LinkedIn is a good tool. The recruitment email aspect is definitely quite annoying, but please consider using an alternative email address so you don't get spam

LinkedIn is a good tool. The recruitment email aspect is definitely quite annoying, but please consider using an alternative email address so you don't get spammed, if that's one of the things you find problematic. It's an easy solution to that (you can also disable notification). I always use separate email addresses to keep my sanity (one for private, one for bank, one for useless stuff, one for mailing list, one for tech, one for school, one for utility bills, and a couple more). I often use LinkedIn to check out famous people's credentials because I am generally curious about their backgrounds. From time to time I do get a "hello" from really big SV companies, otherwise I would have a hard time to get an initial interview without a LinkedIn profile. I am sure they send like 10,000 requests every month, but it still help speeds the progress with a recruiter directly reaching out to you. But there was an embarrassing anecdote, something a lot of users had faced before. One day I was on LinkedIn and it asked me whether I want to import contacts, I hit "no thanks", but I think there was another confirmation which I pressed "next" and LinkedIn sent out an invitation to everyone in my email contact list, including many mailing lists. Some mailing lists rejected the email, but some let the email through its filter.