I have never had a LinkedIn account, both out of general anti-data-vacuuming-social-media, and specifically anti-whatever-the-fucking-corphead-psychos-are-doing-on-LinkedIn tendencies, and managed to find a decent job out of uni just fine (software field). I’m now looking for a job again and the number one piece of advice I’m being given by concerned parties is “get on LinkedIn”.
I’m curious how many people into the whole “privacy” thing have had to make this choice, and which way you went with it.
Do the advantages (which it seems mainly boil down to “networking”) outweigh the icky feeling I’d get making an account? Of course only I can actually answer that question, but it sums up my conundrum.
Depends on you local job hunting culture and your own work social networks.
If you are a person that has many work related connections and you have a large offline network, you could probably get a job through that way easier. But if you are not big on maintaining social networks like that and you don’t have many connections, then you probably will have a hard time finding jobs otherwise.
There is a middle ground where you open a LinkedIn account with none of your real information. You use it to find jobs and every job you want to apply to you go to the site of the actual company and apply through an email or whatever form they might have on their website with your actual resume. The disadvantage there is that some companies expect you to have a LinkedIn and might actually skip your resume if you don’t, also it is more work, and one actual advantage of LinkedIn is that you can keep a large work social network without having to maintain anything as you can always dm an old connection and it wouldn’t be as weird as calling them up.
Personally, I take the privacy L and have a real LinkedIn profile.