Personally, I've used LinkedIn for recruiting tech talent, being recruited and most recently, doing biz dev (aka sales).

Stray observations: 1. LinkedIn has too many products like sales navigator that attempt to force you through a specific workflow. While it can work, it feels a lot like a misguided tracking system.

2. LinkedIn is most useful as an online resume. Whenever I am meeting someone new or want a refresher, I check LinkedIn. I think everyone does this in North America. This doubles as a useful social sign in tool for biz apps.

3. Older people (40+) in non tech positions respond surprisingly often to InMail. They respond far more often than young techies (who probably get too many messages). This is surprising and extremely useful for my job.

4. LinkedIn needs contact management in context of career. For example: simply stating when you made this contact is crucial.

5. LinkedIn needs a way to show how active a profile is or at least indicate if a profile is no longer responsive. There are millions of LinkedIn profiles that are inactive but LinkedIn encourages you to pay to message them.

6. There needs to be an indicator for how close you are to a specific contact. 99% of the time your mutual contacts are useless. This is especially true for "active users" like myself who see no major disadvantage personally for adding as many contacts as possible.

My whole point is that LinkedIn has an extremely valuable service. It is missing some features and product focus. Many of my above suggestions also help refocus LinkedIn's integrity.

Overall LinkedIn falls into this strange low integrity (in this case, spammy) but somehow successful company. The question is are they going to clean up their act. I think they will.

I'm pretty sure (3) is a generational thing. I and plenty of 20-somethings I know won't answer their phone if they don't recognize the number, yet my parents get up and run for the phone when their landline rings during dinner time. When someone unknown tries to reach you their default mindset is "But what if it's an emergency?" and ours is "It's probably spam"

As for point 6: I only connect with people I know. Every once in a while I get a connection request from some random person , but I always say no if I don't know them (even if we are in the same industry).

I think the whole value of connections is diluted otherwise. A connection doesn't mean anything. So that's what I see as the disadvantage of adding as many contacts as possible.

I agree with you in principle and in the past only accepted connection requests from people I know as well. However, I think LinkedIn's promise as professional social network has really diminished over the years and mostly functions as nothing more than a job board at this point. I probably have about 100 recruiters I have never met in person in my network. As a contract dev updating my profile serves as a way to push notify these people that I'm in the market. It's really the only value I see left in the platform.

It's your choice to add 100 random recruiters to your network. But then, don't complain that you are being spammed by recruiters.

Not who you were replying to, but I don't add people that I don't know to my network, and I still get spammed by recruiters constantly.

I've "unfriended" recruiters I've mistakenly added in the past.

However, if you're looking for talent, it is helpful to have such "connectors" in your network - without those recruiters, when I was doing a check on my network I didn't see some of the people I was trying to hire - this was only the case when I had switched jobs/domains.

Wow, how do you unfriend people? I've looked for a way for years.

Linkedin -> Connections tab -> filter by "connections only" -> find the one you wanna unfriend in the list and mouse over it -> "more" -> remove connection

That is just about as buried as I thought it would be if indeed it was possible. Classic LinkedIn, thanks!

I get spammed by them via initial contact / add connection requests.

I literally have 0 recruiters in my list of contacts.

Me too keep getting spammed by recruiters. And the handful number of recruiters I'm connected actually don't bother spamming me LOL

The strongest contacts should be those that have overlapping resume entries, i.e colleagues, former colleagues and people you may have studied with. Other contacts should have an optional tag (friend/family/random recruiter/...) and would have a lot less weight. Being connected with someone because you worked 5 years with someone they worked 10 years with earlier is a lot closer than you having responded to the same recruiter once. LinkedIn has all this info and should really use it.

It does however show the conflict again: recruiters are their bread and butter, so they may want to be careful outing them as people with huge weak networks that appear to be spam nets.

A huge network for a recruiter is not weak. That is his bread and butter. Often, a valuable interaction with a recruiter is very brief: he found you a job. Similar for people in Sales, Business development, Consultant, ...

The problem is that the connection feature in LinkedIn covers 2 vastly different use case. What is regular for you ( and me ), a network of people we have worked with and developed a relationship and that overlap your competences in some fashion and eventually become an implicit reference for what you put in your resume. What is regular for recruiter is a network of customer to which you have provided services. You will look at a recruiter connection to double check if he is indeed in contact with all the major investment banks as he pretend, not to double check he indeed worked at company X on project Y in the past.

The weighting should be almost the opposite for a recruiter. If he has worked 5 year in HR in a company 10 years ago, those connections are less interesting that the one he has made in his current position.

