People have been complaining about LinkedIn for years but in case you haven’t really been paying attention or listening, or you are kind of a slacker about paying attention as I sometimes am, and maybe perhaps have been needlessly building up your LinkedIn profile and gathering contacts and making yourself look really awesome on there, let me tell you something: you should stop.
LinkedIn is like the worst of Facebook (competing with everyone else you’re connected to) plus a permanent job interview. Nobody needs that, man. Nobody.
I have had a LinkedIn account since the beginning, literally. Like I had an account for years before anybody else I knew did. Because of a random request from an acquaintance. Now it’s this whole big deal. And do you know how much it has helped me? Not at all. I have not received one job interview because of it, nor have I put anybody else in touch through it who has (at least not that I know of – if I have, please enlighten me!)
All that I get out of LinkedIn is mildly entertaining updates on who is looking at my profile.
It’s bad enough that people will google you and read anything you’ve ever put online about yourself before hiring you or dating you. Do we really need a service set up specifically for this purpose? I like the idea of having some kind of way to actually refer human beings you know to each other to help people with job searches – in fact I tried to do an Indiegogo fundraiser for this very idea, but nobody was interested – but that’s not what LinkedIn is. LinkedIn is about:
1. Collecting as many contacts as possible.
2. Trying to make yourself sound cool by spending too much time crafting the descriptions of your jobs.
3. Listing a crazy amount of skills from the searchable skill list provided.
4. Stalking other people.
Honestly, the world of job searches and hiring needs something much MORE personal than we’re doing now, not less so. I am thinking of deleting my profile, since I have never once found it useful. I realize if I do I have to be hardcore about it, so I have been hesitating, but every day I am more annoyed by its existence.
Do you agree or do you have an actual story about LinkedIn being helpful and useful to you or someone else who is a real, live person? Tell me what you think in the comments. Maybe I will have an epiphany.
Yeah, I was looking for a job for a loooooonnnnngggg time, and LinkedIn did f*ck all to help. Of course, maybe you aren’t taken seriously when one of your contacts is a self employed “King”.
I get 338.654 thousand LinkedIn invites every 9 minutes. I am yet to cave. I’m not professional in any way, why would I join a network for professionals?