Why LinkedIn Profiles are Useless

Oh, wow, you have a LinkedIn account! How modern of you. We are all very impressed. NOT. Here is something to internalize. The people that you should want to impress, who wouldn't waste a minute of their time and life on LinkedIn, are not impressed that you were able to perform the no brain required task of setting up a user name and password and then plow in some information. Yippee, you basically just posted your information on a job board. Posting your resume degrades you and what you're selling, in case you were not aware. Lost in your glee and self-satisfaction of being what you think is a professional is the fact that you are needlessly hurting your job search, which means you are basically hurting your career, finances, livelihood, future, etc. That is not an overstatement.

Let's be clear. For a variety of reasons, you are not going to get a job or move your career forward by having a LinkedIn profile. It's not happening, unless maybe you find something in their job postings. Fast forward to 2013 from the early days of LinkedIn. LinkedIn by design is no different than any other job site these days. The LinkedIn of the past made no money. As a job site, they can now sell job postings and sell their resume/member database to agency recruiters. Stop thinking of LinkedIn as a professional networking site. It is not.

The only thing that is going to happen for you as a result of having a LinkedIn account is you are going to waste time for maybe a week or so while you play with it, and you are going to needlessly ruin job opportunities and credibility with top employers. For the teeny weeny infinitesimally small number of recruiters or HR people that will pay, search, locate, view, and contact you as a result of your profile, and who also by chance have a job opening that you are a fit for, what is likely going to happen is that the information you inputted will probably talk yourself out of contention for jobs. Too much or the wrong information on your resume or profile sabotages you and your job search. As a recruiter, people clearly do not get what hurts and what helps.

Let's step back for a moment. I implied from what I just wrote that a recruiter or HR person might actually find you and your profile. We won't talk too much about the fact that if they did actually find your profile there is no contact information 99.9% of the time rendering it even more useless, and that 99.9% of people hiring do NOT proactively search resume databases since it is easier to just post a job and let people find them instead. We won't get into many of the other fatal flaws with LinkedIn as a means to conduct a job search or for employers to find you. There is a bigger and more surprising reason why LinkedIn should be left to new college grads only.

Here is something that you did not know. Are you aware that if you go to LinkedIn's "search members" page and enter in your search criteria the results do NOT GIVEN ANY FIRST OR LAST NAMES. What? C'mon, that can't be right. Yes, it's a fact. Well don't they have plans that recruiters can purchase to see names. Absolutely, just like Monster and CB have plans to search their resume database. You have to remember something before I explain their plans. There are millions of companies out there that you can potentially market yourself too. If you understand fractions, you can put about five zeros in front of any number and this will represent the number of companies that actually pay LinkedIn to search its database, such as .000005. As far as a percentage of recruiters, you can put four zeros instead. Exactly, nobody's finding you through LinkedIn.

What about these LinkedIn pay plans? Glad you asked. There are three plans. I will not cover the list of non-useful items they believe benefit people, just the number of times you can contact people through "InMail", which recruiters quickly find out nobody ever replies too, mainly because most profiles and accounts are dormant. In the course of a month, if you pay them a fee, you can contact either 10, 25, or 50 people on LinkedIn using InMail. 50 InMails per month and actually seeing a first and last name will set you back about $5k per year. Yes, you heard that correctly.

So, not only do you need to have someone with a relevant open job pay to use LinkedIn, and then actually search and find you, you have to hope and pray they will be willing to use one of their valuable InMails to contact you. Keep in mind, I'm a recruiter, I call or email about 120 people EVERY DAY. I would use up my plan in the first four working hours of every month. Oh, you're still not convinced that LinkedIn is utterly useless. Let me share some more about what LinkedIn does that hurts you directly whether you are job searching or not. Take a deep breath and internalize this. It is very important.

You might be confused about your profile being found by people because when you put your name in a search engine it comes up. Keep in mind, what is even more unlikely than a recruiter paying for and searching LinkedIn's database is a recruiter blindly searching an enormous search engine for candidates. That's not happening. You are thinking that because your name shows up when Googled that employers can and will find you. Employers will find you alright, but only after you sent them a resume. This is where the real damage occurs with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

All employers will search the Internet before either interviewing or hiring someone. It's almost a requirement these days. They will look at your LinkedIn account, they'll browse your pictures on useless FB, and they'll delve into whatever else they can get their hands on, maybe even calculate your age. This is where you go wrong. None of this information, personal or professional, should EVER be visible to the general public. You're not cool, hip, or modern for allowing this. You're only an idiot. I know this from endless years of corporate recruiting at brand name companies and leading headhunting operations at nationally recognized search firms.

It's too long of a topic for this already too long article, but in a nutshell, hiring managers, recruiters, etc. look at a lot of factors when selecting a candidate to interview and hire. You do not really get what these are. Trust me, you don't. You are delusional if you think you do. I have reviewed and have a database hundreds of thousands resumes and every one of them has damaging information from the employer perspective. The story people put in front of employers makes me wonder if the entire world has a medical marijuana card. I'm not going through them all right now, but just keep in mind that employers look at candidates and resumes from a risk perspective. Hiring is expensive and time consuming. They want to feel like they're making a good decision / hire. You are doing dumb things on your resume. You don't even know what you don't know.

Not only are you putting the wrong information on your resume, you are certainly including all of the wrong information on your "professional profile". Besides putting information on your profile that hurts your cause, the information is almost always inconsistent. Just like that, you're an inconsistent liar. This is no joke. At least 50% of all of the information that is on a resume is inconsistent with what is on LinkedIn profiles, and about 75% of the time one or the other has information the other one doesn't. Trust me, this doesn't go unnoticed. So basically, in addition to everything else, there is just no upside to putting your information out there for the public to view. None.

Let's summarize. The odds of someone paying for LinkedIn, having a relevant job opening, searching the member database for someone like you, locating your profile, sending you an "InMail", you connecting with them, and then getting an interview and job is somewhere around .000001%. All you have done by putting your profile out there is provide too much or the wrong information that is excluding you as an option for many companies and jobs. The networking aspect of LinkedIn is also 99% useless. Here is why.

Let's say you waste valuable hours to hunt done people you know in LinkedIn. Keep in mind that like most sites like this and FB, the average account is dormant. If 50% of FB users are dormant / inactive, it's more in the 85% range for LinkedIn. People signed up to LinkedIn to be cool and feel good like they're a "professional" and quickly realized what a waste of time and life it is. For the ones still using it, do you really think they are going to be able to assist you in getting a new job? Sure, it happens once in a blue moon, but networking for jobs is overblown, unless your uncle is a hiring manager and by chance hires people with your background, and has an actual job opening. There are far too many factors working against networking being a reasonable and useful means to find employment.

One last thing. This is a favorite of mine. Putting your LinkedIn URL on your resume is completely unimpressive and a major resume faux paw. Nobody is impressed and you look foolish for doing so. There is NO upside. My educated guess is that you have spent more time devising your useless LinkedIn profile than your resume. I guess that doesn't matter because preparing your own resume is the number one most egregious judgment error you will make in your entire lifetime. It is irresponsible, unprofessional, and reckless. Stop trying to save a nickel, swallow your pride, and have your resume prepared correctly by experts. Yes, making a resume is easy, but guess what, your resume looks homemade and it is not good. You can't look objectively at your own work, and you can't know what to include or exclude unless you've work in recruiting, hr, headhunting, etc. forever. If you could you wouldn't be sending out these horrifyingly poor resume presentations to prospective employers you want to pay you a lot of money.