Problem is that all the use case are treated the same in linked in and most people mix and match different type of contacts in their connection.

I reply to messages from random people who ask to connect with an email telling them that if they have a reason they want to talk to me, please send me an email about it.

Most people never reply, so I presume they are just trying to bump up their numbers.

Or maybe, like me, they accidentally clicked the button that sends out contact requests to all (or maybe just a lot of?) your "suggested contacts". D'oh!

Connections don't mean anything except for raising your own profile and improving your position in search results. I have 939 contacts on LinkedIn right now and my experience has not changed from when I had 50.

Large list of contacts in your industry allows you to quickly vet new contact or prove to new contacts that you are not a newbie in your industry.

That's how connections who you do not personally know - help.

#4 already kind of exists. You can annotate every contact on LinkedIn with how you met, and all sorts of other context.

I agree with your overall point that they need to focus their product and drive it forward more than they've done in the past. I have some friends there and from what it sounds like, that's exactly what they're doing.

Re-vamping Groups, re-vamping mobile, cutting out dark patterns (e.g. they've reduced email volume almost 60% I believe through a regulation mechanism that they call Air Traffic Controller).

How do you annotate contacts? I see you can add tags to them. Is that how you are doing it?

When you go to someone's profile and you're connected to them, there's a section called "Relationship". On there you can add tags, notes, or reminders. That's what I'm talking about.

I think you're using tags, but notes are also a great way to annotate contacts.

Again, I personally don't use these features that much, but I just wanted to point out that they do exist and people can probably get some significant value out of them. Perhaps part of it is a discover problem?

LinkedIn has been focusing on too many far-flung 'features' without a plan for tying them together into a seamless experience. The current cluttered site is the outcome of such disjointed thinking. They want people to come to the site and 'engage,' but then they also encourage alot of low-quality content on the site, along with sprinkles of irrelevant ads on top.

At the end of the day, the CEO is responsible for this mess. He's never at a loss for encouraging buzzwords, but maybe it's time for a change and someone with new vision.

It struck me a couple years ago as a castle with 100 rooms and no hallways. It's a bit better now, but navigation still can get very tangled.

This isn't a bad article, but it's extremely one-sided, from the POV of tech employees, which are still the vast minority of workers. Yes, it's spammy and yes, they use dark patterns, and yes, there should have been some better ethical governance since the beginning, but it's not as bad at what it aims to do as a lot of people believe. Even if you just consider it a business card holder -- there's actual value there. Add in facilities to empower connections between people who don't know each other, or who only share connections, and it's pretty powerful. I think they can successfully navigate through this critical spot and emerge much stronger on the other side. They just need to refocus on what the core value propositions are.

I was coming to say this. From the article:

"Spotting the best talent is actually far easier with tools like Talentbin, Stack Overflow, and Github, which aggregate or facilitate positive interactions and allow skilled individuals to display their work — showing why they’re good at what they do."

So that covers technical people, technical people and, er, technical people. What if I want to find a PR Agency? Or a company to refurnish my office?

Or hire a PM? Or HR? Or marketing?

>Even if you just consider it a business card holder -- there's actual value there

Yes, but how much? $30BB, where it was last month? What about the $16BB it sits at today?

I think both figures overestimate the value.

I've had my fair share of LinkedIn hate in the past. Using it outside the tech industry is really useful though - it's almost like a GitHub profile in some circles.

Using it as an advertiser is something else altogether. Their advertising interface sucks but holy moly, it's the best business ad targeting platform in the world. People use it, that makes it valuable for advertising - that makes the company valuable. How valuable, not sure - but I think the tech industry doesn't really get LinkedIn so there's a lot of knee jerk bias.

Useful doesn't mean it can be monetized. Google has killed literally dozens of products that lots of people used, simply because they couldn't monetize them. Smaller companies do the same all the time.

Look no further than the source. Who is TC writing for? Certainly not my girlfriend. Certainly not the founder of my former marketing agency.

Yeah, but it's not really about the audience of the article, it's about the audience of LinkedIn.

Which is being portrayed as predominately tech-industry, when in reality the tech industry (where stackoverflow and github are relevant) is a small fraction of LinkedIn's market

I'm not so bearish on LinkedIn.

It serves a few useful purposes:

1 - Before any meeting I look to see if there's something I share in common (person, interest, job, etc) with the other person. This was especially important when I was in Sales.

2 - When I was job hunting, I did a lot of "Look up the job, then see if I knew someone who knew someone at the company" that would've been impossible without it.

3 - I use it for recruiting. The response rate is very low when HR uses it, but as the hiring manager it isn't too bad.

