"Oh you work on Toptal? I have a business proposal for you. What if I use your profile and do all the work, and give you 30%!" I get a few of those a week.
It is unethical, but the entire article is designed to convince people LinkedIn is outdated. It’s written on a blog that has 0 other submissions to hacker news. It was obviously a fluff piece written by someone trying to disrupt professional networks.
Webflow seems to be a Wix competitor - and in spite of her mentioning it's "template showcase" in the article as example of some sort of next generation LinkedIn community replacement - it's really a place to buy templates - and I would bet that no one has ever "built an audience there" much less gotten a gig (that's not directly related to a template they sold (or gave away)).
One of the challenges with that is that, to the degree I "like" either Facebook or LinkedIn, I actually like the fact that one is mostly a personal social network and the other is pretty much just a Rolodex for professional contacts. I'm probably not alone in trying to keep the two spheres largely separate (though I don't on Twitter).
Well yes, they'd have to do the Google Plus Circles sort of thing where your different friends are placed into different groups, so you can keep your Professional and Personal facebook separate-but-linked.
And yeah, Twitter is the water-cooler/street-corner, it conflates the professional and the personal in its culture.
No. The reason for that was that Google is Google and in Google the only thing that matters is launching new things[0] and keeping gmail/gsuite[1] and the ads[2] running.
You might think I'm exaggerating, but frankly, even the search product has seen a massive decline since 2009.
[0]: based on testimonials from googlers and xooglers here on HN.
In all fairness, Google+ failed for a lot of reasons--starting with the "Google" part. But Circles was actually a pretty nice concept that I wish Facebook had to separate my friend friends from people who are more like professional acquaintances.
There's probably a risk there of Facebook being perceived as doing something too "niche", when their pitch has always been to be everything to everyone.
In any case, given Facebook's long-standing issues with privacy controls and user trust, it would probably be a super bad look trying to also take on LinkedIn's ultra-sleazy business model of selling access to search tools, info on who looked at your profile, etc.
I only used linked in as a resume i could refer people to and occasionally for networking with other professionals. what linkedin actually became is a way to get tons of unsolicited offers from headhunters and the resume component lost significant value because of that. I deleted my profile but there's no undoing it because of thoroughly it got crawled. I regret using it.
whatever new system comes it better have stronger privacy controls and more free form resumes.
First, the analysis is woefully limited to specialized aspects pertaining to only the tech industry. A lot of the disruptive forces linked in the article are highly ill specific to very limited situations.
Second, the analysis doesn’t explain why it’s bad that LinkedIn appeals to businesses and recruiters. Why is that a problem? It appeals so well to them that basically all companies are on LinkedIn in some way, and that means that young people coming into the marketplace will go there to find work. They don’t have to enjoy it or even log in that often to justify keeping an active account.
Personally, I know at least a few people who do not have a Facebook account at all, but they do have a LinkedIn, because that’s where the jobs are.
Finally, making the assumption that LinkedIn itself won’t change over time is completely shortsighted. It’s owned by one of the better managed companies out there (Microsoft) with tons of resources to make changes.
Accusing LinkedIn of being a relic of the past is like accusing Azure DevOps of being exactly the same as the old TeamForge Services - a woefully outdated view that only someone with zero recent exposure would take.
It doesn’t matter that the LinkedIn feed is a stupid waste of time, the jobs platform and InMail are the bread and butter of the platform and the reason why anyone’s there in the first place.
And by the way, if you’re looking for a job, give the Premium free trial a chance. The extra pieces of data you get on each listing can be really useful (although potentially not $40 a month useful), and there isn’t really another job website that can give them to you.
I find LinkedIn reasonably useful as a professional Rolodex. I've never fleshed out a resume on it and I mostly just ignore emails that come through it. But, then, I haven't gotten a job other than directly through personal contacts in decades.
