Ultimately, if you're not looking for work, there's zero value in LinkedIn. Realistically, most people choose or need to look for a new job eventually and in that scenario, LinkedIn is by far the most effective platform to increase your odds on finding a new job.
Tons of courses and posts say that LinkedIn is their most effective Lead gen model.
I'm yet to make it work for me, but it seems like it works for them.
Networking is wildly better, but you know what makes it easier? Having a Rolodex of people I’ve worked with that shows where they’re currently at.
My last two jobs have also come from LinkedIn. Exactly how am i supposed to find remote jobs?
And I have been working for 30 years…
I created my LinkIn account in 2012. By then I had been a developer for 15 years in Atlanta and knew all of the local recruiters and had met some in person. For the next 8 years, LinkedIn really didn’t serve a purpose. When I looked for a job in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018, I just reached out to my network and interviews and offers fell into my lap. Admittedly they were just regular old enterprise dev jobs in Atlanta.
But in 2020, things changed. AWS reached out to me about a remote position in the consulting department (ProServe full time with the standard four year package) and after that my last two jobs have been based on either targeted outreach on LinkedIn where I was an industry expert in a niche of AWS that most people don’t have (2023) or an internal recruiter reaching out to me on LinkedIn 2024.
Saying linked in is good for jobs is like saying tinder is good for dating, or facebook is good for socialising. It sure can be, but the quality and substance of what youre after does need to factor in, and so does the time you spent there over higher value time sinks. For me, tinder does not serve my needs, and neither does linked in. Both offer poor signal to noise and terrible time economy.
They don't have to do that. Apparently there are services which link any known email address, mobile phone etc. to your LinkedIn account through a browser addon even when you didn't hand these over to LinkedIn.
I know because my mom was called several times on her mobile phone (which has a number not in any phone book) by a very aggressive and disrespectful recruiter looking for me while I even was not looking for a job. (her first initial and mine are the same).
Only when I threatened him to report him and his company to LinkedIn and the authorities, and blocking him on LinkedIn the calls stopped.
But they might restore service even though the courts won’t “make” them.
The point here is that, if we don't exercise the tools available to us to have a human being judge whether Microsoft's behavior is unjust, then we'll never know if a human being would have judged Microsoft's behavior (and terms of service) as unjust. Is LinkedIn summarily destroying one's 'Rolodex' an unlawful act, regardless of whether their boilerplate permits it? One could easily speculate that LinkedIn's terms are a one-sided contract with intolerable terms that exclusively benefit themselves to the harm of the other party, and a judge might well agree if presented such an argument. We'll never know unless people try, though :)
ps. Not particularly relevant, but it came up in research, so:
> Jaffe was asked by defense counsel, "Did you care how he obtained it?" and he answered, "I don't recall thinking that at the time, no sir." Defense counsel then asked, "... all you wanted was the information, and you did not care how it was obtained?" To which Jaffe responded, "Well, I certainly didn't expect him to murder anybody for it." TRM 161. Casper testified that when he handed Jaffe the rolodex file stolen from Wolstencroft's desk Jaffe "was rather elated."
— United States v. Payner, 434 F. Supp. 113 (N.D. Ohio 1977) footnote 34
Could also use a tool like n8n instead of Clay or build your own system to read the csv and make api calls to enrichment service
LinkedIn harvested peoples contacts under the guise that they were going to help you find connections, but instead they spammed your entire contact list through their outlook plugin and now when you try to get your lists and contacts out they make it extremely painful.
Again, I think you'd benefit from researching the Cambridge Analytica scandal to understand what's going on here. There was a time when social media worked according to the intuition you're describing, where you should be able to export from the platform any information you can see on the platform, and it led to results that the public and regulators really did not like. Companies like Cambridge Analytica were able to build detailed profiles on Person X, without Person X's consent or knowledge, simply because Person Y who happened to be friends with them agreed to share data with a Facebook quiz. So now that's not how things are done.
LinkedIn isn’t protecting people from misuse here; it’s preventing portability. If the concern were outreach consent, that could be handled with clearer user controls. Blocking access entirely keeps relationships dependent on the platform, which conveniently aligns with their business incentives.
I have personally referred 6 people who I know are qualified. Only two got interviews and no offers.
Hell my offer to referral ratio was 50% at AWS. The job market really sucks right now
Your real colleague list is well under 100 ppl, stop adding mere acquaintances.
But they are likely orienting themselves with GDPR and similar laws around the world, under which data exports and portability only include your own data, and specifically exclude that of other "data subjects".
This is one of the few areas where I think that GDPR may be too strict.
FistfulOfHaws•1mo ago
After viewing a 100 or so profiles, I was logged out of LinkedIn and when I tried to log back in my account was suspended. I was in LinkedIn jail for like a week, and when I was finally able to login again I got the automatic tool warning and had to agree that I wouldn’t use one again (even though I never had used one).
convolvatron•1mo ago
you have been suspended for the use of automation
jmye•1mo ago
> of course for some reason that doesn't really work, the keep coming back
What the heck is that about? It’s deeply frustrating.