How to beat LinkedIn: The Game

davydog187 | 502 points

> Shortly after I connected with an eagle-eyed Pulitzer Prize and Emmy nominated journalist/producer (who perhaps was initially fooled by my impressive credentials to accept my request), I received an angry message from him. “Don’t know who you are,” he wrote, “but neither school you list offers the majors or degrees you claim to have so I’m deleting you from my contacts."

Dying. Nice work.

laurex | 6 years ago

I don't understand why LinkedIn get's so much hate. I got my two last jobs from recruiters reaching out to me on LinkedIn. My current job I got from an ex-coworker at a place that I found because of LinkedIn. Like all markets, LinkedIn is chaotic but you can get value out of it if you can avoid the bad parts like spam.

jdavis703 | 6 years ago

I've connected to literally $200,000+ worth of client work through LinkedIn, and the clients are very happy too, so I'm not on board with calling it useless.

edit: And before I became a consultant, I got a life changing job offer from someone who discovered me on LinkedIn.

cm2012 | 6 years ago

Funny writeup - the recruiter and the Goldman/Quantcast callout was particularly enjoyable :)

An alternate LinkedIn game that I've done many times with colleagues (and which works better on the web/desktop UI) is:

* Ensure you have at least 50 connections

* Go to the 'My Network' then 'People You May Know'

* Scroll down and enjoy some of the ridiculous profile photos eg people at the horse races, photos with partners cropped out, weird off-camera poses, 1980s hair, etc

* Try not to laugh

Admittedly with the recent rise of 'personal brands', this game is more difficult than it used to be - yet still juvenile!

Also, what the heck is a 'thought leader' anyway? Isn't it better to be an 'action leader', a decision-maker, a publisher of some description; someone who does something or produces something meaningful?

Not all thoughts were created equal, of course, and there are not many 'thought leaders' on LinkedIn who were not self-appointed!

edit: fixed 2 spelling errors, formatting changes, added Quantcast reference for clarity

adrian_mrd | 6 years ago

It is great that LinkedIn just reports 500+ connections. It truly is an unimpressive stat. It's been a valuable platform for me, so I keep it around. The only things to remember: don't install the mobile app and get used to ignoring requests from unfamiliar people and irrelevant recruiters. Never connect it to Outlook or any other app.

dade_ | 6 years ago

For those who find LinkedIn pointless are you making crazy bank already and find no need to raise your salary by using recruiters who offer you better jobs weekly on LInkedin? When they do it's time for you to say I make 100k more then you really do and boom you raised your salary a ton.

I don't get the hate though and again those that hate it I guess don't need to play the game? They already have maxed out their salary and or aren't in tech to make as much money as possible?

Or maybe they are the programmers who hate facebook and social networks in general; have no clue how to use Linkedin to their advantage?

paul7986 | 6 years ago

At a previous job, we got so annoyed with recruiters that we decided to create a honeypot account - fake LinkedIn, fake Github, fake Twitter, everything. We took the first picture off of Google for "bro" as the profile picture.

For his Github, we just forked popular projects like jQuery and then ctrl+f replaced the name with his first name, like "bradQuery".

Surprisingly, we had many recruiters contact us about the popular "bradQuery" library. And we uh, had to play the part of a douchey brogrammer. It's amazing how far those conversations went.

It was really fun at the time, but also maybe a little mean to recruiters. They do have a tough gig and they're usually under the gun. Ah well...

misterbowfinger | 6 years ago

Very amusing.

I'm almost tempted to delete my LinkedIn. I turned off all email notifications months ago so largely forgot about it, but a friend of mine recently said he saw my profile pop up in his feed about a work anniversary or some other 'engagement' thing they spam people with.

The photo on my profile is from 9 years ago, and my job title has since changed, in fact most of it is probably out of date.

I suspect my inbox is full of recruiters shouting into the void.

djhworld | 6 years ago

I changed my privacy settings set on LinkedIn so that no one could see my connections after I started noticing that many recruiters sending invitations were already connected to other people I know or have as a contact otherwise. I strongly suspect some of these recruiters just want to add you for the sake of having access to your contacts lists in order to have more people to connect with.

I don't usually accept requests from recruiters, either. In fact I had this for a while as my first sentence in my profile page and that didn't stop them from sending requests. That signals me they don't bother checking your profile first, either.

