
I Finally Deleted my LinkedIn Account - renownedmedia
http://thomashunter.name/blog/i-finally-deleted-my-linkedin-account/
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ryguytilidie
I'm a recruiter and I simply do not understand things like this. Sure, many of
my colleagues have given us a reputation for being incompetent assholes. But
many of my friends contact me the second they are looking for a new job
because they know I like to help people out. Isn't pressing archive on a
couple annoying emails worth meeting someone like that?

When the market isn't so good, maybe people will stop thinking of these people
as annoyances (though I understand 95% of them ARE worthless annoyances) and
realize that these people can be a valuable tool to help them get a job. Hell,
I don't charge for a single placement I make where it is a friend being
placed. If a friend says "hey do you know a recruiter/hiring manager at place
x? I'd like to work there." My answer is usually "yes" and they do. Call the
people in the field annoying all you want, but I imagine someday people will
realize they were being a bit immature with stuff like this. It's almost as if
people need to pad their ego by bragging about how many of these annoying
emails they get and then start doing things like writing blogs about how
theyre deleting a useful tool because of it. Makes no sense to me.

~~~
potatolicious
This whole thing reminds me of the H-1B debate in a way. What we have here is
a heavily bimodal system that is also poorly understood. There are _amazing_
recruiters (I've the pleasure of knowing a few), and then there are _awful_
recruiters. There doesn't seem to be a lot of middle ground - you're either in
the "awesome, great to work with" camp, or you're in the "omfg leave me alone"
camp.

What you have here are people treating recruiters as a monolithic entity
instead of the highly binary one that it actually is.

Knowing some good recruiters is _extremely_ valuable. I agree that sometimes
these "hurr recruiterzzz" posts seem like attention-seeking or bragging. I
ignore almost all recruiter contacts on LinkedIn, and they waste 10-20 seconds
of my life daily. Hardly something worth a blog post about.

Anyways, something concrete from the post that bothered me:

> _"For now on, if I like a company, I’ll contact them."_

And you can do this while still talking to recruiters. I contact companies
occasionally just to chat, even if I'm not looking for work, simply because I
find their work interesting and want to make the introduction. I also talk to
recruiters, because I am not an encyclopedic source for good companies in my
area.

The secret is talking to good recruiters and wasting no time with bad ones.

~~~
ryguytilidie
I guess the problem I have is that people seem entirely unable to do anything
but "well all recruiters suck" nowadays, when that is very, very clearly not
the case. Of course a lot of recruiters suck and are annoying, but when you
translate that into "all recruiters suck, fuck them, I'm not talking to them",
frankly you're hurting yourself.

In the last 3 weeks I've had a couple different CTOs ask me to meet so I can
teach them a bit more about hiring. I'm not harassing these people into taking
a meeting. They are emailing me because they know that I can teach them skills
that would help them and their company grow. If people want to shut out a
source of value like this, than that is their own choice, but it's certainly
not one I agree with.

~~~
gyardley
_Of course a lot of recruiters suck and are annoying, but when you translate
that into "all recruiters suck, fuck them, I'm not talking to them", frankly
you're hurting yourself._

If and only if the benefit you receive from the good recruiters outweighs the
hassle of talking to and vetting all the bad recruiters in order to find the
good ones.

This isn't always the case. I get that you're frustrated by the demonization
of your industry, but I suspect you don't really appreciate just how much of a
useless time-suck a bad recruiter can be, and just how small the ratio of good
to bad recruiters is.

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jmduke
This seems like a silly post designed purely to preach to the "recruiters?
Ha!" choir.

There's literally zero downside to having a LinkedIn account. The emails are
too annoying? Auto-archive them and send them to a 'Recruiting Spam' folder
which you browse every few weeks (or never).

~~~
prezjordan
Privacy concerns? Another company having a bunch of data on you including
where you're from, where you went to school, and where you've worked?

Disclaimer: I have a LinkedIn account, but I'm likely deleting it soon.

~~~
amirmc
All information you've _explicitly_ disclosed to them yourself.

If you'd complained about how much stuff companies like this _infer_ about you
then you'd have more of a case about privacy. e.g I've never given Facebook my
phone number but I'm almost certain that FB already knows what it is since my
friends have it in their address books. Address books which they've (perhaps
unwittingly) handed over to countless companies. Even then, me leaving such
services doesn't stop them from knowing things about me.

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sergiotapia
I owe my livelihood to both LinkedIn and my personal blog. Without either, I
wouldn't have the great job I have at the moment; 100% remote work.

I think deleting your LinkedIn account is a net loss, what's the downside of
_having_ a LinkedIn account?

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popee
Well, remote job isn't exclusively connected to linkedin and personally i
think that remote jobs are going to become more and more common with time.
Linkedin is, mostly, useful for headhunters and people who want to sell
themselves (which is totally legal, but it's personal choice). I've deleted my
linkedin account and doing just fine with one important addition -> don't have
to pump my ego on profile and live all that shit related to virtual
narcissism. So, if you ask me, it's much better in mental sense.

