6 ms·

Not having LinkedIn is ruining your chances. Candidates without a LinkedIn are going to come across as a scam in the very least, 90% of the time your applicatio

Not having LinkedIn is ruining your chances. Candidates without a LinkedIn are going to come across as a scam in the very least, 90% of the time your application will just get tossed if you can't be found on LI.

codegeek 1y ago
Pretty much this. I know lot of people hate Linkedin but the fact is that if you are a job candidate and have little to no Linkedin, it's a huge potential red flag in today's world. Lot of scammers, overemployeds/moonlighters out there.
- matwood 1y ago
  Especially if someone has 25 years of experience as the OP said.
- throwaway1492 1y ago
  When I was moonlighting LinkedIn didn’t affect me. Every time I applied/interviewed and got hired for a w2 job, I just left my last non moonlighting employer on there, and checked the “please don’t contact current employer” checkbox. I hadn’t worked there in over a year. Didn’t my new employer want me to update my LinkedIn? That never came up, but if it would have I would have delayed. Why should I support their business model.
- trod1234 1y ago
  That's some real stupid thinking. At its most basic, this is a cult of qualification which no longer provides real value, it fails for a number of reasons I won't get into here. When you disqualify arbitrarily, and can't find anyone because of that, its your fault for disqualifying everyone, not the market's fault for not having the ballerina that doesn't exist. Want a programmer in a language thats only 10 years old with 15 years of direct experience? You aren't going to find it even when the creator of that language applies. You pay to have the work done. That is the only legitimate requirement for hiring someone and remaining employed, and you can't go and change the requirements later when they show they can do more. Doesn't matter if they moonlight, are overemployed etc. That view to disqualify such people are in fact monopolistic practices designed to disenfranchise wages that are already low and distorted because of money-printing, they are not red-flags. Its like the flawed type of thinking that "We need someone to do this work, but this guy is so overqualified he'll leave first chance; so we won't hire anyone". You hire to have a job done. You don't get to be an arbitrary slave master. The moment you lose sight of this is the moment you ignore your immediate needs, and drive your company on a path towards failure, and if its a consolidated large company, that failure and bad decisionmaking will impact a lot more people because of the centralization/concentration. Financial engineering can decouple the need for immediate action, but the tradeoff is that the risk of not doing things you should have done becomes far greater to your long-term sustainability, and its completely invisible. There is no place for deception and coercion in the hiring process. If the job doesn't exist, don't jam communication channels. Jamming channels is tortuous interference.
  - codegeek 1y ago
    The point is that when you have 100 Resumes to sort through for 1 role, you will have to use process of elimination. In 2025, with AI/scams/bots/moonlighters, Linkedin Profile is a good way to sort through. I am not saying having Linkedin is the only thing that matters but when there is so much noise, you need to stand out especially as a real human.
    - trod1234 1y ago
      Sure, there is naturally a sieving process in any hiring, and the issue of AI/scams/bots is simple to solve because it was solved before AI was around before people got lazy. Fraud and misrepresentation isn't a new thing or even "being unsolve-able except in just one way, your chosen route". The answer is simple... Require that they come in and show up physically to the office to verify their CV/application/Driver's License, and at that time since there will be cost on the business side, also cross-check if they fit other open positions you have, or if they are interested in hearing about other positions (the answer will almost certainly be yes). Rapidly promoting from within naturally bubbles the competent to positions without a lot of external risk like what you've described. This is how you build a resilient pipeline of talent, and vet the soft skills people who would be good at the job that you'll never find through an interview except by moonshot chance. When you structure it from the get-go to exclude excessively and use bad indicators, you have bad data in and get bad outcomes out. > LinkedIn Profile is a good way to sort through. Its not, there are plenty of fake LinkedIn Profiles. You can't stand out as a real