If anybody used to enjoy working with you and they know of something it, should be easy enough from then on.
It used to be a thing of the past - people don't seem to bother now. Go ahead and create the profile. Search and connect with your colleagues.
And arguably even a negative signal. Productive people have jobs to do instead of grinding Monopoly karma. Yes, this absolutely includes LinkedIn thought leadership.
I know MS and recruiters love to push the 'it matters' line, but I'd ask the reader -- who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
Who would you rather interview: someone who has a great resume, and a strong LinkedIn profile, and connections to a strong peer community who can endorse them, or a faceless rando that shows up in your inbox with a PDF, amongst thousands of others, with zero referrals?
I'm not endorsing LI grind -- I too hate it, but ignore at your own peril. OP seems to be in a rather precarious situation, so maybe it would help being a bit less dogmatic.
Wrong question. This is not about the hiring stage.
Who would I rather move on to a phone screen: someone with an empty or nonexistent linkedin profile, or someone with a profile which matches their resume and has many connections to other people who worked at the same companies?
While I hate to have to say it is the latter, that's where we are today with AI-generated fake resumes.
I have 344 resumes left to review tonight. Those that don't match their linkedin profile history have no chance (unless they are a direct colleague referral).
I hardly use LinkedIn, but it does show work history. As someone else said there was a flurry of “endorsements” but I haven’t seen many since.
I would suggest creating the linkedin profile but be sure to fully populate the job descriptions for each job (or as far back as you care to go) and spend some time looking up past colleagues from each one and send them invites to connect.
I'm finding that a completely blank linkedin profile (listing only companies but zero detail) is a bigger red flag than not having a linkedin profile.
But having a profile with job description info and a network of connections from each job adds credibility. When a resume looks borderline suspicious, I dig through the persons connections in linkedin to see if it looks like they really worked at each of those places. Even better if I find any shared connections, which is a stronger signal that I'm looking at a real person not an AI bot.
Also, building that network of connections can be a source of job leads on its own.
I'm in a terrible position for when I need to find a normal job, and comments like this don't let me forget it!
You can also make one, add people, and then ask for a few references. "I just finally made a linkedin in 2025 on a lark" is a perfectly cromulent icebreaker/reason to ask.