Apart of maintaining my vanity URL, I don't even know why do I still have a LinkedIn account; I just don't find it very useful.

danirod | 6 years ago

I want to read the version of this where you win Githib

projectramo | 6 years ago

I'd like a version of LinkedIn that uses computer vision to shadow ban anyone who wears a suit and a shit-eating grin.

ravenstine | 6 years ago

I endorsed them for things like “alcoholism,” “horse care,” “blood,” and “solid waste.”

Can't stop laughing at this!

rdiddly | 6 years ago

Hi!

I’ve started a couple of lucrative contracts via LinkedIn and receive many offers there.

I make lots of money because of LinkedIn.

Thanks for playing, sorry to hear you suck at the game. Maybe try some cheat codes?

davedx | 6 years ago

This is where the classic phrase “the only way to win is not to play” comes in.

robin_reala | 6 years ago

I like LinkedIn because it gives me a sense of how the market is doing. As a Dutch developer, I get messages just about every single weekday. Especially last year it's been crazy: I've had 3 recruiters in 20 minutes. Unfortunately employers are more willing to pay (multiple) recruiters than to just increase salary to snatch developers from lower paying employers. The free market is not working that well for us developers if we keep giving recruiters the chance to act as intermediaries. Out of principle I only deal with employers directly or in-house recruiters. I'm not saying they're all bad, but I've seen a lot of them who approach Javascript devs for Java positions and visa versa... they add no value in the next step of your career.

Egidius | 6 years ago

Unrelated to the (enjoyable) article - How do you feel about the advertisements on this site? More intrusive, less intrusive?

Edit - I ask because instead of the usual advertising model they have 12 partners a year that get custom ads, and there is no other advertising.

soared | 6 years ago

Coolest read of the day. Never imagined Linkedin as a game :-)

mandeepj | 6 years ago

That went gloriously off the rails.

dswalter | 6 years ago

Enjoyed the article, but I often wonder about the metrics of ads that appear mid stream on a satirical article such as this.

I noticed a few ads for Hewlett-Packard within the article, but the cartoon-y graphics used and their placement within the article body just made me think they were faux ads that fit the comedy nature of the article.

It was only when I scrolled through to another (serious) article and saw the same ads that I realised they were actual legitimate ads.

cyberferret | 6 years ago

Linkedin is terrible (the ui, the bugs, the social crap, the missing functions), but I'm okay with that. When I want to find another job I start accepting the random recruiters and tell them to write me an email, otherwise I avoid it like the plague.

I remember one recruiter who was really pissed off when I accepted her request after half a year or so, but most of them couldn't care less. I usually apologize first and then tell them politely how I'm "not good with linkedin".

Same for facebook. Unless I want to reach someone who prefers the platform (fortunately only a handful of people for me), otherwise no login at all. Unfollow everyone (no exceptions), like their pages if they send a like request (and unfollow in the same second) and just get out.

The internet is like a bottle. You can put the cork back in and noone will care. Of course this is a strategy that works for me, ymmv.

xab9 | 6 years ago

Xing, the German Linkedin throttles you after you send ~50 invites to strangers (first some have to be accepted before you can send more), Facebook even stops you from sending friend-requests after you sent 20 invites or so.

Not sure why Linkedin allows people to send 3000 contact-requests without throttling them. Any ideas?

s3nnyy | 6 years ago

I'm so glad I'm in a field (academia) that doesn't really use linkedin.

jccalhoun | 6 years ago

Ok this was riotously funny, but in defense of LinkedIn, it's a great place to hire and a great place to get a job if you take the time to write a quality, genuine profile — which is certainly a rarity and makes good people stand out.

I just ended a hiring campaign on LinkedIn. The stats were that it lasted 35 days, cost $704, our job ad was shown to 1001 people, and 233 applied through the platform.

I didn't keep exact stats of qualified / non-qualified people, but there were at least 5 people I thought were wow good, and another dozen or two that I wasn't sure immediately about but who were possibly really good. We hired two people.

These numbers outperformed their algorithm — they estimated that we'd get 40-60 applications for $600 across 30 days, and we got considerably more. I think our ad was pretty good and unusual, it was a condensed version of our team hiring page —

http://ultraworking.com/work

As for whether "fake social networker" cred helps... I don't think so. I make a quick checklist of things I'd skim rapidly for when looking at profiles to do first pass analysis. Basically, I'd look for any sense of ownership, service, or self-direction.

