For the last year my profile bio has opened with the statement "Recruiters: Please tell me what your favourite colour is if you want me to respond to your message." Not one recruiter has actually done that. They literally do not even look at your profile.
The same recruiter previously emailed me in December and did not use that phrase, so it's not like he always copy-and-pastes the same thing. However, in his December message, he misspelled my name (which is only 4 letters long), and never even mentioned which company he is hiring for -- it was only apparent in his signature line.
This was a Google recruiter, hiring for staff+ level SWE roles.
I know there are a lot of devs out there, particularly junior and intermediates, who are looking to work with their favourite tools or something they've not worked with before. But after 25 years in the industry, having worked with several "stacks" and programming languages and worked through many popular paradigm shifts, I care far more about what I'm building than I do what tools I'm using to build it.
So yeah, I ignore those recruiters.
The first are "body shop style" recruiters. It's basically a numbers game where they try to cold-call as much people with githubs/linkedin or blogs that reference programming. They don't know programming (not even what's the difference between languages or front-end/back-end) and are looking for a list of buzzwords. They'll send copy-pasted messages (you can tell because it references tech you never used or never even claimed to have used). If you respond (and really you shouldn't) you won't be able to get any relevant information about the position because... they don't have it. These recruiters are often contracted by external firms in "best value countries" and are given canned response to message you. That's probably what the author encountered.
Second type are professional recruiters. Their salary is by commissions will often be a percentage of your salary. They are knowledgeable about programming and tech (often former engineers who wanted a break from coding!). They typically are looking to match specific profiles to specific jobs at client companies. This goes all the way to recruiters specialized in C-Suite executives (and you can picture the commission finding a CEO will bring in). Their messages will be personalized and you shouldn't hesitate to reply back even if you aren't looking for a job. They know that most great software engineers are almost never openly looking for a job so their goal is to be on good terms with a large number of talented developers so that the minute they start looking for a job they can match them with positions. You'll know when you encounter one.
Third type is basically referrals. A players attract A players, smart companies know it. Make sure your referral bonus is a percentage of total comp. It's probably the most effective way of recruiting (it has an insane signal to noise ratio). But you only get access to that type of network by... bringing value and being part of it in the first place!
Mass recruiters are the problem here. I’ve never tried the brown M&M strategy, Instead I prefer to just tell them no thanks when it’s not interesting.
Recruiters from Meta/Facebook and other companies have reached out to me since then. The non-spammy ones directly from companies I respond to, but told them I am not currently interviewing.
In your settings you can check if you're active looking, casually browsing etc. If you're marked as actively looking you might get more incoming.
For that purpose, I masked all of my software terms like “java” from my EE profile with homoglyphs: humans can read them, but they don’t match search terms.
I used this site: http://www.irongeek.com/homoglyph-attack-generator.php?decod...
This is an example: ѕoftwаrе looks like “software” to humans, but I’ve pulled from Cyrillic characters, so the ascii codes don’t match.
I cut down my spam by about 80% instantly. (One weird trick!)
Spam sandwiches can be tasty though: that's how I got my current job. A recruiter sent me a LinkedIn message that was either intended for someone else, or she forgot to change the name at the beginning of the message.
Didn't matter; got job. I just replied "Hi Rebecca, I'm not Bhargav, but that position looks interesting" Fast forward a few months and I'm at a new place that seems pretty nice so far.
I also did something similar saying that "My rates start at $150", and recruiters were still contacting me for $13.
Do you want a new job enough to be inconvenienced by recruiters? If not, then this system seems to be working perfectly.
Most recruiters have one goal, get candidates into a job - any job. Then they get their fee. They do not have an obligation to get a candidate in to the most suitable job. In my experience they will happily lie, flatter and cajole you in to doing their bidding and taking a job that is not right for you.
I don't want to deal with recruiters like that and that's why I try to filter them out.
Recruiter sends out spam to everybody fitting X parameters.
If you find the company and position interesting you can respond.
A recruiter will actually look at your profile and if they think you’re a good match, go from there.
I still find it useful overall because once you respond to the recruiter, you have a decent in with the company. You do need to wait for actually good positions to come in (which would be true anyway if they were looking at your profile), but you can literally just ignore them all until you are looking to actually job hop.