ADDED: To your broader points, a resume (especially for experienced people) has long been one of those things that you need to have and that people may use to roughly gauge potential fit. But very few people are making decisions based on only a resume, especially for senior positions. And portfolios, in whatever form, have always tended to trump resumes in certain fields. (Which can admittedly be problematic in software because some have portfolios they can share and other, potentially equally skilled developers, do not.)
I use it in the same Rolodex fashion. I feel it also adds weight to a resume. If someone can find connections of actual people at other companies that I used to work with, it validates my resume, at least at a high-level.
I've received countless job opportunities through LinkedIn. My current position, I reached out to a former colleague to join that company via LinkedIn. It worked well.
> Second, the analysis doesn’t explain why it’s bad that LinkedIn appeals to businesses and recruiters. Why is that a problem?
I will admit that I am probably an outlier here, but I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago once I realized that the only thing I was getting out of it was recruiter spam. No real upside, only downside.
My use case for having a Linkedin account is generally keeping track of where people I've worked with in the past are now, and checking out companies/people before I speak to them about something.
TBH I get the recruiter spam that I'm sure most get, but it's easily ignored, and not really that invasive.
> Personally, I know at least a few people who do not have a Facebook account at all, but they do have a LinkedIn, because that’s where the jobs are.
I’m one of those. I’m on linked in because that’s where I can connect with others in my industry. I don’t care what they do for vacation or their political views but I am interested in their take on issues we’re mutually encountering.
I’m also not looking for work for me but I’m on the lookout for talented folks and former members of my team. If they need a role or if something sounds like them, I can link them up
> The extra pieces of data you get on each listing can be really useful (although potentially not $40 a month useful), and there isn’t really another job website that can give them to you.
Could you provide example(s) of what the extra data are, and how these data are useful for a job search?
I did a year ago and was pretty disappointed. It might be my location or my niche, but it didn't really help me in any way.
It actually matches a certain pattern of uselessness from LinkedIn for my purposes (generating leads for freelance jobs). I get notifications saying "23 people saw your profile this week" - and none contacted me, so are you just rubbing it in? It would be useful if it tried to tell me something about why they don't ping me, but as far as I remember there was nothing of the sort. And of course the sales product is extra (and extra-pricy) and the ads are extra (and does anyone actually look at them?)...
> It doesn’t matter that the LinkedIn feed is a stupid waste of time
Over time I found it to be very useful. It's my chance to see what's going on in my network and connect with 1st or even 2nd level contacts on specific topics like: events, product releases, partnerships, awards etc. It's very easy to use any of these topics as opportunities to approach somebody via the post itself. In 99% of the cases you get a response. So more than a job seeking platform, it is a business platform for the employed.
Just to add to this, I am not convinced that resume's are going to die any day soon, but in the meantime, linkedin has some excellent ways to show skills outside of the resume with their feature of people underlinig skills of other users. Why did the author of this post not adress that?
For that matter, depending on your field, you don't even need to search actively... just clicking the "allow recruiters to contact me" option opens a virtual floodgate... though I do wish I could filter by salary and location in terms of those contacting me.
Ditto. It's mostly Indian head-hunter types offering contract jobs in cities that I don't live in. It's gotten to the point where I used a modified Slashdot checklist to reply to any direct emails I get.
Took longer to find one than I expected: https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3060655&cid=41058673 from a discussion of using a sandbox for spambots in 2012.
The beginning of it reads as follows: "Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam."
I'm surprised why people here hate on LinkedIn so much. I'm able to find and contact professionals working on very niche fields (the ones with little online presence) and follow their latest work. This is access I've previously never had.
I'm not a developer so I don't get a lot of recruiter spam, but the ones that do contact me usually have very relevant openings for my experience.
It's the HN echo chamber at work that finds little value in social networks targeting non-devs. I don't use LinkedIn myself but know lots that do and most do find work and opportunities through it, otherwise they wouldn't bother using it.