LinkedIn has the highest value users of any service - professionals making good money. If they can figure out good ways to monetize it, they'll blow through their current valuation issues.

You are not so bearish as a user, are you planing to invest though even at current valuation?

Good question. If I actively invested in individual tech stocks, I probably would. But that's a big if. :-) For now I'm talking like a researcher rather than a trader.

My investing strategy has been to invest in large indexes with low expense ratios. For diversification against my human capital, I slightly lean against tech (S&P over Nasdaq) and for personal reasons I try to get some overseas exposure.

I did at $103 through options and am currently up 45%.

I was in product at LinkedIn, and I thought this was spot on. LinkedIn is a two-sided platform. Increasingly the revenue model undermines user engagement. To some extent, one side no longer builds the other, one subtracts from the other. LinkedIn is a platform for spam more than it is a platform for content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market

The content platform was really engaging when influencers were posting and blogging frequently. Medium now seems to be the platform of choice. Not sure if opening up the content creation experience to all users "devalued" the platform or if it was the acquisition of Pulse or a summation of a bunch of factors that caused the decline. What's clear is that content platform definitely has taken a turn for the worse.

It sounds like you are suggesting a minimalist version of LinkedIn intended to break even [rather than VC-level profitable] is a good idea. ;)

Hah, fair point. I just think they've gone a little too far on the greed side. No doubt as part of being public.

I really like how every negative thing is rationalized away until shit hits the fan and then every negative thing becomes a reality because all of a sudden it gets reported. LinkedIn is still the same shitty service it was before. Move along. Nothing to see here. It's just before it was overvalued and overhyped.

LinkedIn is a great example of how your platform can be useful to people in spite of a horrible UI, bad infrastructure, and grossly inconsistent user experience.

I swear the amount of times I wasn't sure if I actually accepted or sent a connection request is way too high. The endorsements are begging to be rigged, and the website is absolutely dismal in terms of social functionality - it pales in comparison to almost every other social media platform.

The only reason it's still popular is because it doesn't need to be any better to do the one thing it does best, which is to be a search engine for recruiters.

That all being said, I maintain an active linkedin profile and I use it regularly.

I think endorsements are actually a non-product -- sort of like the "close doors" button on the elevator.

My sense is that LinkedIn doesn't use endorsements in any other dimension of the site. It's just an engagement tool, so that people are on the site longer. That way they see more ads -- and are perhaps more likely to tweak their profiles.

I work at LinkedIn, we actually do use skills in a number of places (like the job pages); typically they are used more of a "here's how your skills compare to other people's" and less of a "you'll get hired if you have skill X listed". We know people can game them, so we try to only use their skills in ways that would be helpful if their skills are actually real to give less incentive for people to lie.

As implemented, they're basically useless. Asking "does X know about Y?" without verifying that I have any knowledge of Y myself doesn't do much. My dentist has endorsed me for things like "Cloud", and while he's a great guy and good at his job he can barely work his iPad.

I personally view those as noise at best and very skeptically at worst -- if someone has a bunch of endorsements for a particular skill I suspect they actually don't know much about it.

> if someone has a bunch of endorsements for a particular skill I suspect they actually don't know much about it.

I disagree with your reasoning here. While I agree endorsements are useless, I also believe that makes them more or less meaningless. I don't think jumping to conclusions based on endorsements, weather positive or negative, is a good idea.

FWIW, I still get value from LinkedIn. The best parts for me:

- one place for contact information

- job offers (most of the ones I receive are relevant)

- being able to "check people out", i.e. see where they have worked before, common contacts etc

I'm in Sweden (if that's relevant). I wrote more about it here: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or-bad/

I concur, most of the job offers I get are relevant and some of the big companies' internal recruiters contact me via LinkedIn: Google, Facebook, Amazon. It may not be perfect but it's far from useless. My impression is that it allows skilled recruiters to make solid connections and lookups. Poor recruiters will always be poor matchers and spam folks.

Yet the alternatives the article proposes are mostly for coders and tech folks. Business people only have LinkedIn. However bad LinkedIn can be, it's still the only tool around for some people. I think the problem is that for some jobs is very difficult to show your skills. A good finance guy has a very hard time showing off vs say, a programmer - there is no github or SOF for finance guys, question is: can there be one?

I have a LinkedIn profile because I was led, back in the day, to think that was the best way to put myself out there for businesses to find and hire me. I don't think I've gotten more than 50 views in the entire time I've had the thing, which is blown away by my personal website (which is still a tiny number of views, but swamps LinkedIn).