Could you please elaborate on your concerns? I mean, LinkedIn is a professional network whose whole point is to allow people like you and me to expose personal details we chose to disclose to recruiters and companies with the goal, direct or indirect, of advancing our career.
Knowing this, how exactly can anyone complain that a service whose sole point is to allow you share your profile info with recruiters is sharing your profile info with recruiters?
This won't eliminate the spam, but will increase your chance of a recruiter seeing the blurb.
https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9...
"LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard on every keystroke" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716451
"LinkedIn accesses Gmail contacts via ‘auto-authorization’ " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769494
"Stop Using LinkedIn" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045677
"LinkedIn violated data protection by using 18M email addresses of non-members " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18525511
The first place recruiters go to source for positions - especially for those that are harder to fill - is LinkedIn.
So no: you absolutely don’t need to have LinkedIn to get hired if you apply directly. LinkedIn makes it easier for companies to find and contact you.
Anecdotally, my last three jobs in my career have come from LinkedIn outreaches (Skype, Skyscanner, Uber). These were opportunities I would have not come across, as I was not actively looking, but they found me at the right moment. Before I always applied directly.
There are a lot of business comms and networkers on linked as well as your standard social network content, in but the greatest value is what it provides to recruiters.
Recruiters use linked in as a 'direct sourcing' (head hunting) tool. LinkedIn provides a recruiter with a whole recruitment toolset to make their jobs very easy.
Put your resume on LinkedIn. Send connect requests to people you've worked with and who you'd be willing to work with again. Accept connect requests from people you've either worked with or know from professional networking (meet ups, conferences, user groups, open source project collaborators).
Why?
If someone asks for your Resume, you can first point to your LinkedIn profile (less of a pain). If someone has a job opening, they'll have a way to contact YOU about the opportunity (yes - I've had this happen multiple times). If someone with a job opening pings you (hiring manager or team member NOT A RECRUITER!) you can "introduce" people and help a former co-worker find a job or contract work (I've done this a couple of times). From time to time you'll get pings from former co-workers who might not have another way to contact you - It's nice to talk shop over beers.
Summary: LinkedIn lets you keep your professional network separate from your personal network.
Based on what I've read and heard from hiring managers, I optimized two things: CV and video call setup. My CV was customized for every application, a single page dense with information but designed to be easy to skim and pattern match to the role requirements. For video calls, I had a high quality camera, microphone, lighting and background arrangement. There are tons of guides for YouTuber setups, which I followed.
I have no control experiment (it could be due to a hot job market or my experience profile) but I was honestly quite surprised how effective it all seemed.
People don’t understand how important production quality is. Virtual backgrounds and automatic cropping / lighting adjust can be good but aren’t as good as getting it right in the first place.
Setting up quality video conference production for remote interviewing is often easier than buying and caring for all of the clothes in the grooming often needed for in person interviewing.
I'm interested to see how you did this. Would you be willing to share a copy?
That said, if someone just sends me (I'm cofounder, post series B startup) an email directly which is well thought out connecting your skills with what we're working on, I will 100% read it / consider it. This ticks a box that you're interested in what we're working on - which we need to feel to hire you.
I do not now look at the vast majority of submissions, since the vast majority of those are generic, so we have a full time recruiter looking through.
However, 98% of it is total and complete garbage. Unfollow everyone. Follow 2-5 people you actually care about. Ignore spam messages - don't even get emotional about your time being wasted - just delete it and move on.
100% of all the jobs I've had in my two-decades-long technology career have been from my real, in-person social network. "Hey bityard, I work at this cool place and think you should too."
It's why, to this day, I do not have a linked in profile. Obviously if my family were starving I'd do what it takes to get a job, but given that programming jobs are fairly easy to find, I am not signing up.
3 years ago I tried everything. I applied to (literally) hundreds of position. More than 100 on LinkedIn, which led to nothing (50% ghosted, 50% automated rejection). Applied to a few from HN (“Who is hiring”), a couple of interviews, no offer. A fez dozens on AngelList, a few interviews, one offer, got hired.