In a decade plus of my career, four of my most significant jobs, including my current role have come from being sourced/recruited on LinkedIn.
I hate being on any social networks, and I feel like LinkedIn has declined in quality over the years, but I stay with LinkedIn.
The primary reason is that you never know when you are going to be thrust into the job market, and its the key place to find future opportunities, identify gatekeepers and leverage your professional rolodex when an opportunity to earn an income is on the line.
You pretty much must have a LinkedIn profile. It really isn't optional. I think most companies would see the lack of one as a red flag, and a sign you're hiding something.
I've never had a LI profile (nor FB nor G+ nor myspace etc). I've never had a problem finding or getting a job. Both from the candidate side and the hiring side, it seems pretty optional to me.
Maybe. I find it hard to believe people do it because it "looks bad" not to have LI. Rather, people do LI because it's easier to let them come to you, even if you have to deal with recruiter spam along the way.
I’m sure I could build a personal web cv, optimize for SEO, pay for hosting, etc but LI has all of that plus the ability to dig into connections, and connections connections. It’s also the default sourcing database for recruiters to find professionals. If I need a job, I flip that switch that says “I’m looking for a job” and let the roles roll in.
I don't think they meant they are able to find 100% of those people. Just that they are able to find some, which is more than the none they could find before.
My main issue is they seem to be reducing functionality, even when you pay for it.
- Why can't I see the path to other users anymore? That used to be a thing you always got. Now sometimes even a level 2 connection page won't tell you who the common friend is.
- Why can't I categorize my contacts anymore? There's still how-tos about how to do this, and they for some odd reason removed the ability to do this. LI is a much more promiscuous network than FB or others, so I need to be able to throw all the recruiters in one bucket, people I've worked with in another, and interesting people who've added me with zero other contact in yet another. I'm happy to spend the time doing the labelling, but I can't.
As someone hacking on a linkedin alternative as a side project to solve my own talent search problems, she's captured a lot of the rationale. Amazing.
It's not just linkedin, the whole concept of a resume was to facilitate an unskilled middle manager who could manage labor in a commoditized way. Today, hiring managers know what they want, and talent competes globally. Teenagers especially understand that the difference between them and their parents is they are entering into a global talent market with a steep distribution curve. Growing up with social media threw them into the world of elite competition that previously only ivy league students were exposed to (thanks, Zuck). Resumes can't capture the differentiation they need to compete and leverage their real skills.
The infrastructure around resumes was all about legitimizing that broker role for recruiters and enabling generalist HR managers, where those roles could be replaced by tech tomorrow, (or like 3-4 weeks, suppose I should launch).
If hiring managers know what they want, how do they find the person that has what they want?
Would that be...a distilled list of relevant skills and experience? How is a resume (digital or paper) not that? What exactly is your proposed alternative?
Also, you speak to global competition as if that’s a universal trait of most jobs. That doesn’t really line up to reality. Many or most jobs can’t be performed remotely, and many or most jobs located far away have local equivalents (i.e. it’s not worth moving hundreds of miles away to drive a bus or put up drywall).
The signalling piece is what's missing and what I think I've solved. My exact proposed alternative will just have to get launched and see if it flies.
Global competition for most jobs is very much a reality. I live in a country that spans an entire continent, as do americans. Many people cross continents and borders to get construction and trade jobs, which include driving heavy vehicles and hanging drywall, and the solution covers them as well. Exciting times.
I don't get this "resumes are so yesterday" thinking at all. They are a crucial tool for me in the hiring process. I can sift a pile of 20-30 resumes in maybe 10 minutes and determine with near certainty the 20% or so that are even worth contacting. Plus the resume is an excellent jumping-off point for further conversation.
Being able to write a reasonable essay may not differentiate you, but not being able to sure does.
> I can sift a pile of 20-30 resumes in maybe 10 minutes and determine with near certainty the 20% or so that are even worth contacting.