That and every time I connect with someone or make the mistake of clicking on their emails, I end up with 20 more bloody emails over the next few days for job offers I don't want (drywall contractor this past one, no joke) or people I don't know who are trying to connect with me (most likely recruiters).

I really don't know why I don't delete the thing.

On the flip side, I get a ton of views of my profile. I indiscriminately accept recruiter requests, because it increases the spread of second and third-degree connections who'll see me in searches. I get two orders of magnitude more profile views than does my website, and I've turned off every email LinkedIn wants to send me.

But, then, I'm a consultant, and having people find me is important. A lot of the messages I get are useless--but enough aren't that I effectively don't need to advertise.

I agree. I'm also a consultant and my biggest disappointment is how LinkedIn is aligned almost exclusively with full-time employment. It's really a waste of my money as I get all my gigs via real-world connections from previous clients. I've been wishing for years that LinkedIn would add more consulting-specific features (this is the era of the "gig economy" after all, right?) but it doesn't happen. I only maintain a profile because in the U.S. not having one means you don't exist (to too many people anyway).

LinkedIn is actually going into precisely that sector, but it hasn't been publicized very well. See LinkedIn Profinder.

How much of that communication would you say is useful? If it's not prying too much, how much of that would you say leads to actual business?

It's no worse than most sales channels, but my situation has been complicated in that I haven't really had the available bandwidth for more work. I spend maybe twenty minutes a week on LinkedIn and I ignore every message that doesn't mention a walrus (my profile explicitly says "mention a walrus"), so my effort level is very low.

I live in the US. I get connection requests from Nigerian princesses and London bankers. Not sure which set of people would be more fun to hang out with on a Saturday afternoon.

This is really fascinating to me. Since they are fraudulent anyway, why wouldn't they just say they are a recruiter from Google and get you to accept their connection request. Do they get more responses by claiming they are Nigerian Princesses?

No, they get less, but they are all qualified leads!

There was a study (sorry I can't find the link) few months ago that discussed how spam looks bad intentionally. The idea is to weed out the smart or even average guy and just get the person that are a good target for this kind of con.

I think you're looking for "Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?" by Microsoft Research.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1677...

Edit: Here's a particularly illuminating quote: "By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor."

When you try to delete it, that's when the nightmare starts.

Would you mind explaining why? I've been considering deleting mine for quite some time now. My google+ profile gets substantially more views, and I rarely use that either.

Well I've never done it, but my understanding is that they will never stop emailing you.

"LinkedIn is not, in fact, a business network — individuals on LinkedIn represent themselves, not their businesses."

Accordingly, business attire is not, in fact, business attire, since people are dressed up as people not as businesses.

What a waste of bandwidth...

I didn't get that either. What would a "proper" business network look like? Everyone connects with other companies' presences through their own company's presence?

Similarly, the advice offered by the article was vague pablum. One example:

>The company needs to simplify its number of revenue streams and make sure that they work in concert with its user engagement and growth strategy, rather than in conflict.

Sure. How? Kind of like saying "the company needs to increase revenue by making more money".

The revenue thing is addressing a conflict in LinkedIn's approach. The value in the platform is the users but their monetization of that platform tends to drive off users (due to being spammy). So they are saying they need to find a monetization system that encourages user growth rather than detracts from it.

You may not agree with that, but that's their logic. It's not quite as tautological as you make it seem.

I understand what the article was saying and I don't disagree. In fact, I'm saying it's obvious. Your explanation effectively repeated it, using equally vague terms.

And that was my point. The author says that LinkedIn needs to find a completely different revenue model in midstream that works for them and that its users love. Do you think there's really a revelation in there? Do you think that's never occurred to LinkedIn (or anyone who's paying attention)?

Making vague and obvious statements as a commentator is also easy. For the article to have value, it should have offered some concrete examples of how these problems could be solved.

I agree, the author confuses "business to business" with "business related" or perhaps more specifically "not a personal/recreational network".

Unless youre a fashion model?

LinkedIn's job search interface is pretty bad for tech employees. There's so many better options out there. But there's nothing better for getting quality recruiters to notice you than LinkedIn.

It might be great if your goal is to get "recruiters to notice you" which might be OK if you don't already have a job (it's better than nothing). But in my experience, recruiter attention is insufficient if your goal is getting a _better_ job. I tried the LinkedIn thing for a while (and still maintain an account there, because who knows?), but it basically resulted in a lot of recruiter contacts and plenty of interviews, but apparently not a lot of companies that were actually serious about hiring. They seem to mostly be the dog jobs too, the crap "opportunities" that employers couldn't immediately fill so they have to use recruiters. And in this job market, if you can't immediately fill a position, you ought to take a good look at what's wrong with that position.

