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Comment by leeny | Hacker News Reader

I'm a recruiter, but I hate LinkedIn. In some ways, that's a gross exaggeration because LinkedIn does one thing very, very well: it standardizes people's work experience and puts it all in one place. Once you get used to reading LinkedIn profiles you can get the context you need about a person very, very quickly. This is great.

The rest of it sucks. In particular, LinkedIn Recruiter (the module that lets you see pretty much anyone, no matter how many degrees of separation exist between you and them and lets you send some number of InMails per month) is a giant spam factory. Its design encourages impersonal spams by making it super easy to send exactly the same InMail to large volumes of people. If I'm a recruiter, I can search for everyone who attended MIT and now works at, say, Oracle very easily, and then do the moral equivalent of throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Ugh.

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Does it--in any way--feel creepy or unethical to be able to see those kind of connections? As though you're a spectator able to traverse anyone's real life in far more detail than others.

What are the clever, resourceful, and truly evil recruiters doing? I guess the amateur ones can filter by universities and organizations, but surely there's a more efficient way to wade through the swamp of linkedin?

I guess I don't see being clever and resourceful synonymous with being evil. I don't know what the other guys are doing, but I try to use LinkedIn only as a reference (e.g. "where is this person working now, and how long have they been there?", "what kind of stuff has this person worked on historically?")

I try to look at blogs, GitHub, dribbble, HN posts, tweets, Quora submissions, and whatever else I can to try to get some idea of what the person in question is interested in and good at. At the end of the day, I'm trying to surface smart people. Then I try to figure out whether I can offer said smart people interesting work that's in line with what they seem to be passionate about.

You sound like a good recruiter.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can only search for everyone who attended MIT and now works at Oracle that has a linkedin profile.

this sounds like, "knives are terrible tools because they can easily be used to kill tens of people"

What I really hate is the incentive structure that drives a lot of the bad behavior people associate with recruiters. At the heart of the matter, the incentive is economic, and LinkedIn's features are just a function of that.

However, that doesn't make me like it or want to use it.

Can you please elaborate how specifically the "design" encourages impersonal spams? Wouldn't it be in the Recruiter's best interest not to do that? That seems like the difference between a good recruiter and a bad one.

It depends on what the recruiter's goals are. If you're trying to build a brand and establish longterm relationships with people, then, yes, spamming the world is not in your interest. If you're working for an agency, have a quota, and are doing your best to stay above board and not get fired, then spamming the world is in your interest.

The design makes it easy to contact multiple people at once with seemingly personalized messages. In particular, I can specify the type of greeting and a template, and LinkedIn will fill in the person's name etc.

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