Devil's Advocate: Do you contact the bottom 80%? When you encounter a dud in the top 20%, do you consider that a potential failure in filtering, or do you say "thank god we filtered out the other 80% who must be worse than this candidate!"
It sounds to me like a process rife with feedback loops.
It hasn't been my role to handle contacts. I hope the org is sending out "position has been filled" courtesy letters, but as a candidate, I usually don't care unless it's a position I was particularly hopeful about.
To clarify, I don't consider anyone a "dud". I'll happily work with someone at any skill level as long as they want to learn and aren't a jerk. By "not worth contacting", I just mean that they're clearly dominated by the top 20% of the candidates, in terms of likely success in the role.
Is there noise in all of this? Sure. Am I a genius? Yes, but not when it comes to hiring. ;-)
I've been crapped on plenty by the hiring process (esp those FAANG weenies), so I try to be kind to everyone.
That's true. I'm making a guess based on the limited time I can spend--that's part of why resumes are so valuable.
In my limited experience, there tends to be a fairly pronounced cutoff below which candidates obviously lack the basic skills or inclination for the position, or even didn't bother to read the job spec at all.
Resumes can't capture the differentiation they need to compete and leverage their real skills.
This is a salient observation. The discussion mostly focuses on employer->employee mismatch, but this statement illustrates how the employee is also losing out (and in effect, all employers): Hidden skills, uncaptured by a traditional resume and hiring process, are never leveraged.
Mostly soft skills, I imagine, but the most important qualities to me as a hiring manager (communication, honesty, ability to learn new things with eagerness) aren't signals which can be derived with this process. We need a platform which highlights these skills in an indirect way, giving value to its users beyond acting as a professional virtue beacon.
But stuff like that is incredibly difficult to measure. I think the current approach would be that you get qualities like that verified by others and through a web of trust these verifications might mean something to a potential employer. But this is something that's on LinkedIn already, isn't it?
Your LinkedIn feed must be completely different than mine, because the shit I see shared there by monetized narcissists ("influencers") is far worse than even my Facebook feed.
EightFold.ai [0] is the most uneasy LinkedIn replacement I've come across, by far. They seem to be utilising similar tricks of trade used in targeted advertising, except now the developers are the adverts themselves and the keywords are bought by the recruiters.
The claimed AI based engine from the co-founders previously behind adtech at bloomreach and newsfeed at facebook make it all the more spooky.
Bullshit. Linkedin today is more useful than ever. It’s a way to bypass hr filter - first you go there to find companies you want to work at, then you find someone who already works there. Contact them. Get hired. This is how I found my current job.
That's pretty cool that it worked. If some random person on LinkedIn was like "hello can I get a job with you" I'd probably block them, but you must have a better way of saying it than I can think of.
I pretty much hate cold calls from people who want to have coffee or whatever. Even if they happen to be one of the 100,000 people who happened to go to the same school as I did or whatever. I won't say I'll never respond. Maybe if they want to chat about an article I wrote of whatever and ask me some questions about my work or what I know about some specific opening while they're at it. But, if I don't know them, that's pretty much where the conversation would end. I'm not going to give them a recommendation.
I've noticed that smaller, targeted communities are on the rise. This thread [0] recently caught my attention and introduced me to Mighty Networks [1] which is software to enable these smaller niche communities. This is what comes to mind when I think of the "next professional network", even if it isn't some large centralized product that "everyone is on."
I've noticed this too. In a way it's sort of a resurgence from the 2000s when independently-run forums ruled the day, but there's a different flavor to it because they tend to grow more from word of mouth. Slack groups not being indexed in Google search is surely part of that. This is generally seen as a feature, though, not a bug.
The problem with the examples the author shared is that they only work in professions where your work and skills are easily demonstrable, aka "portfolio jobs".
How would you demonstrate a skilled manager's capabilities without a resume that shows rapid advancement and dealing with increasingly higher responsibilities?
