Litigation

At least the Business Journal agrees with me about LinkedIn

By Tracy Coenen

Much to my dismay, the Business Journal of Milwaukee ran a piece raving about the usefulness about LinkedIn, the modern day version of a chain letter. Last week I talked about how it’s nothing more than an annoying tool ultimately used by headhunters and sales people. Real connections and real value derived from the service are few and far between unless you’re a job-seeker or job-peddler.

And apparently I must have hit a sore spot with the folks who run LinkedIn, because they can’t seem to stay away from this site. They’re checking that thread multiple times a day to see if anyone’s saying anything.

So about this Business Journal article…

At least they agree with me on LinkedIn’s usefulness: It really only useful for headhunters and people selling something. They even quote a Milwaukee headhunter who says that LinkedIn has been her top source for finding candidates. In fact, almost the entire article focuses on LinkedIn being used by employer seeking candidates and employees seeking new jobs.

That’s all fine and well, but what does it mean for those of us who aren’t seeking jobs? The whole system is more bother than it’s worth. Yes, I do believe that a lot of users find some marginal usefulness to the system outside of job-hunting. But it’s frankly not worth the time.

LinkedIn reminds me of those horrible networking activities that we’ve all attended at happy hour. Not the good ones where real connections are made. But the bad ones… where those peddling their wares are seeing how many business cards they can pass out.

Full post as published by The FRAUDfiles Blog on May 20, 2008 (boomark / email).