Does anyone think linkedin is kind of creepy. I dont mind the general concept but its getting out of hand. Ive been meaning to set an account up for a while so I did today. Suddenly its asking to search all my gmail accounts to find all my potential contacts. I declined but I get impatient when registering for things and I almost clicked yes in the hurry. Here is the worst part. I was just using half of my name until I set up all the profile info when I have some more time later. Soooo I thought I would try a quick search for an old co worker who I diddnt have the best working relationship with just to see how to use the basics of linked in search. First random name that popped into my head. Well a few mins later I find out that he can see that I viewed his profile. Not a huge deal, could be a little embarassing but whatever. The part name I used would be obvious to anyone who knew me. I used a partial name because I diddnt want people looking me up or something and getting a bare profile. That just doesnt seem professional to me but what the heck do I know. More big picture though it kind of bothers me that the default is set to auto share all your activity. Jeez let a guy eaze into it. There is just feature after feature and a lot of it doesnt make sense to a new user who is pressed for time just to set up a GD profile on a glorified myspace. I’m not even that old but I think that this and also that new facebook facial recognition feature is starting to border on straight up creepy. I dont know how many things that I have agreed to over the last few hours. Kind of like that South Park Centipad episode. After I literally felt like I had to do full on due dilligence so I don’t make an ass out of myself on corporate “facebook”. There are like 3 profile settings and then 3 settings to track all sorts of stats on whos viewing you and who you are viewing. Is linked in even worth while for looking at new jobs or potential moves? Or is this just overhyped. Most of the people I would friend I have their email already. What do you guys think?
Just you man… You might want to delete that.
short the stock
Yes it is worth it. I agree, it can seem creepy. I resisted joining for a LONG time. When I did sign up, I did not allow it to search my email contacts. Though one way to think of this is that it can help you connect quickly, I didn’t like it. I made my connections the slow way as there are definitely people in my email list I wouldn’t want to connect to (for example, the boss I had then, I HAD to email him but that doesn’t mean I would want to connect. Best to forget that guy forever!) While your old coworker may be able to see who has viewed him, he might not. When I found out about this feature last year, I tried to see who had viewed me, and the list appeared for about one second before linkedin was asking me to upgrade my account to have this privilege. That particular feature seems to come and go. I just went to my profile to see if I could see who had viewed me: yep, still the same. It shows that a few “anonymous linkedin user” have viewed my profile, and is still telling me to “See the full list of who’s viewed your profile. Upgrade your account”. so don’t worry too much about it. I hate that people can spam me through linkedin and also sometimes people I don’t know will try to connect (mainly recruiters, but sometimes out of work people trying to “build their linkedin network, let me tell you about this AMAZING trading software we’ll be rolling out!” or the like. If I don’t want to accept, LinkedIn will continually ‘remind’ me of these so called invitations, and it gets REALLY annoying. But I think a lot of people complained as it looks like they now have a feature to ignore the user. Regarding usefulness: I got my current job from a corporate HR recruiter who found me on linkedin, and I know others who have done the same. Plus, when the hiring manager viewed my connections, they found that they knew some of them well so I was almost pre-qualified for the job. My advice is to use it, but be careful… it’s also good to be able to keep in touch with former coworkers and friends this way. Many corporate recruiters seem to now feel that finding candidates on LinkedIn provides a higher quality candidate pool.