Right, and Second Life was supposed to be a social gathering place and not at all a place for penises of every type and description to be put on display. Attempting to predict how a social network will behave is utterly futile.
This is not a genuine post. This is a thinly-veiled informercial.
She is an angel investor and owns a fund that invests in the type of professional networks she is promoting. She is even an angel investor for a company that she directly promotes in the post (Webflow).
LinkedIn is sufficient the way it currently is.
1. Connect and contact professional peers
2. Contact recruiters
3. Display bare minimum work experience and look up this information of peers
4. Link to specialized work and portfolio e.g. github
That covers the majority of consumer use cases and anything more complicates the website.
I completely agree that this person should have been more forthcoming about their own affiliation.
I think there are definitely issues with LinkedIn though.
What I don't like about LinkedIn is how scammy it feels. They've tried to get me to enter my e-mail password in the past so they could get all my contacts... No thanks. Then there's the issue of being contacted by recruiters all the time even though I have my profile set to not looking for a job. I also wish there was a way to also say "not willing to relocate" (is there?).
Lastly, I think the website could be more streamlined/simplified and better looking. That pic she posted from the LinkedIn interface in 2003. I like it better than the way the website looks now. So simple and straightforward.
IMO, LinkedIn is "ripe for disruption". It's coasting on the network effect. The network effect is a powerful thing, but it didn't stop MySpace from getting killed despite its 100 million users.
When my last startup was struggling to hit our growth goals after closing our series A round, I started formulating a theory: You can build pretty much any business if you have a large following on social media. I started thinking about this when someone told me that Tesla has no marketing budget and relies completely on Twitter and PR form Elon Musk.
So I decided to give it a try with my new startup. We setup ad campaigns to ensure we had a traditional marketing channel that we could scale and then I started posting on LinkedIn. The results have been mind blowing. In 7 months I went form 1,000 followers to over 30,000 followers[0]. I was just named #4 in LinkedIn's Top Voices for 2019 for Software Development.
A single post that goes viral on LinkedIn can generate $500,000-$2M in new sales opportunities for us and it costs us nothing. By developing a social media presence, we've been able to grow our company to $2M in annualized revenue (we aren't SaaS, so it's not ARR) without any outside funding. And we are profitable.
Enjoyed reading this. How much did you have to spend on your initial ad campaign (or was that solely through content creation)? On a quick test I found the CPC and CPM rates to be insanely high especially if you target highly paid people.
We started testing paid ads on LinkedIn and Facebook. We spent about $500/month to test. Just to clarify, this was to find customers for our product/service, not to acquire followers. Growing social media followers was only through making posts on LinkedIn.
I started by accepting every connection I received. In month 5 I switch the default "Connect" button in my profile to follow because I was at 20,000 connections. LinkedIn has a max of 30K connections.
Sometimes when you're having a hard time getting through a piece of writing, it's because the writer is so masterful, each word so rich with meaning, each turn of phrase so unusual and yet so apt, that you have to acknowledge a shining genius far beyond your own. This is not one of those times.
Professional networks are stupid. It's an HR circle jerk but everyone is expected to have a glowing profile just for "reasons". Shitty recruiters love it though. LinkedIn is terrible at trying to get your contact list and the fraudulently email you saying a contact wants to connect. It's a complete waste of time. My recommendation is to use when searching for a job then immediately wipe your account. Plus some bosses monitor it to see if you are looking. It's a lose lose for individuals.
linkedIn is so terrible. The facebook timeline really killed it IMO. Its full of 'consultants' publishing their worthless brainfarts and some feel good messages about work.
urks. i quit it a while ago and i am very happy with it. I honestly was reluctant at first because I run my own business and thought it might be necessary, but quitting it didn't impact my business at all...
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadFraudulent LinkedIn profiles are a big problem, too.
I get a few of these each week:
"I came across your profile and thought we might mutually benefit from connecting. I help business generate 1,000 high quality leads a month..."
