Gyroscopic Investing

Do any of you consider LinkedIn to be a valuable part of your professional life? Have any of you gotten interviews or job offers directly because of LinkedIn? (By that I mean interviews or job offers you're fairly certain you would not have gotten if you didn't have a LinkedIn account.)

As for my own experience with LinkedIn, a headhunter once contacted me out of the blue on it by doing a keyword search for people with my job title. I subsequently got two interviews and a job offer from that company. I ended up declining the offer, but it was interesting to me that this social networking site I barely use was directly responsible for my getting a job offer--and I didn't even initiate the process.

I'd say I'm contacted by recruiters 1-2 times per month.  My wife gets maybe 3-4 solicitations per month.  Neither of us have gone through to interview.  A friend of mine is going through the interview process right now for an opportunity that was brought to him via linked in.

I get requests on linked in from people I've met in other contexts to be in their circle, friend or whatever it is called and have never figured out why.  Anyone understand?  How does it help anyone to have a physician in their  whatever it is called?

I get contacted by recruiters on there occasionally.  LinkedIn seems to have taken the place that Monster.com used to have - generally all of the head hunters, recruiters, and various other bottom feeders spam crappy job postings there that they are unable to fill because the salary is too low, the contract is too short, and the location is undesirable.  99% of the jobs are not anything you would want (ie. relocate to Bentonville Arkansas to be a wage slave on a 3 month Walmart contract position, after which time we will turn you loose, unemployed, in Bentonville Arkansas!)

Who wouldn't want a job like that?

It's been my experience that the signal to noise ratio is very low.  Most of my good jobs have come from qualified recruiters who use their personal network (not a social network) to find good candidates and match them to jobs that are a good fit.

Storm wrote: It's been my experience that the signal to noise ratio is very low.  Most of my good jobs have come from qualified recruiters who use their personal network (not a social network) to find good candidates and match them to jobs that are a good fit.

Treating LinkedIn only as a personal network would seem be the best way to use it, but everyone in your personal network would have to go along with that rule for it to work.  And I don't think LinkedIn would make any money in that case.

I accept all invites.  Now and then, I get solicitated with brokerage or investment offers.  To me, LinkedIn is a higher tech version of a local COC meeting where everyone just swaps business-card under guise of "networking".

For those of you who are contacted fairly often on LinkedIn by recruiters, are your profiles set to "public" so that anyone can search for you by skillset, location, etc. and see your full profile and resume?

Mine is set to public, although my contact info is not shared.  I view it as a virtual resume.