My kids are contacted once in awhile. I am sure others are too so I am just wondering. I guess headhunters do most of the contacting.
So getting a job through Linked In is a pretty low possibility. Right?
LinkedIn is a critical element in the job search and in professional networking now.
I had doubts - however many companies post their jobs on linkedin - if you have some specific companies in mind it can be helpful looking at their linkedin job postings (which may not match their job postings on their career page of their website). Also, the default job listings that linkedin generates for you might have some companies/jobs you might not have considered so check those out also. Recruiters at companies seem to be the most active linkedin users - so they think it is a good way to find prospects.
It depends. Headhunters trawl LinkedIn shamelessly. Mr. B (not a headhunter) successfully used LinkedIn to find a handful of collaborators and to get references for job candidates. So yes, LinkedIn is a useful tool.
I use it a ton. Here are the benefits I get from it:
- Stay connected to people I know from various jobs. It used to be that you got someone’s email address,but if they moved companies, you then lost contact. Now it actually strengthens your network when someone moves – you know someone at a new company! My rule of thumb is if I met with someone more than once via work (and I think they know my name
), I will send them a connection invitation. If I talk to a recruiter or a headhunter and like them, I will suggest we link up (but I often ignore invitations that come from people I have never heard of). - When you are ready to job search, you can contact people via LinkedIn that you are connected to (just send 'em a message within LinkedIn, and it forwards to their email). So you can ask people if they know anyone who is looking to hire at their company. I find posting on LinkedIn for my whole network to see to be hit & miss (not everyone reads those messages). So I usually use it to touch people directly.
- Companies post jobs they are hiring for on LinkedIn, too. I have a second interview next week for a job I responded to on LinkedIn.
I tell college students to link up with fellow students, older students who graduated, people they met at internships, even parents of friends if they work in a field of interest (I have a couple of my kids’ college classmates as LinkedIn connections). One thing I tell new grads is that it isn’t like Facebook – they are professional connections, not always personal friends, so you don’t need to know them very well to request to connect.
In the “gig” economy it is a hugely beneficial tool. I have a few beefs with it (things they could do to make it more efficient to use), but all in all I am a big fan.
Regarding your original question, I have to say that it is rare that someone searches out my info on LinkedIn and contacts me with something I want to do. I do have it open for searching right now (as I am in the job market), but most of the time when people contact me the jobs are not something I want to do or the pay is too low. So I don’t count on it to bring people to me – but I use it big time for the reasons listed above.
So, if I can just generalize whether I am correct or not, 
Headhunters contacting a person somebody probably doesn’t mean much, but Linked In is a very useful tool in finding a job.
I can handle it if somebody wants to say I am wrong.
I agree with what you said, dstark. My experience is just a bunch of anecdotes, of course, but I personally do not know anyone who got a job after a headhunter’s LinkedIn invite. However, I know many folks who successfully networked their ways to a new job using LinkedIn.
D got her first job in her field after she contacted someone (not a headhunter) who had viewed her LinkedIn profile. I think headhunters are headhunters wherever they appear, but I agree that LinkedIn is useful apart from them.
I agree with Int that it is a great networking tool in many ways. D also used it to see who she knew worked where she wanted to work, and was able to get a much better second job that way.
Can I look up somebody on linkedin without their knowing? I used to get email messages stating who was looking me up.
I agree that it’s a great networking tool and you should ignore the random invites from headhunters, who are often in other countries. I organize monthly talks for an organization of local technical folks. I find LinkedIn to be a great way to find a 1 or 2 person chain to connect to someone I can talk with at a company from which I want to find a speaker. If I were looking for a job, it would be similar; I’d use LinkedIn to find someone I can connect to at the target company.
They can tell if you looked at their profile. So I don’t stalk. I usually only look right when I get connected, or if I am messaging with them. You can see who someone has listed as their current employer without going to their profile, though, once you are connected.
My older son gets contacted fairly often from headhunters on the site. My younger one, no. A weird thing is that he just had Uber try and recruit him through LinkedIn, through an email to his non-public WORK email address, and through the Uber app itself. Kind of creepy.
Damn it. Now I can’t stalk my kids.
If you pay LinkedIn for a premium subscription like many recruiters do, I believe you can have a setting where you can look at other people’s profiles without revealing your identity. I get a bunch of these incognito looks where I know that someone took a peek - just can’t tell who.
I am a retained Executive Recruiter and we constantly use LinkedIn and probably place someone from LinkedIn about once a week. And these are middle management to executive level roles - usually $150k+.
Dstark - I second that you can stalk your kids. There are different settings. I know my D goes back and forth between being incognito and not, and that she has never paid for the service. I think the bottom line is, though, that if you can see who is looking at your profile, people can see when you look at other profiles.
LinkedIn is an extremely valuable tool. I am part of the recruiting department for a F500 health care company and we find many of our applicants via LinkedIn. Although I work directly for the company, I would not necessarily ignore requests to connect with headhunters as others have recommended. We actively partner with headhunters on many searches, and you’d be limiting your network substantially by ignoring those contacts.
It looks like Linkedin changed their browsing options:
However, in basic mode, you will not be able to see who looked at your profile if you go private.
https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/help/linkedin/answer/47082
Premium users get to browse in private and see their profile visitors:
“I would not necessarily ignore requests to connect with headhunters as others have recommended.”
I keep my LinkedIn network fairly focused, so I would not let a recruiter join just because they requested so. However, I would not ignore a legitimate recruiter’s emails, but I will keep the conversation going through other channels - just not through my LinkedIn page.
There are too many recruiters with jobs paying a quarter what I will take. I am not willing to just let them into my network on request. Now if they sent a message with something specific to discuss that sounds like a reasonable job, I might. But that never actually happens.