For posterity can you link to her connection to webflow?
It doesn’t change the quality of her argument.
Facebook's main layout is already very professional-looking (except for the ads and games), and they market it for internal social networks.
Bolting on resumes and job searching, letting users have a professional face to their page... wouldn't be a huge stretch.
And yeah, Twitter is the water-cooler/street-corner, it conflates the professional and the personal in its culture.
You might think I'm exaggerating, but frankly, even the search product has seen a massive decline since 2009.
[0]: based on testimonials from googlers and xooglers here on HN.
[1][2]: based on observations.
In any case, given Facebook's long-standing issues with privacy controls and user trust, it would probably be a super bad look trying to also take on LinkedIn's ultra-sleazy business model of selling access to search tools, info on who looked at your profile, etc.
whatever new system comes it better have stronger privacy controls and more free form resumes.
There’s no way you can get “crawled” if your settings are correct.
First, the analysis is woefully limited to specialized aspects pertaining to only the tech industry. A lot of the disruptive forces linked in the article are highly ill specific to very limited situations.
Second, the analysis doesn’t explain why it’s bad that LinkedIn appeals to businesses and recruiters. Why is that a problem? It appeals so well to them that basically all companies are on LinkedIn in some way, and that means that young people coming into the marketplace will go there to find work. They don’t have to enjoy it or even log in that often to justify keeping an active account.
Personally, I know at least a few people who do not have a Facebook account at all, but they do have a LinkedIn, because that’s where the jobs are.
Finally, making the assumption that LinkedIn itself won’t change over time is completely shortsighted. It’s owned by one of the better managed companies out there (Microsoft) with tons of resources to make changes.
Accusing LinkedIn of being a relic of the past is like accusing Azure DevOps of being exactly the same as the old TeamForge Services - a woefully outdated view that only someone with zero recent exposure would take.
It doesn’t matter that the LinkedIn feed is a stupid waste of time, the jobs platform and InMail are the bread and butter of the platform and the reason why anyone’s there in the first place.
And by the way, if you’re looking for a job, give the Premium free trial a chance. The extra pieces of data you get on each listing can be really useful (although potentially not $40 a month useful), and there isn’t really another job website that can give them to you.
ADDED: To your broader points, a resume (especially for experienced people) has long been one of those things that you need to have and that people may use to roughly gauge potential fit. But very few people are making decisions based on only a resume, especially for senior positions. And portfolios, in whatever form, have always tended to trump resumes in certain fields. (Which can admittedly be problematic in software because some have portfolios they can share and other, potentially equally skilled developers, do not.)
I've received countless job opportunities through LinkedIn. My current position, I reached out to a former colleague to join that company via LinkedIn. It worked well.
I will admit that I am probably an outlier here, but I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago once I realized that the only thing I was getting out of it was recruiter spam. No real upside, only downside.
TBH I get the recruiter spam that I'm sure most get, but it's easily ignored, and not really that invasive.
Someone reaching out to you from a company is a huge leg up over applying directly somewhere: you already know they’re interested.
I’m not sure how they would have found me otherwise. My personal website? Through word of mouth and connections?
It’s only spam when you’re not considering a job change.
I’m one of those. I’m on linked in because that’s where I can connect with others in my industry. I don’t care what they do for vacation or their political views but I am interested in their take on issues we’re mutually encountering.
I’m also not looking for work for me but I’m on the lookout for talented folks and former members of my team. If they need a role or if something sounds like them, I can link them up
Could you provide example(s) of what the extra data are, and how these data are useful for a job search?
I did a year ago and was pretty disappointed. It might be my location or my niche, but it didn't really help me in any way.
It actually matches a certain pattern of uselessness from LinkedIn for my purposes (generating leads for freelance jobs). I get notifications saying "23 people saw your profile this week" - and none contacted me, so are you just rubbing it in? It would be useful if it tried to tell me something about why they don't ping me, but as far as I remember there was nothing of the sort. And of course the sales product is extra (and extra-pricy) and the ads are extra (and does anyone actually look at them?)...