human when you have pigeonholed everyone into a circular peg and set the sieve requirements to a square peg. Forcing people to all go through a online centralized portal, even when they show up in person, is what promotes these perverse incentives. Not rocket science. As a business you can do a lot to solve problems, and there's no way you can stand out as a human among the noise of digital artifacts where bots mimic real humans in the same digital environment. Go physical. I've friends who are executives that do hiring, their main complaints were we've tried to hire people for X positions, and our top 10 candidates were all fake, we spent months on this with numerous interviews (cost) and have to start all over from scratch. I pointed out the answer is rather stupid simple. Go old school verify the inputs are real at the beginning of the process, not at the end after you sunk all those costs. That's what they've been doing since then and it works. Finding the right talent is a cost you have to pay that you can't push off on other businesses through use of products or services where that business may lie/misrepresent because each business is different, and if you depend upon that one pipeline for talent they can and will eventually cause issues where you can't find talent. The attitude you seem to have mirrors the same things I see in people who simply don't want to pay the cost to get competent people, and by extension don't want to actually be in business. Also, conditions worsen when you spoil an entire labor pool over decades through bad management in consolidated hands, it gets harder and costlier to find qualified labor. Its the nature of ponzi; costs go up unti outflows exceed inflows. If you don't get ahead of the labor crunch, it will crush you, and most competent people given the adverse circumstances in hiring are now retraining resulting in brain-drain, a hollowing out and watering down of the competency in the labor pool. What happens when you can't find qualified people at any cost because your practices drove them to other sectors. They won't come back because they wrote it off as a bad investment. Its psychologically sticky. People always have a choice, even when others try to make it so they don't.
ComputerGuru 1y ago
I don’t have a LinkedIn and it has impaired my job hunts in the past but I always worry that creating one now (without the references of colleagues from decades of past work) would look worse than not having one?
- aunty_helen 1y ago
  Nah that’s not a thing. Get involved spend an afternoon setting it up and then it will suggest a bunch of people you’ve probably worked with in the past. They’ll be happy to connect and then it’s a good point to catch up and drop the “I’m in the market”. If anybody used to enjoy working with you and they know of something it, should be easy enough from then on.
- dotmanish 1y ago
  Majority of my LinkedIn contacts don't have any endorsements on their LI profile. It used to be a thing of the past - people don't seem to bother now. Go ahead and create the profile. Search and connect with your colleagues.
- wcarss 1y ago
  not a recruiter: I have never felt that recruiters pay attention to linkedin references specifically. You can also make one, add people, and then ask for a few references. "I just finally made a linkedin in 2025 on a lark" is a perfectly cromulent icebreaker/reason to ask.
- craftkiller 1y ago
  Do people still do endorsements on LinkedIn? There was an initial flurry when that "feature" launched but I haven't been endorsed for anything for I think the past decade. Really the only things I do on LinkedIn are update my job history and accept connections from coworkers.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    Imho, anything past where you've worked on LinkedIn is a waste of time. And arguably even a negative signal. Productive people have jobs to do instead of grinding Monopoly karma. Yes, this absolutely includes LinkedIn thought leadership. I know MS and recruiters love to push the 'it matters' line, but I'd ask the reader -- who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
drivingmenuts 1y ago