~~~
sergiotapia
I don't know what you mean by 'better in a mental sense'. I have my LinkedIn
account and log in at best every 2 months. I don't even realize when I have
internal linkedin notifications. People contact me by email, not by linkedin.

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donretag
I wish more recruiters actually used LinkedIn.

I moved from NY almost two years ago, and I still get calls/emails for NY
based positions. A quick glance at my LinkedIn profile will clearly show that
I do not live in NY anymore.

There is no magic behind LinkedIn. You are discoverable based on the amount of
information you enter. Do not list skills or job descriptions (w/ buzzwords)
and your hit rate will go down. Forget what LinkedIn suggests, your profile
does not need to be 100% completed.

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ghshephard
I've never treated LinkedIn as anything but the modern corollary to a Rolodex.
I happily deleted my Facebook account a couple years ago, but, at least once a
month (if not more often) make good use of linked-in to track down the email
address of a past coworker and/or see what they are up to these days.

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kabdib
I'm not on LinkedIn because of the recruiting. Most of the recruiting messages
I've received have been either friendly (I tell them "No thanks, let's talk in
a year or so") or so ham-handed and over the top that I've passed the howlers
around.

(The only time in 35 years that I found a job through a recruiter, it was a
train wreck. I doubt the recruiters on LinkedIn are much different).

I'm on LinkedIn because it's fun to find and talk to prior cow-orkers without
involving the privacy catastrophe that is Facebook.

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exratione
I don't have a LinkedIn account because I don't think that any social
network's management can be trusted over the mid to long term on matters
relating to privacy, etc. LinkedIn is better than others so far, but the
incentives do not align.

Yet I still get a not insignificant amount of spam connection requests.

~~~
endianswap
Then don't give LinkedIn any information that you wouldn't want becoming
public? The tool is just as useful with just your résumé transcribed into
their system as it is with that plus a bunch of your secrets.

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peejaybee
The "I tried to call you" e-mail brings me to my tangential pet peeve: _why
can't more recruiters do more of their business by e-mail?_

Seriously, if you want to chat with me on a matter that I'm going to need
discretion in (like, say, leaving the company that owns the cubicles) we're
going to have to arrange a time in advance.

That's a lot of effort to find out that my skills are a poor match for the
position, or (as happens a lot) that I've already been talking to your client.

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chrislaco
Funny. I simply put "I'm not interested in recruiters or open positions at
this time. I will mark them as spam." at the top of my profile. The spam
connection request have stopped completely.

I used to have this in my 'how to contact me" spot in the profile, but
LinkedIn failed to surface that section correctly in the public profile. Half
of this is their fault.

~~~
mindcrime
I have a similar blurb in my profile, although I don't go as far as saying
"I'll mark them as spam". But I have a very explicit section, labeled " __
_NOTE TO RECRUITERS_ __I am NOT interested in ..." in there.

With that, I do still get a few recruiter contacts every now and then, but
it's just a trickle.

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city41
You will find you still get LinkedIn invites from recruiters. And LinkedIn
will send you a "reminder" email about the invitation every couple of weeks.
Still don't understand why LinkedIn feels it needs to be so slimy.

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eddieroger
My presence on LinkedIn got me my last two jobs, and LinkedIn wasn't a thing
when I started my first. This last job was through one of these cold-emails
through a recruiter. As it has been said by other commenters, it's really what
you make of it. I treat LinkedIn as a professional version of Facebook that I
actually take care to prune, which really just makes it a glorified Rolodex.

It's also worth noting that you don't even have to be notified of all these
bothersome emails, let alone reply to them, and can clearly indicate whether
or not you wish to be contacted about work (granted, that can be ignored, but
the good ones won't).

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coopdog
In an ideal world when it comes time to look for a new role you'd browse all
the companies with positions open. It's frustrating though, that many, many
companies don't advertise the positions because the effort of sorting through
thousands of replies is too much, so they outsource that by going through a
recruiter.

The recruiters though are typically inexperienced due to high churn rate, so
it's almost random luck that you'd get a good fit for a job interview,
particularly if they lie to both you and the employer before the interview to
make it seem like there's a fit.

It's definitely inefficient, what's the solution here?

~~~
praptak
Networking. Funny enough, LinkedIn is a pretty decent tool for that. I got my
current job by contacting a friend here and I would not know I have a contact
here without having found that via LI.

It's a self-updating rolodex for me.

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coherentpony
I deleted my LinkedIn account and I _still_ get emails from them. LinkedIn, I
beg of you, please leave me alone.

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windsurfer
I honestly don't get spammed by these recruiters. What's the difference
between my account and all these other people who are getting "spammed"?

~~~
renownedmedia
We probably throw way too many acronyms in there that don't need to be
mentioned (e.g. HTML and CSS).

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futhey
We have a stupid amount in common, sent you an email with a question about
something. I promise I'm not a recruiter.

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general_failure
+1 sir. Good devs need no stinking LinkedIn.

Good recruitments happen through good contacts anyway.

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thoughtcriminal
Curious: what sites are alternatives to LinkedIn? Who is LinkedIn's
competition?

~~~
sdfjkl
There's xing.com (formerly OpenBC), which is very popular in Germany.