Over time I found it to be very useful. It's my chance to see what's going on in my network and connect with 1st or even 2nd level contacts on specific topics like: events, product releases, partnerships, awards etc. It's very easy to use any of these topics as opportunities to approach somebody via the post itself. In 99% of the cases you get a response. So more than a job seeking platform, it is a business platform for the employed.
I'm not a developer so I don't get a lot of recruiter spam, but the ones that do contact me usually have very relevant openings for my experience.
Indeed and LinkedIn are basically the only job sites these days so you need an account to use it.
I wish I could block certain employers or be able to tell LinkedIn to quit telling me about jobs from certain companies.
I hate being on any social networks, and I feel like LinkedIn has declined in quality over the years, but I stay with LinkedIn.
The primary reason is that you never know when you are going to be thrust into the job market, and its the key place to find future opportunities, identify gatekeepers and leverage your professional rolodex when an opportunity to earn an income is on the line.
This is an extremely niche persona among professional careers, overrepresented on HN.
No, you find the people who are posting their latest work on LinkedIn. A lot of niche field professionals won't do that.
- Why can't I see the path to other users anymore? That used to be a thing you always got. Now sometimes even a level 2 connection page won't tell you who the common friend is.
- Why can't I categorize my contacts anymore? There's still how-tos about how to do this, and they for some odd reason removed the ability to do this. LI is a much more promiscuous network than FB or others, so I need to be able to throw all the recruiters in one bucket, people I've worked with in another, and interesting people who've added me with zero other contact in yet another. I'm happy to spend the time doing the labelling, but I can't.
The content discovery and discussion features really aren't very good relative to other niche sites either.
It's not just linkedin, the whole concept of a resume was to facilitate an unskilled middle manager who could manage labor in a commoditized way. Today, hiring managers know what they want, and talent competes globally. Teenagers especially understand that the difference between them and their parents is they are entering into a global talent market with a steep distribution curve. Growing up with social media threw them into the world of elite competition that previously only ivy league students were exposed to (thanks, Zuck). Resumes can't capture the differentiation they need to compete and leverage their real skills.
The infrastructure around resumes was all about legitimizing that broker role for recruiters and enabling generalist HR managers, where those roles could be replaced by tech tomorrow, (or like 3-4 weeks, suppose I should launch).
Would that be...a distilled list of relevant skills and experience? How is a resume (digital or paper) not that? What exactly is your proposed alternative?
Also, you speak to global competition as if that’s a universal trait of most jobs. That doesn’t really line up to reality. Many or most jobs can’t be performed remotely, and many or most jobs located far away have local equivalents (i.e. it’s not worth moving hundreds of miles away to drive a bus or put up drywall).
Global competition for most jobs is very much a reality. I live in a country that spans an entire continent, as do americans. Many people cross continents and borders to get construction and trade jobs, which include driving heavy vehicles and hanging drywall, and the solution covers them as well. Exciting times.
Being able to write a reasonable essay may not differentiate you, but not being able to sure does.
Devil's Advocate: Do you contact the bottom 80%? When you encounter a dud in the top 20%, do you consider that a potential failure in filtering, or do you say "thank god we filtered out the other 80% who must be worse than this candidate!"
It sounds to me like a process rife with feedback loops.
To clarify, I don't consider anyone a "dud". I'll happily work with someone at any skill level as long as they want to learn and aren't a jerk. By "not worth contacting", I just mean that they're clearly dominated by the top 20% of the candidates, in terms of likely success in the role.
Is there noise in all of this? Sure. Am I a genius? Yes, but not when it comes to hiring. ;-)
I've been crapped on plenty by the hiring process (esp those FAANG weenies), so I try to be kind to everyone.
I'm saying, you're taking 20%, claiming it's the top 20%, and saying they're the ones who will be successful in the role.