Well, that sucks. The one thing I hate about Linked in is being up-rated on my skills by people who barely know what I do and certainly have never worked with me in any capacity or even discussed my work in any sense beyond "What do you do for a living?". From where I sit, it's a tool for marketers and recruiters to gather data and it's otherwise completely useless.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  One of my pet peeves are people who don’t understand what I call “gravity problems”. You may not like gravity. But that doesn’t mean you jump off of a 30 story building and hope to survive. Whether I like LinkedIn or not is completely irrelevant. I play the game, add connections, post a few banal “Thought Leadership” posts, ask for recommendations, etc. My remote job at BigTech fell into my lap in mid 2020 and at 46 because an internal recruiter reached out to me, I got my next job two years ago within a week after I started looking because of targeted LinkedIn outreach. My current job also fell into my lap two weeks after I started looking because an internal recruiter reached out to me. It does absolutely no good being good at your job if no one knows it. I think even in the current job market, someone would give me a job or a contract relatively quickly if I needed one based on my network, LinkedIn profile, and positive impressions I’ve made in my niche over the past 7 years.
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    None of your positive impressions are by virtue of linkedin though. Unless your profession is influencer I suppose.
    - scarface_74 1y ago
      How else would someone know about me and how would I connect with them? I can change my status to “Open to Work” and have 1200 people see it My specific niche is strategy consulting along with hands on keyboard work for smaller projects and before that, I was hired at 3 separate companies by a new to the company director/CTO to lead initiatives. At that level it’s all about knowing how to “influence” and communicate. I’m not bragging, I’m old. I should have that type of experience and network.
DwnVoteHoneyPot 1y ago
In addition to possibly being a scammer, some people found my resume to be less believable without a linkedin profile. One interviewer thought I was lying about my previous job title.
- kulahan 1y ago
  What? I just put “computer programmer” for every position listed on LinkedIn - why would that be any more valid?
  - kulahan 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - SuiGenerous 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - soulofmischief 1y ago
      noobs on HN have been claiming this since the site was created. It's so tiresome that it's actually against site guidelines to make this kind of comment. If you want HN to be a nicer place than reddit, try to follow the guidelines.
  - JonChesterfield 1y ago
    One place really didn't like that mine says "software engineer" instead of the proper string of letters. Makes me look incompetent apparently.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  Why would it matter what your previous job title was? Why would I care if your previous job title was ‘Grand Vizier of Khyrgistan’? Can you do the job I want you to do now?
  - kmoser 1y ago
ihnorton 1y ago
Seconding. These days I will rarely talk to anyone without a verified LinkedIn or other presence like a clearly inhabited GitHub (and I’m not looking for hyperactivity by any means)
- danparsonson 1y ago
  But why? Those things are easy to game, and speaking personally, I don't have an online software development presence like Github because I don't spend my off time working on anything I feel is worth sharing.
  - ihnorton 1y ago
    Numbers. I’ve read thousands of resumes over the past few months, screened dozens of applicants, and experienced a wide variety of weirdness and fakes both in resumes and on screen calls. Please note that I’m talking about raw “application box resumes”. Referrals and other semi-vetted sources don’t get this level of scrutiny. I gave two examples of secondary sources, but what I’m really getting at here is that the numbers and noise are so, so high now (not to mention staffing firm fronts and foreign actors) that I usually need more signal than a solid-looking resume before investing even 30’ in a screening call.
    - danparsonson 1y ago
      Ah, yes I see what you mean - a low pass filter.
  - dilyevsky 1y ago
    If i’m hiring for eng director in my industry I'm expecting at least a few 2nd/3rd common connections so i can backchannel. Without that i assume its someone who hasnt gotten along with anyone at beast or a scammer at worst
- radley 1y ago
  > anyone without a verified LinkedIn Last I checked, verification requires people to install the app. No thanks.
randycupertino 1y ago
Agree with this, unfortunately. I have a coworker who routinely calls people without linkedins "sketchy" and obsessively looks everyone else, vendors, functional area colleagues, etc up on linkedin. I didn't have a very fleshed out linkedin myself because I value privacy and was surprised how biased some people are about it. I've also seen candidates who have otherwise passed interview panels get veto'd because the dates on their linkedins don't match their CVs.