2 years ago I mostly gave up on LinkedIn. Still applied to a couple of dozens there, same result of 50% ghosted 50% automated rejection. Applied to a few dozens on AngelList, a few interviews, no offers. This time, on HN, I applied to all positions that I could be a match (for two “Who is hiring” threads). A few interviews, got hired by one of those.
Last year I ditched LinkedIn completely for applications. I did not apply for a single job there (but kept my profile updated and I could see that my profile was visited by people from the companies I was applying). Applied to all of HN positions of December’s thread, several interviews, two offers. Applied to about 20 positions on AngelList, a few interviews, one offer, which I ended up accepting.
So LinkedIn is a complete waste of my time when applying to jobs there, but I believe keeping a profile there helps a little (although probably a good enough resume file could do the job).
Some caveats, with more experience my application-to-interview-to-offer ratio improved a lot, except on LinkedIn. There a couple of reasons for this I think. Big companies use LinkedIn more. Big companies have more silly (imo) requirements, having a CS degree (I don’t) or the recruiter recognizing where I studied (I went to college in Brazil).
Also, this last time I was back living in Brazil, so I wanted companies that hire globally remote and that’s mostly small companies that don’t use LinkedIn for hiring.
The "Home" page feed is full of inspirational quotes/memes and heartwarming videos, so they're building a social network which I have no need for. I only have the profile because recruiters/employers increasingly require LinkedIn profile with your application.
- Internal Referral (this is the best way)
- Twitter leading to internal referral
- Inbound recruiter leading to interview (only happens if you've already succeeded at 1 or 2 previously).
---
- Have gone to famous school like MIT or Stanford.
There are a lot of ways to get an internal referral, but most involve making friends with someone who already works at a place or knows someone who does. You can do this by making friends on twitter, HN, github projects etc. Moving to an area that has a lot of the industry (SF Bay) if possible helps too, though with remote work is less important now.
Of the six rounds of interview/job offers I've gone through since 2016, 5 were the result of a recruiter finding me on. LinkedIn. Caveat for one of those was that one of those was a reachout from a big name tech company a couple years previous, so I then reached directly out that recruiter. For another big name tech company, I submitted my resume directly through their online portal and got a call the next day.
My LinkedIn spam level is probably about 75%, which isn't actually a terrible ratio. I consider spam to be something that's clearly irrelevant to my role or far too junior. For the spam, I ignore, and for the others I always reply with a polite "thanks, but no thanks" which people generally respect and has occasionally led to a more appropriate job link.
The Easy Apply is straight up revolutionary, because you don't need to wade through a 20-page job application anymore. I don't need to answer a personality quiz to apply for a job . Job .
That said, I absolutely hate the photos on LinkedIn. My physical appearance and my qualifications are two different things.
In recent years though, I've had more inbound interest due to my online presence, and haven't done any proactive job seeking activities.
YMMV. If I were applying to Microsoft, for example, I'd probably create a LI account.
In my experience, having a personal website has all of the upsides of being on a "professional" social network with none of the downsides.
The advice I got when I started in tech 5 years ago was: you don’t have to like using linked-in, but you should use it.
If that company is one that you really want to work for, perhaps try finding an alternative way of applying. See if you know anybody there and get them to submit your resume. Having an internal referral is good for them, and probably helps your chances vs. coming in via a web form.
If you are personally opposed to setting up a LinkedIn profile, the fact that the firm requires one for submitting your resume, probably indicates that they aren't a good match for you.
shameless plug: We don't require a LinkedIn profile, though you can provide one... https://www.bainbridgehealth.com/careers
I haven’t had any problems interviewing with any of your who’s who companies in the tech industry.
Best of luck.
YMMV, and for me a key factor is that LI is heavily slanted to full-time employment. For consultants, its value proposition isn't so great.
Good luck!
But YMMV. I also don’t have Facebook; I use GitHub as a portfolio page and do have some open source going on there.
Witnessing what happened to Marak, who broke his own npm libraries and got locked out of GitHub, my conclusion is that the platform does not operate on the user’s terms. Yet another mega corp.
From the hiring side--I've done quite a bit--I never thought twice about whether someone had a LinkedIn or CV. I do think it's lazy not to provide anything on one's background, though. It helps me guide the conversation towards a candidate's strengths.
It's a social media account. Instead of posting about how great your cats are, you post about how great this article that you wrote is.
