Yeah, I have a love/hate relationship with LinkedIn.
I don't like the site, and I don't like the company. That said, I've had on-site interviews at Google, Facebook, and the like not via my StackOverflow profile (which is pretty good, 20k+), or my blog, but directly through being hit up on LinkedIn.
I'm about to start a dream job next week, again after being contacted first on LinkedIn by my new employer.
Perhaps it's alright if you can post online about all the great work you do, or you have a name for yourself in the industry, or you make lots of OSS contributions on GitHub. Unfortunately I don't have any of those (yet!). But I do have a LinkedIn profile, and that's what got me on the one-way flight from London to SF next week.
I'm not defending LinkedIn as a company: I think they're pretty scummy. But if I didn't have my account, maybe I wouldn't have got this job.
It would be interesting to hear first hand what your process looks like, and why you might find Linkedin to be a better fit as opposed to something like SO (which obviously I'm not sure you do).
The parent wasn't apologizing for LinkedIn so much as advocating for an active recruiting strategy rather than a passive one. If I were a recruiter mercenary, I'd look use both.
Recruiters might use LinkedIn because there are lots of good programmers whose community participation does not occur on Stack Overflow, but still have LinkedIn profiles.
Sorry if I was unclear. I was responding specifically to "They find you, instead of you find them." I use SO and Github quite a bit, but my point was simply that I'd MUCH rather find someone myself than just wait for resumes to come in, as the resumes that come in are often not very good.
There is a very high chance that a professional will end up finding a job through linkedin since employers, specifically recruiters find it helpful to filter prospective employees... but keeping in context an older post [1], is linkedin really worth the solution to find the right person for the job? Had it not existed, would we end up hiring the wrong people? I guess not. It is just an added layer of `sophistication` to the hiring process.
Its features don't really acknowledge an individual’s skill set, and are flawed. For example the `endorsing feature` of linkedin allows people who haven't even worked with technology X, to endorse people for the same technology.
In short, I don't see linkedin adds any value, but at the same time since recruiters are on it and we are forced to accept it.
You're talking about the "skills" section. I don't need to work with jQuery directly to know John Smith wrote my company's jQuery code and he has that skill. If you want to write an in-depth review of John Smith's code from a technical standpoint, you can do that on LinkedIn, too. Most often, LinkedIn asks me if they know XYZ and either I know that they know it or I don't know--the value I get from that, it helps me to see where my connections are going with their careers. That's helpful to know for a variety of reasons, use your imagination. Sometimes they go into "skill" areas I never would have expected. Likewise, if someone hates Java (even if they know it well) they're not going to list it as a skill. Also, you can turn off any profile section you find annoying, it's in the options/settings. For example, I have the "people who viewed PJ also viewed these profiles" turned off.
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Yeah, I have a love/hate relationship with LinkedIn.
I don't like the site, and I don't like the company. That said, I've had on-site interviews at Google, Facebook, and the like not via my StackOverflow profile (which is pretty good, 20k+), or my blog, but directly through being hit up on LinkedIn.
I'm about to start a dream job next week, again after being contacted first on LinkedIn by my new employer.
Perhaps it's alright if you can post online about all the great work you do, or you have a name for yourself in the industry, or you make lots of OSS contributions on GitHub. Unfortunately I don't have any of those (yet!). But I do have a LinkedIn profile, and that's what got me on the one-way flight from London to SF next week.
I'm not defending LinkedIn as a company: I think they're pretty scummy. But if I didn't have my account, maybe I wouldn't have got this job.
At this point, it's as if a lot of company have stopped accepting applicants except via LinkedIn. They find you, instead of you find them.
Recruiter here. Would you rather have an inbox with 2000 unqualified resumes or just go find qualified people yourself?
It would be interesting to hear first hand what your process looks like, and why you might find Linkedin to be a better fit as opposed to something like SO (which obviously I'm not sure you do).
The parent wasn't apologizing for LinkedIn so much as advocating for an active recruiting strategy rather than a passive one. If I were a recruiter mercenary, I'd look use both.
Recruiters might use LinkedIn because there are lots of good programmers whose community participation does not occur on Stack Overflow, but still have LinkedIn profiles.
Sorry if I was unclear. I was responding specifically to "They find you, instead of you find them." I use SO and Github quite a bit, but my point was simply that I'd MUCH rather find someone myself than just wait for resumes to come in, as the resumes that come in are often not very good.
There is a very high chance that a professional will end up finding a job through linkedin since employers, specifically recruiters find it helpful to filter prospective employees... but keeping in context an older post [1], is linkedin really worth the solution to find the right person for the job? Had it not existed, would we end up hiring the wrong people? I guess not. It is just an added layer of `sophistication` to the hiring process.
Its features don't really acknowledge an individual’s skill set, and are flawed. For example the `endorsing feature` of linkedin allows people who haven't even worked with technology X, to endorse people for the same technology.
In short, I don't see linkedin adds any value, but at the same time since recruiters are on it and we are forced to accept it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6212961
You're talking about the "skills" section. I don't need to work with jQuery directly to know John Smith wrote my company's jQuery code and he has that skill. If you want to write an in-depth review of John Smith's code from a technical standpoint, you can do that on LinkedIn, too. Most often, LinkedIn asks me if they know XYZ and either I know that they know it or I don't know--the value I get from that, it helps me to see where my connections are going with their careers. That's helpful to know for a variety of reasons, use your imagination. Sometimes they go into "skill" areas I never would have expected. Likewise, if someone hates Java (even if they know it well) they're not going to list it as a skill. Also, you can turn off any profile section you find annoying, it's in the options/settings. For example, I have the "people who viewed PJ also viewed these profiles" turned off.