Things like genuine volunteer activities, excellent academics, leadership roles in student clubs are all obvious examples.

But actually, there were a bunch of things that are doable for everyone that I looked for, and which surprisingly few people do.

For instance, the vast majority of candidates wrote their profile in first person tense. "I'm a skilled marketer with X years of..." or "I'm looking for a job doing..."

Very few people wrote in any second person tense at all. EG: "If you're looking to hire a marketer and you have a great company, I'd love to help you develop your..."

I also saw only 2-3 profiles out of 300 that mentioned being happy, smiling, or service oriented. One guy didn't have any fancy brand name education or work experience, but he wrote something like, "I did this job with a smile every day and looked to make everyone I worked with happy." Okay cool, yes, I'd be delighted to talk to you.

Your culture will vary of course, but I was also impressed with people that had a mix of any kind of art/aesthetics alongside any math/engineering/analytical pursuits, and noted anyone who mentioned a disciplined history of sports, martial arts, or athletics.

What didn't factor much at all for me were the self-descriptions of jobs (I skimmed briefly to make sure they weren't a total non-fit, but otherwise don't really trust it) and in the Hiring Portal, you can't even see how many connections someone has easily. Or maybe you can, but I must have just parsed over it if so — I didn't notice it once.

I was skeptical of Linkedin for a long time. The "LinkedIn: The Game" thing. But it's a legitimately great way to put good opportunities in front of people looking for a new job, and a good way to seek companies doing what you're interested in if you're jobseeking. I'm legitimately very impressed with Linkedin excited to work with the two people that joined the team. In my book, a very good use of $700 and 15 hours.

lionhearted | 6 years ago
[deleted]
| 6 years ago

We found the best way to beat LinkedIn was to create a better version of it https://peertal.com/#/profile/9

We've developed an algorithm for ranking users similar to how Google ranks pages. This does away with spam & depends on reciprocal endorsements rather than friend requests.

armini | 6 years ago

It's amazing how majority of HN community hates products/companies that real market users actually find useful and are successful.

gandutraveler | 6 years ago

"Once your profile is in decent shape, you can start connecting with strangers. Unfortunately, LinkedIn limits users to only 30,000 connections, and 3,000 connection requests, so use some discretion." l o l

Is it weird I was thinking of making a mastering linkedIn course yesterday? I think people would be interested.

morenoh149 | 6 years ago

While I appreciate the creativity involved, my colleagues in the soft skills world and I running a professional services firm in Shanghai, generate some terrific leads and partnership connections through the service. The article was good for a laugh.

vfulco2 | 6 years ago

This was great. If you enjoyed this, you should also watch this short parody of LinkedIn from SuperNews: https://youtu.be/_7DiOm-edMs

mifreewil | 6 years ago

Not ready to outright delete Linkedin, but it was the noisiest mobile app on my phone. Luckily the mobile site works decently, so it has been assigned to a firefox tab for the foreseeable future.

NiceGuy_Ty | 6 years ago

ROFL that reply to the recruiter. 'You know what they say: In business, you're either the earthquake or the losers falling into the cracks and landing in the hot magma'

winningcontinue | 6 years ago

I’m looking for a professional agency that could create my LinkedIn profile. Has anyone know one?

leszekm | 6 years ago

The best way to beat LinkedIn is to delete your account. LinkedIn is pointless.

paulie_a | 6 years ago

Page down and down arrow keys don't work. Is this a new UX normal?

diminish | 6 years ago
[deleted]
| 6 years ago

LinkedIn is like one giant business motivational poster.

hguhghuff | 6 years ago

I loved this!

emilfihlman | 6 years ago

You'll want to disable JS on this site, or else you'll get shot to another article when you reach the end, replacing the linked article in your history (lord knows who thought that was a good idea).

anothergoogler | 6 years ago

"Strange game. The only way to win is not to play."

- WOPR/Joshua

sonnyblarney | 6 years ago

I am a skilled sr sw dev, I have 600-700 connection on linkedin and I know 4 people, have been there for years and never got a job out of it. The idea of linkedin is great but in practice it is absolutely pointless website.

ivanjaros | 6 years ago

What an obnoxious layout, especially on mobile

coin | 6 years ago

Cyberpunk at its best. high5.

auslander | 6 years ago

Sell out to Microsoft...

crazy_monkey | 6 years ago

Shit site for mobile

allan_golds | 6 years ago

This is hilarious

g7 | 6 years ago