I guess if you MUST have one, just put a link to your own site with CV and stuff that you want - then its there for normal people to see, and those that insist on using a social media platform to decide if they should hire you or not.
A trend I've seen is the absolute bombardment of overly flowery "I'm leaving my current company and joining this other". It's exasperating.
It's my #2 source of jobs after TopTal for the last 10 years and comes before word of mouth. I don't think there are any other sources though one guy hunted me down through a YouTube comment which I thought was pretty cool.
e.g.... is it 'migrate our huge legacy databse to Oracle Version X' or, our PhP wordpress site needs a css banner that shows a clock counting down?
Do they pay only if the contract is met or do they pay hourly then fire you if they don't like the results delivered at each sprint?
After a one week trial you either get hired and paid 100% or rejected and paid 50%. Unless you totally fucked up. The client never pays anything but sometimes they try to abuse it. But >90% good.
Paid every two weeks like clockwork.
Almost all of my work for the past decade has come via way of LinkedIn or referrals, and usually the referrals from older colleagues are because they could find me on LinkedIn. You don't _need_ a LinkedIn profile, and you're not obligated to provide it on a job application. Having a LinkedIn profile is a useful automated marketing tool, and a more extensive, cultivated version of your resume/C.V.
I have also found, that as an engineer/developer, that I don't use LinkedIn the way the majority of engineers/developers use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a marketing tool and should be used as such.
LinkedIn is also full of low-quality recruiter spam and people not even glancing at your profile before reaching out with a 6 month/$20 an hour contract Java position on the other side of the country.
Summation of LinkedIn experience - https://justinlloyd.li/blog/hippos-and-ducks-are-verbotten/
I have 753 voicemails from recruiters. And I'm not in demand. (I have 5x as many e-mails from recruiters, so I also recommend not putting your personal e-mail in your resume)
Anecdote alert: I joined a small firm in Hamburg, Germany after leaving another startup in the same location. When the new team I had joined was talking about how the company was looking to launch a new product and was in desperate need of a ReactJS dev I showed them something an old friend from the previous job had done and they wanted to offer him the job without even interviewing! The interview that did occur was more or less a formality -- assessing cultural fit and such. He was hired and is happy; I've since moved on but that experience never left me. I kid you not he is one the best ReactJS devs I've ever seen (not that I am in the ecosystem but the things he has built and his knowledge of CSS and JS etc -- he could just a lot done very quickly).
There is the usual job opportunity spams, which for IT Security is not bad. I have received several initial introduction from recruiters from respected companies.
What I like about LinkedIn is that I can find out instantly if I know someone who already works at the company I am interested in applying. Being able to ask someone about the company's culture can help you make the decision if you want to accept employment or skip to the next one.
However, it’s so easy that you might as well just do it. You can have it set up and filled out in 10 minutes and it’s an easy link for people to pass around when discussing you as a candidate.
More than anything it's just a recruiter spam farm.
I don't switch jobs that often. My career has been at only 4 companies over 20 years so far.
I agree with other comments here, your LinkedIn profile is useful for showing people what you're about and what you can do at a high level. I know people who don't have linkedin because they are in-person networkers. They go to conferences to build relationships, and when they need a new job they work that social network that they built into their "little black book" by hand.
It’s a good product, and I don’t understand the hate it gets here.
What’s the alternative? Begging some old coworkers or friends for a referral? That’s a relatively small net.
GitHub under Microsoft also flagged a new-ish work related GitHub account as spam. They eventually reversed the suspension after four/five months. Luckily my day-to-day work does not have GitHub in the loop. On one occasion a co-worker did me a favor and submitted a PR for me.
* In LinkedIn's case I used some Czech in my profile. Maybe that made it seem suspicious.
* GitHub doesn't like when you delete a GitHub account, wait some amount of time, then create another GitHub account with the same email address.
The first was an ex-colleague recruiting me directly for a position he was trying to fill. LinkedIn was just the easiest way for him to find me since we were already connected there.
The other was random recruiter spam, to which I always respond with my standard blurb - basically "Is this position fully remote and what's the salary range?" They came back with a number 40% higher than what I was making then, so I pursued it.
At first they were cheap startups, then they turned into better paying companies.
