LinkedIn is not just for recruiters -- it is, for better or worse, the first place where your business contacts will often go to check you out. It exists for yo

LinkedIn is not just for recruiters -- it is, for better or worse, the first place where your business contacts will often go to check you out. It exists for you to project the optimal image of yourself in a professional context. It is useful because it has a consistent format that makes it much more easily readable than a collection of custom sites. Having a LinkedIn page isn't mutually exclusive with creating your own page / blog / whatever. What it does do is let people see at a glance where you come from, who you've worked with and what work you're interested in. It's the tl;dr of your professional profile; not the entire profile itself. I don't care about the security issues because I don't intend to put anything on there that I don't intend to be public knowledge. I don't care about the spam because I basically just forward everything from LinkedIn to spam. LinkedIn is very useful at what it does; and as long as I can keep it in that little box, I'll continue to use it. And I know very few people who have gotten a job from a cold call on LinkedIn. Nobody gets jobs that way; you usually have to know someone who works there already. LinkedIn helps answer the "who do you know here again?" question because the interviewer who looks at your profile 5 minutes before you walk into his office will already know that you used to work at some startup with his head of development. That kind of connection is what helps you get the job, and LinkedIn is great for it.