10 Reasons Why LinkedIn Is Useless If You’re Searching For A New Job
LinkedIn has tonnes of problems and their network professionals are increasingly turning to new alternatives. Why? Because LinkedIn is steadily ignoring user service requests and that is the clearest indicator that the business is destined to fail (or at least become less relevant). It is also obvious that LinkedIn cares more about the money than their loyal customers.
If your love for LinkedIn is waning and if you are wondering why your job search on LI is fruitless; why your applications disappear into communication black-holes; and why your LI account is getting hammered with useless request, despite the fact that you have “Expert or All Star profile strength”; then just check my list below. If you experience some or all of the problems listed, then it is time that you seek out alternatives or you will search forever and continue to feed a hungry spam beast with your data.
Incessant requests to share your email list with LinkedIn
No one with half a brain will share their email list with social network sites! If you want to lose friends fast, click yes. Otherwise protect yourself and others from a big problem and a massive embarrassment. When people connect with people for the first time, they don’t like to be asked to give out their whole list of contacts so LI can spam mail them with content in your name! You have to be kidding me. STOP THAT NOW!
The LinkedIn mobile app is seriously bugged
Its 2016 for xx*#sake, and the LI app appears to ignore that people primarily use mobiles to access their social media or look for job opportunities. The App is bugged to the top and it’s also slow and very unintuitive. On the top of the list is the fault with Likes and Comments – every time I use it, I am sent back to the top of the post. Who is building your app features – some underpaid freelancer or real LinkedIn Developers? The worst bit is the LI-Job Search App. It’s like going to your hairdresser to read up on the latest news.
The useless endorsements
The “Endorse” feature is incessantly jumping into view and serves absolutely no purpose. (Early day’s endorsements excluded!) It would take a Junior Developer 2 days to code a solution to get more details as to how / why someone is deserving of an endorsement. This “endorse” feature is the most annoying and it just won’t go away and it is always on.
Automated / fake invites
Why does LI allow everyone to send us invitations, even if they have absolutely no profile history, connections or profile content? LinkedIn has failed to set up a feature which prevents new users from inviting anyone unless they have the correct email addresses of the invitee or until they have at least 100 connections (for example). Why did LinkedIn remove the option to “customise” the request to connect? Why can’t we respond back to the initiator or simply block them? Obviously – because it slowed down LinkedIn’s subscriber growth and so we have to suffer this nonsense.
Hackers, spammers and thugs disguised as LIONS
They are like a pest. They put all of us at risk and LI does absolutely nothing about it. The number of fake and fraudulent profiles is ramping up by the hour. Anyone with a bit of common sense or anyone who actually bothers to read them can work out that they are spammers or thugs. LI, unfortunately some of your users, aka “LIONs”, are indiscriminate, and the fakes grow faster than they can be removed. LI does not have a most basic screening to protect us from these spammers and thugs. Have you ever wondered why? It’s so against the LI business model. It will slow their subscriber growth.
No fraud protection, data privacy or security
Your contacts are open and visible to your other contacts as the default setting. What is the point of connecting with other professionals or, if you are a job hunter, with hiring professionals, if all it does is to allow these hackers, contact collectors, phone sales reps and fraudsters to see all of your other contacts? This is the worst of all LI problems as our carefully curated social network contains valuable information for these thugs and they can easily target our contacts with just a few mouse clicks – just because you and I accidently accepted an invite request from one of these “LIONS”. What ever happened to Privacy? LinkedIn has never addressed this problem and because they are not fixing this problem, they lose customers by the thousands every day!
No protection from thugs, thieves, fraudsters and spammers
Recruiters, job hunters and professional networkers didn’t join this network to spend 30 minutes a day removing spammers and fraudsters. I regularly report fraudsters and spammers expecting that the tech guys at LI take them off their network and keep them from coming back. …fake profiles with fake pictures and 500 + users but no work or professional history… profiles who are selling sex or other x or r rated content or services. Google image search can show me with just two mouse clicks that I am being exposed. Is this what you want from your LI profile? Is this why you joined LinkedIn?
In-mail SPAM!
People you never met and don’t know in any way are sending you spam using the LI In-mail and harassing you with sales or connection requests and, if you accept, cold calling you. Enough said. It’s obvious LI does not really care about you.
LinkedIn harassing you to “update profile info”
Seriously? This is just a joke. If you don’t attend to updates because you don’t have any education / certificates / languages that you haven’t already updated since last time, what’s the point of asking again? Are they trying to brainwash us to use their site properly to feed the keywords and fix their flawed coding and algorithms? If I didn’t do it last time, why would I do it now? Don’t they ever get it? I have no updates to feed into the LI machine. Stop sending me these useless requests.
So, there is the short and bitter truth why LinkedIn is increasingly irrelevant for job hunters.
LinkedIn apparently no longer cares about its users and it is obvious that they have no plans to improve the site because shifting their focus would slow the subscriber growth. I have been a member since 2004 and have been a Premium user since it was launched in 2014.
My tip:
Seek and check out alternatives, protect your privacy and your IT equipment and remember to hunt wisely!
Uli
