I keep getting requests from friends in Business to be LinkedIn or added to other e-networking lists. I always say yes to the invitations just to be polite, but I have a feeling I'm mostly opening myself up to more junkmail. Perhaps these sites are professional MySpace-type sites, so it looks good for someone to have lots of links (friends)?
The invitation to link that I accepted today informed me that I am now 3.7 times more likely to find a new job. Cool.
Last day of major travel for me..
14 years ago
5 comments:
I don't know how serious LinkedIn is. In Europe we have Xing, which is probably the same thing. Many people want to be my "contact", as you do, indeed, have status in some guy's eyes by having a lot of contacts.
My rule is that I only accept contact from people I know in real life (grad students, colleagues, friends).
The group is actually unbelievably useful for finding people to teach obscure classes or for interesting projects. And I get some interesting offers for extra jobs.
I also use this for keeping track of our alumni. I can see where they are working, and if I need a contact at a company I can ask a graduate for a name.
But I refuse to join all the groups. And yes, there is a bit of "spam", at least most of it is professional, i.e. I could perhaps be interested in what they are selling. And people are polite and quit sending you stuff if you ask, as you can have them taken off the group.
I haven't gotten any spam from LinkedIn (so far as I know). But I also haven't gotten anything useful (read: concrete job connections) out of it, either.
I'm with european FSP, I usually only link to people I actually know, with only the very rare exception.
Too bad there's no discreet way to drop people from your network once you've accepted them.
I mostly used LinkedIn to keep in touch with old classmates, people from previous jobs or people that I meet at conferences. I helped someone find a job through there. They were qualified, but I only thought of them because they were in my Linkedin profile.
I've been receiving a lot of requests lately from LinkedIn. I will only accept if it's someone I actually worked with, not just someone that worked at the same company as me in the past. It's amazing how often I'll get a request and wonder who the person is.
A lot of IT/developer folks I know in my social life use LinkedIn a lot, and that's probably why they get a great deal of contact and value from it. I do not know if it is necessarily tuned very well for academic jobs and connections outside of industry.
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