues and work friends in a more structured way than the odd phone call. It is MySpace for the professional.
Except if you use it as a Link farm… You need to restrict it to people you actually have worked with, people who you have spent quality time with. The people who 10,000 direct links/contacts do themselves a mis-service. People who try to link to people like Scoble without actually knowing him are the ones who ruin the function of the service, just like people who have 10,000 friends on MySpace (unless you are a band of course, using it for marketing).
Oh, and you can sort of remove yourself from Linked-in - delete all your links to everyone, change your e-mail address and never answer an invite. Nothing quite like side stepping the matrix.
My girlfriend made use of it to find her current job. She contacted the president of the company through it and requested a meeting. She’s now their Head of HR.
I’ve used it in a few cases to contact colleagues from a decade ago that I had long ago lost contact with.
There will always be people abusing the system, but that goes for any system.
I had my doubts, but I have seen real benefits lately. I get updates when my contacts update their profiles and it has helped me understand more about those who I work with. So LinkedIN is A-OK in my book.
I do agree that the power to be in the LinkedIN database should be in the user’s hands.
The nice thing? Software changes every day and because of your post maybe things will change!
I had a very difficult situation to resolve involving a live server cluster and Microsoft Message Queue. I used LinkedIn to get in touch with one of the product developers from Microsoft. He chatted with me on Skype the next day and helped me resolve the issue. All that for free. I’m not complaining
(3) It can be “managed” by the LICM tool. See tech.groups in yahoo LICM. (I tried to put the link in but it wasn’t welcome.
There’s also some yahoo groups dedicated to exploiting LinkedIn and there are, using the metaphor of moneys type the encyclopedia, a lot of “monkeys” out there banging on keyboards trying to find the value in there somewhere.
It’s about finding others in similar backgrounds and industries who one day might be able to help you with that problem you need solving; or that someone might come to you asking for your consultancy
In two years of use, neither of those benefits ever materialized for me. YMMV, of course, but I’m not participating in a system that has no concrete benfefits for me-- and neither should anyone else. Peer pressure, or some indeterminate, nebulous future promise of benefit, isn’t a good enough reason to opt in to this particular social pyramid scheme.
Like any site this requires you to be active - it’s a good way for active people to locate other active people. If you sit back and expect the world to come to you then I’m afraid that it, er, won’t.
I believe that LinkedIn has very valuable information and I do not find the emails it sends out to be extremely burdensome. I use it not only to look people up but also to introduce a hurdle to get to me. LinkedIn is hardly a Friendster or Plaxo.
Being a member of LinkedIn hasn’t benefited me any more or any less than being a member of MySpace or Facebook or Vox or Blogger or WordPress.com or any other blogging/social/whatever network. That isn’t any reason to delete the account.
Well speaking for all of those responsible headhunters/recruiters out there I believe that with any networking site you have to be realistic about why you are particpate in them in the first place. I have often times used Linked In just for the purpose of knowing, in my network, who has been faced with an unexpected RIF or who might be in need of assistance when it comes to making a career change. I think you use it when needed and make your profile only available to those you trust to be respectful of your privacy and your time.
I can’t speak to why you had such a bad experience with LinkedIn. From what I can tell, you pointed to a blurb about how someone complained they couldn’t just delete their account. It doesn’t even look like YOU were actually trying to do it and decided to go off on a rant about it, you just simply pointed to someone elses pain. There are a TON of other sites which have the same limitation, so why come down on LinkedIn?
If you just don’t like the service, that’s fine - not everything will please everyone. But to go off on a rampage urging people to close their accounts seems a bit over the top to me, and a bit unfair to LinkedIn. After all, YOU joined voluntarily and they haven’t twisted your arm to stay right?
My personal experience has been pretty decent to be honest. I use LinkedIn’s profile page as an online resume. They give you a pretty easy link to send people and it includes as much detail as I want to provide, AND the added benefit of having all my endorsements available to anyone I send there. If I am applying for a job somewhere and it has a form entry for “online resume”, I point it to LinkedIn. Most employers will only ask for references once you have made it past the final stages and are getting ready to make an offer. What if they saw your references BEFORE you even interviewed? I have 21 outstanding endorsements provided by a mixture of former employers, direct-reports and clients. That alone gives me a leg up going into an interview because they have seen my track record and know I am capable of doing the job based on those references.
So Like anything else, I think you get out of it what you put into it. Just my $.02 man, but it seemed a little unfair to beat up on the service when a lot of people actually think it’s pretty decent…
I’ve used it quite a bit. It’s helped me get back in touch with some people I worked with 12 years ago, whom after several moves and job changes, I’d lost touch with. I’ve also used it to get in touch with a friend who moved and I had no good contact info for. It’s been nice to be able to keep in touch of some folks I recently worked with and were all laid off together. We all helped each other find new jobs quickly within our network. Your situation may be different, where you’re not changing jobs or moving frequently, so I can see how it might come off as annoying, but for myself, it’s been a real boon to be able to keep in touch with former colleagues.
I was skeptical and paranoid about LinkedIn until one of my board members convinced me to sign up a year ago. Now I’m a convert and I have several hundred connections. It’s replaced much of my contacts database.
I’ve found LinkedIn most useful for keeping in touch with great engineers I’ve worked with in the past, and hiring them for my new startup. Not only did I get to work with them again, I saved paying headhunter fees. I also reconnected with a colleague who turned into a valuable customer. Many of these people would have been impossible to find otherwise as the contact info I had been keeping so carefully was 5+ years out of date.
If your job doesn’t require you to interact with the world at large or you are not the type of person who networks much, then LinkedIn might not be of use. I think it is ironic for people like Robert Scoble to bash it, since he is almost a public figure. Not all of us have blogs with millions of subscribers.
I’ve received exactly two unsolicited contacts this year, which is nothing compared to dozens of spam emails that slip thru SpamAssassin every day.
For me, the biggest benefit of LinkedIn is having an online copy of the address-book (i’ve lost my address book twice due to a hard-drive crash, and I know, I was supposed to make a backup, but I never really did it).
So having this sort of online contact backup is useful. I got quite a few calls from headhunters from LinkedIn, which is IMHO an additional benefit. Sure, the service could be better, and they could improve it by allowing me to delete connections and put in more contact information for each connection, but I’m happy with it for now considering that it’s free.