But if you're only ever talking to that "top 20%", then you don't know whether they're really the best.
In my limited experience, there tends to be a fairly pronounced cutoff below which candidates obviously lack the basic skills or inclination for the position, or even didn't bother to read the job spec at all.
This is a salient observation. The discussion mostly focuses on employer->employee mismatch, but this statement illustrates how the employee is also losing out (and in effect, all employers): Hidden skills, uncaptured by a traditional resume and hiring process, are never leveraged.
Mostly soft skills, I imagine, but the most important qualities to me as a hiring manager (communication, honesty, ability to learn new things with eagerness) aren't signals which can be derived with this process. We need a platform which highlights these skills in an indirect way, giving value to its users beyond acting as a professional virtue beacon.
I like LinkedIn because it a very low bs social network, and I would really appreciate for it to stay that way.
Your LinkedIn feed must be completely different than mine, because the shit I see shared there by monetized narcissists ("influencers") is far worse than even my Facebook feed.
http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
The claimed AI based engine from the co-founders previously behind adtech at bloomreach and newsfeed at facebook make it all the more spooky.
[0] https://eightfold.ai/technology/
If anyone reading this is ever in Santa Barbara, let me know if you want to grab a coffee or a beer! :)
Exactly.
Bravado is a professional network for sales professionals.
[0]: https://twitter.com/tylertringas/status/1202990875120459776 [1]: https://www.mightynetworks.com/
And the recruiter hate is also unjustified.
How would you demonstrate a skilled manager's capabilities without a resume that shows rapid advancement and dealing with increasingly higher responsibilities?
I'm not personally pining for a website that makes arbitrary ratings for such things.
She is an angel investor and owns a fund that invests in the type of professional networks she is promoting. She is even an angel investor for a company that she directly promotes in the post (Webflow).
LinkedIn is sufficient the way it currently is.
1. Connect and contact professional peers
2. Contact recruiters
3. Display bare minimum work experience and look up this information of peers
4. Link to specialized work and portfolio e.g. github
That covers the majority of consumer use cases and anything more complicates the website.
I think there are definitely issues with LinkedIn though. What I don't like about LinkedIn is how scammy it feels. They've tried to get me to enter my e-mail password in the past so they could get all my contacts... No thanks. Then there's the issue of being contacted by recruiters all the time even though I have my profile set to not looking for a job. I also wish there was a way to also say "not willing to relocate" (is there?).
Lastly, I think the website could be more streamlined/simplified and better looking. That pic she posted from the LinkedIn interface in 2003. I like it better than the way the website looks now. So simple and straightforward.
IMO, LinkedIn is "ripe for disruption". It's coasting on the network effect. The network effect is a powerful thing, but it didn't stop MySpace from getting killed despite its 100 million users.
Would that stop recruiters from asking?
So I decided to give it a try with my new startup. We setup ad campaigns to ensure we had a traditional marketing channel that we could scale and then I started posting on LinkedIn. The results have been mind blowing. In 7 months I went form 1,000 followers to over 30,000 followers[0]. I was just named #4 in LinkedIn's Top Voices for 2019 for Software Development.
A single post that goes viral on LinkedIn can generate $500,000-$2M in new sales opportunities for us and it costs us nothing. By developing a social media presence, we've been able to grow our company to $2M in annualized revenue (we aren't SaaS, so it's not ARR) without any outside funding. And we are profitable.
So yeah, I think LinkedIn is pretty great.
[0] Me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsweeney21/
Shameless plug for our new startup: https://www.facetdev.com/
I started by accepting every connection I received. In month 5 I switch the default "Connect" button in my profile to follow because I was at 20,000 connections. LinkedIn has a max of 30K connections.
urks. i quit it a while ago and i am very happy with it. I honestly was reluctant at first because I run my own business and thought it might be necessary, but quitting it didn't impact my business at all...