LinkedIn Problems Run Deeper Than Valuation
Personally, I've used LinkedIn for recruiting tech talent, being recruited and most recently, doing biz dev (aka sales).<p>Stray observations:
1. LinkedIn has too many products like sales navigator that attempt to force you through a specific workflow. While it can work, it feels a lot like a misguided tracking system.<p>2. LinkedIn is most useful as an online resume. Whenever I am meeting someone new or want a refresher, I check LinkedIn. I think everyone does this in North America. This doubles as a useful social sign in tool for biz apps.<p>3. Older people (40+) in non tech positions respond surprisingly often to InMail. They respond far more often than young techies (who probably get too many messages). This is surprising and extremely useful for my job.<p>4. LinkedIn needs contact management in context of career. For example: simply stating when you made this contact is crucial.<p>5. LinkedIn needs a way to show how active a profile is or at least indicate if a profile is no longer responsive. There are millions of LinkedIn profiles that are inactive but LinkedIn encourages you to pay to message them.<p>6. There needs to be an indicator for how close you are to a specific contact. 99% of the time your mutual contacts are useless. This is especially true for "active users" like myself who see no major disadvantage personally for adding as many contacts as possible.<p>My whole point is that LinkedIn has an extremely valuable service. It is missing some features and product focus. Many of my above suggestions also help refocus LinkedIn's integrity.<p>Overall LinkedIn falls into this strange low integrity (in this case, spammy) but somehow successful company. The question is are they going to clean up their act. I think they will.