codegeek 1y ago

Pretty much this. I know lot of people hate Linkedin but the fact is that if you are a job candidate and have little to no Linkedin, it's a huge potential red flag in today's world. Lot of scammers, overemployeds/moonlighters out there.

matwood 1y ago
Especially if someone has 25 years of experience as the OP said.
throwaway1492 1y ago
When I was moonlighting LinkedIn didn’t affect me. Every time I applied/interviewed and got hired for a w2 job, I just left my last non moonlighting employer on there, and checked the “please don’t contact current employer” checkbox. I hadn’t worked there in over a year. Didn’t my new employer want me to update my LinkedIn? That never came up, but if it would have I would have delayed. Why should I support their business model.
trod1234 1y ago
That's some real stupid thinking. At its most basic, this is a cult of qualification which no longer provides real value, it fails for a number of reasons I won't get into here. When you disqualify arbitrarily, and can't find anyone because of that, its your fault for disqualifying everyone, not the market's fault for not having the ballerina that doesn't exist. Want a programmer in a language thats only 10 years old with 15 years of direct experience? You aren't going to find it even when the creator of that language applies. You pay to have the work done. That is the only legitimate requirement for hiring someone and remaining employed, and you can't go and change the requirements later when they show they can do more. Doesn't matter if they moonlight, are overemployed etc. That view to disqualify such people are in fact monopolistic practices designed to disenfranchise wages that are already low and distorted because of money-printing, they are not red-flags. Its like the flawed type of thinking that "We need someone to do this work, but this guy is so overqualified he'll leave first chance; so we won't hire anyone". You hire to have a job done. You don't get to be an arbitrary slave master. The moment you lose sight of this is the moment you ignore your immediate needs, and drive your company on a path towards failure, and if its a consolidated large company, that failure and bad decisionmaking will impact a lot more people because of the centralization/concentration. Financial engineering can decouple the need for immediate action, but the tradeoff is that the risk of not doing things you should have done becomes far greater to your long-term sustainability, and its completely invisible. There is no place for deception and coercion in the hiring process. If the job doesn't exist, don't jam communication channels. Jamming channels is tortuous interference.
- codegeek 1y ago
  The point is that when you have 100 Resumes to sort through for 1 role, you will have to use process of elimination. In 2025, with AI/scams/bots/moonlighters, Linkedin Profile is a good way to sort through. I am not saying having Linkedin is the only thing that matters but when there is so much noise, you need to stand out especially as a real human.
  - trod1234 1y ago
    Sure, there is naturally a sieving process in any hiring, and the issue of AI/scams/bots is simple to solve because it was solved before AI was around before people got lazy. Fraud and misrepresentation isn't a new thing or even "being unsolve-able except in just one way, your chosen route". The answer is simple... Require that they come in and show up physically to the office to verify their CV/application/Driver's License, and at that time since there will be cost on the business side, also cross-check if they fit other open positions you have, or if they are interested in hearing about other positions (the answer will almost certainly be yes). Rapidly promoting from within naturally bubbles the competent to positions without a lot of external risk like what you've described. This is how you build a resilient pipeline of talent, and vet the soft skills people who would be good at the job that you'll never find through an interview except by moonshot chance. When you structure it from the get-go to exclude excessively and use bad indicators, you have bad data in and get bad outcomes out. > LinkedIn Profile is a good way to sort through. Its not, there are plenty of fake LinkedIn Profiles. You can't stand out as a real human when you have pigeonholed everyone into a circular peg and set the sieve requirements to a square peg. Forcing people to all go through a online centralized portal, even when they show up in person, is what promotes these perverse incentives. Not rocket science. As a business you can do a lot to solve problems, and there's no way you can stand out as a human among the noise of digital artifacts where bots mimic real humans in the same digital environment. Go physical. I've friends who are executives that do hiring, their main complaints were we've tried to hire people for X positions, and our top 10 candidates were all fake, we spent months on this with numerous interviews (cost) and have to start all over from scratch. I pointed out the answer is rather stupid simple. Go old school verify the inputs are real at the beginning of the process, not at the end after you sunk all those costs. That's what they've been doing since then and it works. Finding the right talent is a cost you have to pay that you can't push off on other businesses through use of products or services where that business may lie/misrepresent because each business is different, and if you depend upon that one pipeline for talent they can and will eventually cause issues where you can't find talent. The attitude you seem to have mirrors the same things I see in people who simply don't want to pay the cost to get competent people, and by extension don't want to actually be in business. Also, conditions worsen when you spoil an entire labor pool over decades through bad management in consolidated hands, it gets harder and costlier to find qualified labor. Its the nature of ponzi; costs go up unti outflows exceed inflows. If you don't get ahead of the labor crunch, it will crush you, and most competent people given the adverse circumstances in hiring are now retraining resulting in brain-drain, a hollowing out and watering down of the competency in the labor pool. What happens when you can't find qualified people at any cost because your practices drove them to other sectors. They won't come back because they wrote it off as a bad investment. Its psychologically sticky. People always have a choice, even when others try to make it so they don't.

ComputerGuru 1y ago

I don’t have a LinkedIn and it has impaired my job hunts in the past but I always worry that creating one now (without the references of colleagues from decades of past work) would look worse than not having one?

aunty_helen 1y ago
Nah that’s not a thing. Get involved spend an afternoon setting it up and then it will suggest a bunch of people you’ve probably worked with in the past. They’ll be happy to connect and then it’s a good point to catch up and drop the “I’m in the market”. If anybody used to enjoy working with you and they know of something it, should be easy enough from then on.
dotmanish 1y ago
Majority of my LinkedIn contacts don't have any endorsements on their LI profile. It used to be a thing of the past - people don't seem to bother now. Go ahead and create the profile. Search and connect with your colleagues.
wcarss 1y ago
not a recruiter: I have never felt that recruiters pay attention to linkedin references specifically. You can also make one, add people, and then ask for a few references. "I just finally made a linkedin in 2025 on a lark" is a perfectly cromulent icebreaker/reason to ask.
craftkiller 1y ago
Do people still do endorsements on LinkedIn? There was an initial flurry when that "feature" launched but I haven't been endorsed for anything for I think the past decade. Really the only things I do on LinkedIn are update my job history and accept connections from coworkers.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Imho, anything past where you've worked on LinkedIn is a waste of time. And arguably even a negative signal. Productive people have jobs to do instead of grinding Monopoly karma. Yes, this absolutely includes LinkedIn thought leadership. I know MS and recruiters love to push the 'it matters' line, but I'd ask the reader -- who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?

