My Stance on LinkedIn (Simpler.)
LinkedIn is an online resume tool with a thin social veneer. In terms of updates that you can expect to receive, they generally come in the flavour of ‘person X is now connected to person Y’, ‘person Z has recommended person Y’ and ‘You may know person Z’.
If you’re connected to someone, you can send a message to them, or read their profile. You can also pay to send a message to someone you aren’t connected to, which, in my personal opinion, probably irritates the hell out of highly influential individuals on LinkedIn.
Beyond irritating people you could not get in touch with otherwise, I’m not sure what LinkedIn adds to the business-focused networking space. I don’t consider it actively social, although I’ve seen there are many people who disagree with me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with LinkedIn, except that I think it has used it’s social veneer as a means of attracting attention from people who see the buzz value in social, but don’t want to actually undergo the shift in social norms that happens in social media. My issue with this is that I think this attention is a large part of LinkedIn’s assumed value.
Within 5 years, I think a veneer of social, without the attendant shift of social norms and interaction, will stop being interesting enough to inflate the value of something.
If this is the case, LinkedIn now replicates having a resume online, and organizes your business-only contacts in a way that does not encourage personal or social communication. This might be useful for ‘pure’ networking, ie, intentionally seeking out people of use to you. I, personally, don’t think that ‘pure’ networking is a good way to build valuable professional connections. I feel the same way about a paid invite to email someone.
So in LinkedIn, I see a purported social network that isn’t optimized for social connection, that replicates resume function, and that doesn’t add anything new to the traditional, or dominant, hiring process.
This was the main point I had regarding my (pure guesswork) 5 year limitation on LinkedIn being relevant; that there is about a 5 year window where same old thing masked as innovative can still inflate value by leveraging a trend. And I think, in terms of it’s value as a technology and not as a culture, social is often applied as a trend.
Do I have an issue with the traditional hiring process? Yes, and many people do. This probably led to me rambling more than I should have in my previous post.
Hopefully this response was more well thought out.
Entirely Unplanned Obsolescence.
I’m not a fan of LinkedIn. I’m on there, of course. I keep my account fairly updated. I respect the profitability and valuation. I just happen to think it has a timeline built in that the founders may have not considered.
LinkedIn is social networking for people who are afraid of social networking. To be more accurate, it’s social networking for people who are convinced it’s possible, and beneficial, to create a hard separation between who a person is as a business entity, and who a person is as a social entity.
This was possible, a decade ago. It’s arguably possible now, for people who aren’t truly connected, or people who are intensely careful. It won’t be true in 5 years. And, I think, those five years will make LinkedIn irrelevant.
Facebook is about people and lives. The social graph they offer, even if it is become ever murkier, incorporates all aspects of a person. As a tool for getting to know people, or providing background information, this is useful. You can see who someone is in a wider arena then their resume - and let’s be honest, LinkedIn is a place where people, even in a social conversational context, attempt to animate their resume as a character.
Comparatively, LinkedIn isn’t about people or lives. It’s about qualifications and professional experience, which even as a hiring tool, seems hollow to me. I’m not sure what LinkedIn adds to the process that isn’t better achieved by interacting with the same person in a network that is actively social.
I don’t see a future in a non-social social network. LinkedIn is a place where one can seem connected while hiding from the central reality of social media - that your life, all of it, is something you will need to own and take responsibility for. A record will likely exist. A record that you do not control.
As a professional tool, you’ll learn more from a resume and a few phone calls than you will from perusing the LinkedIn account of a potential hire or collaborator. However, looking at someone’s twitter account, facebook, and website, would be give information about the human being that, if you look at it with the correct perspective, helps you find out it this is a person you could work with.
LinkedIn is going to be obsolete in 5 years. [Edit: I’ve reconsidered the following sentence.] It could be useful as a Facebook application right now.
That said, there will always be money is creating a version of something gamechanging that doesn’t intimidate the older generation in the workforce. And yes, that is how I think of LinkedIn: the social network that won’t make my father uncomfortable.
