And, no one is impressed that you have a LinkedIn profile. Consider this. Do you think hiring managers are searching, locating, and reviewing your LinkedIn profile? No chance. Do you think staffing and HR people are specifically searching LinkedIn right now for someone with your skills to fill a job, and then making the effort to try and track you down? Very unlikely. Do you think agency recruiters and headhunters are scouring LinkedIn looking for someone like you for a client? slight possibility. If you are on LinkedIn as a means to find a job, you are taking the reactive approach to job searching instead of the proactive approach. Reactive = Lazy. If you are there just to build your posse to help satisfy some internal issues you may have, maybe you should reevaluate your priorities and find something constructive to do with your downtime. Do you think the top people in any field are playing around on LinkedIn? No, they are not. Okay, maybe a handful of the neurotic types are because they just can't help themselves, kind of like an Andrew Wiener type of person.
Sharp hiring managers are not searching LinkedIn for you. They are working and doing their job. They don't have time for frivolous activities like LinkedIn, which is why they are a boss. HR staffing people are there but they're not suffering through trying to find someone on LinkedIn. They are searching real resume databases and posting jobs to find candidates, and performing other HR tasks. Keep this in mind. Even if an HR person miraculously finds your profile, with no email and phone number of course, they are not going to hunt you down at your employer. Direct sourcing like that is for headhunters due to the impropriety of HR people trying to directly recruit a person from a company. Headhunters, the good ones that you want to be contacted by, are identifying passive job seekers through direct sourcing techniques, not wasting a lot time in the LinkedIn abyss of outdated dead profiles.
Here is what all three of these groups know that you do not. If you go to LinkedIn and use its people search function and search on, let's say "sales representative", you get a long list of no name profiles. That's right. No names appear, which in turn makes it a waste of time to continue further. If someone searches on a title, company, or any other criteria you get the same thing. A list of useless nameless profiles with cryptic titles. Yes, some pay to get a little more detail on LinkedIn members, like a first name and last initial, but overall the pay options are severely lacking and the number that do pay isn't anywhere nearly enough to impact you.
Well, what about networking with people at past employers and my college buds. Okay, so let's say you magically hunt done all of these people on LinkedIn through the droves of nameless profiles. Do you really think they are going to be able to assist you in getting a new job? Sure, it happens once in a great while, but not very often. Networking for jobs is overblown, unless your uncle is a hiring manager and by chance hires people with your background. Rightfully so, people are focused on themselves and their progression and life, not yours. All of this talk of connecting on LinkedIn assumes that when you find them you can actually connect with them. Like the 50% plus of dormant FB users, LinkedIn is probably in the 80% range, meaning, good luck getting a reply. If you do connect they might like to hear that you're still kicking, but making an effort to get you a job? Not likely. The deal is, the company they work for must actually have a job opening for someone with your background. What's the chance of that? Jobs don't magically appear because you're in the market and interested in a company.
If you want to have the feeling of being modern and part of the crowd, go ahead, join LinkedIn and a hundred groups while you are at it. Get your profile groups / flare and enjoy to your heart’s content. Spend months trying to build your connections so you feel important and like you are doing something useful, kind of like you have been doing on the biggest time sink known to man, Facebook. Know though that these activities are very likely not going to be helpful for you to get a new job opportunity. Also, putting your LinkedIn URL on your resume, is completely unimpressive, and a major faux paw. You progress in life and locate job opportunities by proactively researching and targeting employers and selling yourself to them, which means spending time on activities that count. My guess is that you've spent more time devising your LinkedIn profile than you have perfecting your resume, which is actually a useful activity. What a mistake.
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