The jobs I get offered on LinkedIn are mostly paying less than 50% of what I'm making via personal contacts. A few can get to 90% of what I'm making.
I tolerate LinkedIn because I'm too lazy to have a CV and because it's nice to gauge how the market is changing by looking at their salary ranges. I also add everyone and ignore them if they're selling services / jobs I'm not interested in.
The recruiters get your CV, go to your linkedin. See if it matches good enough. Look throug your linked to see if there is something they can use (they are human resource after all) and then maybe push you one up in the hiring pipeline process. Next step is reading / skimming the other stuff you sent over.
Without linkedin you and they have more work in the first step, so even though I hate linkedin with a passion and use its stream mostly as an art project, for jobsearches you should use it.
Applying for open jobs is always going to be a numbers game that most candidates will lose. On the other hand there is no better way that I know of to passively receive inquiries from companies. Most of them are irrelevant or garbage but it only takes one good one to be your next job.
- Minimalist social network for engineers: no feed, no messages from anyone not in your network.
- Input ideal job criteria and get matching and vetted job requests with standardized fields instead of paragraphs of texts from random recruiters.
- Private, no Google Analytics, and open-source.
It's pretty easy to see who you and the interviewer know in common. That way we can get references and pass the interviews more easily. I'm very experienced and at my level, if I didn't have references it would be unacceptable. LinkedIn lets people instantly see who we both know so they can ask about me and get a reliable answer.
I do the same when I'm hiring. It helps with my confidence level.
It's more useful for applying directly to companies. I was getting jobs from Indeed but it seems like 3 of the last 4 were from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is useful for me behind looking at the design portfolio (most important), and the resume. I'll scan the connections to see if we have a mutual friend, college, previous job, etc as a topic to talk about in the interview, and it frequently brings up a great discussion that might not have happened otherwise. Definitely not required, though.
As ever with these kind of eccentricities, if the candidate is good enough they can pull it off, but otherwise it's a orange flag.
If you are seeking a job then you are better off contacting and reaching out yourself. But even in this case having a linkedin profile, lots of connections and references help potential employers screen you later in the process.
- Believe in yourself and your skills
- Hiring managers are as clueless as you are, don't sweat
- X Years of experience is just GOOD TO HAVE, even less would be good
- Let the other people judge if you are right fit or not. Don't be the judge even before applying.
From what I’ve seen everything else is fairly similar, just smaller scale.
I prefer to work with people who I’ve worked with before, and come in via referrals and to hire the same way, but sometimes your pool of contacts isn’t big enough to do that exclusively.
That’s a great approach, and by nature you’re prefiltering for those interested enough in the position to apply for it, but I don’t think it covers all the cases that people use LinkedIn for when hiring/being hired.
The vast majority of clients did research on the platform and then were "checked out" by employers. The submit by linkedin attempts seemed to go into dark hole. Better to make a contact at the company and/or apply direct if you can.
Obviously this is just my anecdotal experience, but I've been on all sides of hiring at many different companies, at several startups and a couple of big corps too.
All the other stuff seems like filler material to me so I ignore it all.
LinkedIn is just one place .. it's a good place, but certainly not the only one.
Responding to HN Who's Hiring or posting on HN's Who Wants To Get Hired is a good source, too.
Finally, AngelList is a noteworthy lead source for me as well.
Back when I used to work as a consultant I got 3 good clients mostly via LinkedIn, including a Fortune 500 company that cold messaged me.
As for regular employment, there's often a multitude of ways to apply, so LinkedIn isn't necessary. If you need a good LinkedIn profile to get hired, well, that's another debate.
I don't, not with what I want and where I want to work. But others might want different things and work at different places and if those places expect LinkedIn profiles they might think it's suspicious if you don't have one. I'd personally not want to work at such a place but that's not a position everyone else can have or has.
Applying through LinkedIn is easy. HR loves LinkedIn. It makes your Resume stand out if you can back it up with a decent profile.
But you don't HAVE to use it. Good to know!
But, I have used LinkedIn to apply, as many employers have a direct application system through LinkedIn (approx. 1-click application if your profile is up-to-date). Success rate getting interviews this way was good given the low effort to apply.
