Not sure I share the experience w/LinkedIn that apparently the majority of HNers have. I get very, very few recruiter messages through LinkedIn. The ones I do get are thoughtful and do a very good job of matching skill-set, background, etc.--they have obviously read my profile and are not just fishing.
This has not always been the case. I used to get the hated torrent of "I see you have 12 years of development experience, how about this entry level position!!!" crap, but I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Either recruiters are getting better, or something I put in my profile has quieted down the garbage.
Either way, I don't think there's much that I've put on that site that I'd feel the need to "export" so the topic of this article seems to be a non-issue. You folks don't have alternate copies of your resume and contacts somewhere?
I also have found the recruiter email to have gotten a lot better recently. As an experiment (as my startup is hiring - I wanted to see what the candidate experience might be like these days), I expanded my LinkedIn profile to trigger as many recruiter-friendly tickyboxes as possible, expecting a deluge of spam. I got about five messages, all fairly well crafted and personalised to some extent. Honestly, I get more spam to my email address than InMail these days.
I also ran a fun experiment where I set up another LinkedIn profile nearly identical to my own, changing the name and gender and writing a very terse summary for each job. Boy, does he get a lot of random spam. I wonder if by writing a more detailed description of my skills/experience/contributions, I somehow generate better inbound messages...
Speaking to the point about "what would you export", I definitely have contacts who I am only connected through via LinkedIn; a key example being former colleagues whose personal email addresses I never got, and whose work emails I barely remember. I think it depends on the kind of network you have built there, though. The more work you've put into your LinkedIn connection pool, the more you want to export it.
> I also ran a fun experiment where I set up another LinkedIn profile nearly identical to my own, changing the name and gender...Boy, does he get a lot of random spam.
Alternate hypothesis: bad recruiters looking for software developers filter by gender...
To be honest, I've had two emails from recruiters in three years, both highly targeted to specific terms in my profile, and I nearly accepted one of the jobs. Skipping those horrible spam-magnet keywords altogether is a good start.
Title might act as a filter as well. I cycled among "Senior Software Engineer," "Product Manager," and "Engineering Project Manager", and got most of the spammy shotgun recruiters when I called myself a Senior Software Engineer.
It would be an interesting experiment to create lots of identical profiles with single variables changed to see how they each perform, but that's likely against LinkedIn's terms of service. They should add the ability to A/B test tweaks like this and let you optimize your profile for whatever level of recruiter interest you'd like.
This has not always been the case. I used to get the hated torrent of "I see you have 12 years of development experience, how about this entry level position!!!" crap, but I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Either recruiters are getting better, or something I put in my profile has quieted down the garbage.
Either way, I don't think there's much that I've put on that site that I'd feel the need to "export" so the topic of this article seems to be a non-issue. You folks don't have alternate copies of your resume and contacts somewhere?