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I am one of the first LinkedIn members. Closed my account this year. It gave me nothing much. Recent 'x mentioned u r reporting to Y' was the turning point fo

I am one of the first LinkedIn members. Closed my account this year. It gave me nothing much. Recent 'x mentioned u r reporting to Y' was the turning point for me. Too much fuss for nothing.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
coldpie 6y ago
On the hiring side, we tried using LinkedIn during a recent hiring round of about 5 highly skilled C developers. We flipped through hundreds of LinkedIn candidates and exactly zero made it past the resume filter. Completely useless. The only successful hiring method we found was actually the monthly Who's Hiring threads here on Hacker News.
- madengr 6y ago
  Are you saying the filter was useless, or you couldn’t find a single candidate out of hundreds?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldpie 6y ago
    Sorry. What I meant by "resume filter" was us manually scanning through the candidates. We put some criteria for C programmers into LinkedIn and got a bunch of web and .NET devs who had also mentioned C someplace. Perhaps skilled C devs just aren't looking for jobs on LinkedIn (totally possible! I wouldn't if I were looking), but I was kind of surprised that we got literally zero viable candidates. I expected at least a couple to look interesting enough to contact.
    - drchickensalad 6y ago
      I highly recommend more niche sources, like triplebyte, angel list/angel co, stack overflow, indeed, glassdoor, etc.
    - laurentdc 6y ago
      Many universities (at least in Europe) still teach some C in introductory level courses to build basic terminal apps with file I/O, string manipulation and pointers. One of my exams was to build a basic address book with fseek or draw a tic-tac-toe board form a struct. When I see C on a resume with 0 industry experience I'm 99% sure it's that knowledge level of C which is nearly useless in real world.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      That's really interesting. I'm a highly skilled C dev (not bragging, it's just genuine) on LinkedIn, yet I don't tend to get "found" much, except by recruiters. One thing I found both awkward and fascinating was a job rejection from somewhere I never applied to or had any prior contact with! That was a strange feeling. Someone internally recommended me for a robotics position. I didn't ask them to, but it was a glowing recommendation I was told. HR looked at my LinkedIn profile and concluded that since it mentions web (I do different things at different times), I received a surprise mail telling me I was unsuitable for the role and I should watch their company site in case webdev positions come up. But I'm not often a webdev, it's just up there for those times when I am! From that strange incident as well as the types of approaches I get from recruiters (we think you are a perfect match for... our client asked me to write to you... oh, having now looked at your profile I see you are not... etc), I'm inclined to think LinkedIn profiles for those with a variety of experience just confuse people looking to hire. I haven't figured out a way to solve this dilemma and from talking with others at a conference, it's a common problem. The way it's done outside LinkedIn is tailored CVs, which focus on relevant items to each role and leave out the less relevant. But you can't do this on a big shared profile.
      - mjayhn 6y ago
        It's really interesting that HR person wasn't seemingly concerned about turning you off from ever applying there by writing you that and ... rejecting you before you'd even applied yourself.. I feel like some internal miscommunication had to have happened but maybe not.

I am one of the first LinkedIn members. Closed my account this year. It gave me nothing much. Recent 'x mentioned u r reporting to Y' was the turning point for me. Too much fuss for nothing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

coldpie 6y ago

On the hiring side, we tried using LinkedIn during a recent hiring round of about 5 highly skilled C developers. We flipped through hundreds of LinkedIn candidates and exactly zero made it past the resume filter. Completely useless. The only successful hiring method we found was actually the monthly Who's Hiring threads here on Hacker News.

madengr 6y ago
Are you saying the filter was useless, or you couldn’t find a single candidate out of hundreds?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- coldpie 6y ago
  Sorry. What I meant by "resume filter" was us manually scanning through the candidates. We put some criteria for C programmers into LinkedIn and got a bunch of web and .NET devs who had also mentioned C someplace. Perhaps skilled C devs just aren't looking for jobs on LinkedIn (totally possible! I wouldn't if I were looking), but I was kind of surprised that we got literally zero viable candidates. I expected at least a couple to look interesting enough to contact.
  - drchickensalad 6y ago
    I highly recommend more niche sources, like triplebyte, angel list/angel co, stack overflow, indeed, glassdoor, etc.
  - laurentdc 6y ago
    Many universities (at least in Europe) still teach some C in introductory level courses to build basic terminal apps with file I/O, string manipulation and pointers. One of my exams was to build a basic address book with fseek or draw a tic-tac-toe board form a struct. When I see C on a resume with 0 industry experience I'm 99% sure it's that knowledge level of C which is nearly useless in real world.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    That's really interesting. I'm a highly skilled C dev (not bragging, it's just genuine) on LinkedIn, yet I don't tend to get "found" much, except by recruiters. One thing I found both awkward and fascinating was a job rejection from somewhere I never applied to or had any prior contact with! That was a strange feeling. Someone internally recommended me for a robotics position. I didn't ask them to, but it was a glowing recommendation I was told. HR looked at my LinkedIn profile and concluded that since it mentions web (I do different things at different times), I received a surprise mail telling me I was unsuitable for the role and I should watch their company site in case webdev positions come up. But I'm not often a webdev, it's just up there for those times when I am! From that strange incident as well as the types of approaches I get from recruiters (we think you are a perfect match for... our client asked me to write to you... oh, having now looked at your profile I see you are not... etc), I'm inclined to think LinkedIn profiles for those with a variety of experience just confuse people looking to hire. I haven't figured out a way to solve this dilemma and from talking with others at a conference, it's a common problem. The way it's done outside LinkedIn is tailored CVs, which focus on relevant items to each role and leave out the less relevant. But you can't do this on a big shared profile.
    - mjayhn 6y ago
      It's really interesting that HR person wasn't seemingly concerned about turning you off from ever applying there by writing you that and ... rejecting you before you'd even applied yourself.. I feel like some internal miscommunication had to have happened but maybe not.