At that time I got numerous jobs thanks to my LinkedIn profile. On top of that I would tell anybody who was listening, particularly anyone who was struggling in job searches, that they should join LinkedIn too.
I went through a phase of business development for a new idea and found that LinkedIn attracted an unlimited number of bullshitters to the point that I was starting to become a bullshitter. I was getting sick and tired of the spam email I was getting. I was angry and resentful all the time and starting to feel guilty for thinking horrible racist thoughts like "They should rename it to linked.in", etc. It just seemed everybody was a "consultant" named "Joe Blow" who had a company called "Joe Blow Incorporated" or a personal trainer, life coach, etc.
Around the time Trump got elected I deleted most of my social media accounts including my LinkedIn account.
Since then I did two job searches without LinkedIn. In one case I went from "damn i really have to get a job" to having a job in a month, in the other case it took a few months.
LinkedIn is also better for big tech, hard to do research on smaller startups. For that, I prefer using crunchbase and topstartups.io
From a quick check of https://jsonresume.org/ it looks like they only have document themes, not website themes.
I use a customized Kendall theme.
Source: me, I run an aggregator of niche EE jobs at www.rtljobs.com.
I found my best remote job due to an announcement right here on HN. My 2nd best (and longest running) due to some open source involvement.
LinkedIn has been terrible in finding jobs. I actually tried to apply to a Google job being suggested to me and was shocked to see that I am being take to another portal to fill-in my data. I would have assumed my data being filled into LinkedIn automatically gets shared with the employees I apply to. Which means LinkedIn it not very practical.
Since I work entirely remote my (previous) team is already distributed.
But LinkedIn itself has basically little support for this scenario. I noticed that although my previous startup was in SV they started promoting me local jobs as soon as I marked I'm "open for work".
I had to change my location to SV to get SV jobs but then some of those had timezone requirements, etc.
An interview is only one day with a candidate, and we’re well past the point where our functional questions are contrived to the point of selecting for interview training rather than job skills.
Consider that 8 years ago asking to reverse a singly linked list in o(1) memory and o(n) time was the difficulty bar for FB. These days you’d likely get asked to implement an optimal multidimensional DP + dfs/bfs/bsearch.
Do one long test/on-site equivalent then everyone can just share their trusted results. Its like the SATs for dev jobs.
I've never had a problem getting a development job, for the past 11 years. I'm in the UK.
LinkedIn was toxic when it started..... sending spam to your email contacts saying you had invited them to join. How the fuck they gained any respectability after this is beyond me.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/07/linkedin-...
> The quickest way to get hired is to create a technical blog, write a bunch of interesting articles, create a couple of interesting projects, and make them go viral.
Is obviously not quick. But tbh is a dream way to land a job.
If you're a relatively junior IC, you may not have time to build up an IRL professional network to help you get a job. You may not have a crazy in-demand resume that jumps to the top of the list for senior/staff jobs. This means you need to find jobs instead of letting them come to you.
I've seen people say that reading linkedin is the ultimate resume - standard format, easy to read and parse, and all look the same. So if you're just doing resume drops on online web forms, missing out on that tells the hiring person they have to do more work to evaluate you. That could mean its "too much work" and they just skip you. YMMV but its a risk you take.
I've heard a lot of different takes on recruiters from linkedin. As a relatively mid-level engineer at FAANG, i get constant recruiters messaging me (1 per week min). I found 50% to be not worth my time ever, and the other 50% are recruiters for big/reputable companies (eg. faang et al.) and some of them have given me interviews/leads, - i've even taken a job that started on linkedin via a recruiter cold message.
Personally, i understand why linkedin is annoying to use. It has lots of antipatterns, etc. That said, part of getting hiring is "playing the game" unless you're truly 1/1000000. By sitting out linkedin (when doing resume-drop style applications), you're signaling to the company hiring you that you either are too lazy to update a profile once a year, or your morals against linkedin are stronger than your desire to help them hire you. Its like people who don't keep their resume < 1 page. They are either truly incredible and it can't be fit on one page, or they just don't know how to or refuse to do the simple things that are expected of them.
TLDR: Unless you're special enough to make your own, or you have a strong personal network already, following the status quo may help you.
(also its LinkedIn not linked-in, skip the hyphen)