You'll also have a hard time using it to change job function or for a career upgrade. If your profile says "Senior Software Engineer" you'll just get a bunch of recruiters spamming you to be "Senior Software Engineer" at some other company. They'll never reach out to you and say, "hey how would you like to try being tech lead, or managing a team of engineers?" The site's obviously automated "suggested jobs" are also carbon copies of whatever it is you're already doing, too.

Needless to say, I don't bother much with LinkedIn anymore.

Recruiters can get very spammy and they immensely difficult to deal with on sites like Dice, Indeed, and Monsters of the web. On LinkedIn, the seem to be far more capable and targeted to my interests. Companies like Google and Amazon have contacted me through LinkedIn as well.

There are any number of other services for tech employees. Interviewing.io and triplebyte being excellent alternatives.

I've never really found LinkedIn useful for recruiting, at least within fields I've ever cared about (startups, security, infrastructure, satcom).

It is sometimes useful for sales/partnerships. "Who do I know at BigCo, or who do I know who can introduce me to BigCo".

LI is irreplaceable right now as a business networking and lead tool, but maddening and getting worse daily in terms of UX. I already pay hundreds on it and ready to pay thousands as it's easily worth that to my business.

But I'm spending that money grudgingly and always reluctant to upgrade because although it saves me time and effort overall, it also wastes my time every day due to crappy UX, badly implemented SPA type functionality, and hateful mobile experience if you don't want to use their app (LI: I will never use your app if it needs access to my contacts list, particularly given the way you leverage that valuable and private info).

That's a really really stupid position for an incumbent to put themselves in as they will inevitably get their lunch eaten by an upstart at some point.

I mostly use LinkedIn to snoop on people I went to high school with.

LinkedIn uses too many dark patterns. I'd like to "link" with recruiters but not have them pollute my graph. They really have pooped up the whole thing.

I think the author just made this up in an hour with some weak arguments.

No doubt LinkedIn is becoming very spammy from all the puzzles and (gasp) personal stuff like 'My son-in-law is having an operation, please pray for him'.

However, the value that most people derive from it and the ease with which you can ignore the spam will keep it being used until there is non-spammy, non-recruiter funded and 'open networking' alternate.

I click on LinkedIn every day. I like the news feed, my network provides useful stuff to read that I wouldn't find otherwise.

I have connections that are more appropriate than on Facebook because our relationships are professional social not friend social. I don't want their baby pictures & holiday photos but I do want to hear about their business and comment on their business writing.

I've started a private slack group for my most active friends and business associates.

I like that better than linkedin.

Good for you. Lots of my associations are pretty loose though. I have no way to influence their decisions. I'm connected with them on LI because they were already there.

I only joined because my University recommended it but then I found out I liked it.

This reads like a hit piece for some reason.

"LinkedIn is now, at best, a business card holder. At worst, it’s a delivery service for spam."

I see that, but I also don't find any of the critiques particularly egregious.

They're all just a tad limited in scope. I guess it makes sense since I would think TC's primary demographic is technical people (I can't back this up though, may not be accurate). In general though, I agree.

It's almost as if the media wants to see the downfall of tech companies so they can continue writing about all the doom and gloom and predicting a bubble popping (when the data thus far does not show a "pop" coming per se).

modern journalism

aka marketing/advertising (usually)

When I still had a LinkedIn account, I noticed that being an attorney on LinkedIn made me a magnet for scammers -- mostly folks attempting to get me to deposit bad checks in my trust account. They were a couple steps up from the typical 419 scam, though fortunately were still easily detected. Between that and the crappy articles that people would post in my stream, I eventually decided that I got less than zero value from LinkedIn membership.

I would hate it if LinkedIn fails to be successful as I'm a frequent IN user. I agree with the fact that 40+ people tend to reply sooner than others. This is one of the reasons I'm on IN as my target audience is on it.

Linkedin is a necessary evil. HR uses it to check out my references and that's about it. I visit it only when I need to find a job - to update the details on my last job. It's OK, just don't give them your phone number or (real) email address and you won't get hassled.

Well, I keep hearing people say things like "I hate LinkedIn" or "LinkedIn is so annoying" randomly at work or in business travel.

It's a small data point, but it seems that perhaps there is a negative sentiment growing around LinkedIn.

This article actually prompted me to finally get around to deleting my LinkedIn account

LinkedIn's best shot at remaining relevant and growing is if they can turn Pulse into something businesses can get real value from.