drivingmenuts 1y ago

Well, that sucks. The one thing I hate about Linked in is being up-rated on my skills by people who barely know what I do and certainly have never worked with me in any capacity or even discussed my work in any sense beyond "What do you do for a living?". From where I sit, it's a tool for marketers and recruiters to gather data and it's otherwise completely useless.

scarface_74 1y ago
One of my pet peeves are people who don’t understand what I call “gravity problems”. You may not like gravity. But that doesn’t mean you jump off of a 30 story building and hope to survive. Whether I like LinkedIn or not is completely irrelevant. I play the game, add connections, post a few banal “Thought Leadership” posts, ask for recommendations, etc. My remote job at BigTech fell into my lap in mid 2020 and at 46 because an internal recruiter reached out to me, I got my next job two years ago within a week after I started looking because of targeted LinkedIn outreach. My current job also fell into my lap two weeks after I started looking because an internal recruiter reached out to me. It does absolutely no good being good at your job if no one knows it. I think even in the current job market, someone would give me a job or a contract relatively quickly if I needed one based on my network, LinkedIn profile, and positive impressions I’ve made in my niche over the past 7 years.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  None of your positive impressions are by virtue of linkedin though. Unless your profession is influencer I suppose.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    How else would someone know about me and how would I connect with them? I can change my status to “Open to Work” and have 1200 people see it My specific niche is strategy consulting along with hands on keyboard work for smaller projects and before that, I was hired at 3 separate companies by a new to the company director/CTO to lead initiatives. At that level it’s all about knowing how to “influence” and communicate. I’m not bragging, I’m old. I should have that type of experience and network.

DwnVoteHoneyPot 1y ago

In addition to possibly being a scammer, some people found my resume to be less believable without a linkedin profile. One interviewer thought I was lying about my previous job title.

kulahan 1y ago
What? I just put “computer programmer” for every position listed on LinkedIn - why would that be any more valid?
- kulahan 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - SuiGenerous 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    noobs on HN have been claiming this since the site was created. It's so tiresome that it's actually against site guidelines to make this kind of comment. If you want HN to be a nicer place than reddit, try to follow the guidelines.
- JonChesterfield 1y ago
  One place really didn't like that mine says "software engineer" instead of the proper string of letters. Makes me look incompetent apparently.
Aeolun 1y ago
Why would it matter what your previous job title was? Why would I care if your previous job title was ‘Grand Vizier of Khyrgistan’? Can you do the job I want you to do now?
- kmoser 1y ago

ihnorton 1y ago

Seconding. These days I will rarely talk to anyone without a verified LinkedIn or other presence like a clearly inhabited GitHub (and I’m not looking for hyperactivity by any means)

danparsonson 1y ago
But why? Those things are easy to game, and speaking personally, I don't have an online software development presence like Github because I don't spend my off time working on anything I feel is worth sharing.
- ihnorton 1y ago
  Numbers. I’ve read thousands of resumes over the past few months, screened dozens of applicants, and experienced a wide variety of weirdness and fakes both in resumes and on screen calls. Please note that I’m talking about raw “application box resumes”. Referrals and other semi-vetted sources don’t get this level of scrutiny. I gave two examples of secondary sources, but what I’m really getting at here is that the numbers and noise are so, so high now (not to mention staffing firm fronts and foreign actors) that I usually need more signal than a solid-looking resume before investing even 30’ in a screening call.
  - danparsonson 1y ago
    Ah, yes I see what you mean - a low pass filter.
- dilyevsky 1y ago
  If i’m hiring for eng director in my industry I'm expecting at least a few 2nd/3rd common connections so i can backchannel. Without that i assume its someone who hasnt gotten along with anyone at beast or a scammer at worst
radley 1y ago
> anyone without a verified LinkedIn Last I checked, verification requires people to install the app. No thanks.

randycupertino 1y ago

Agree with this, unfortunately. I have a coworker who routinely calls people without linkedins "sketchy" and obsessively looks everyone else, vendors, functional area colleagues, etc up on linkedin. I didn't have a very fleshed out linkedin myself because I value privacy and was surprised how biased some people are about it. I've also seen candidates who have otherwise passed interview panels get veto'd because the dates on their linkedins don't match their CVs.