Blog assignment 7:LinkedIn. Connect with people you know. Fill out your profile. Analyze how you construct your identity on LinkedIn Is this service an effective way to find job connections? Why (not)? Analyze the service considering the Granovetter readings.
LinkedIn seems very clearly designed around Granovetter's concept of weak ties, especially as applied to job hunting. Granovetter considers "strong ties" to be the relationships between you and those people who you have very close relationships with: family members, go friends, and so on. "Weak ties," on the other hand, are relationships between you and people whom you aren't so close to - but these people are important because they link the tight social circles that you belong to all the other social circles. Granovetter posits that weak ties are extremely important to the flow of information through social networks, and he found that among white-collar professionals, jobs were found more often through weak ties than through strong ties.
LinkedIn encourages you to compose a professional presentation of yourself and to bring your professional colleagues in to the system. It allows you to search within this representation of your extended professional network for people within given industries, regions, companies, and with given titles. You're also given a free-text search field, an important feature that helps you find pieces of information in people's profiles that the designers couldn't have predicted or categorized.
By now I'm accustomed to the unnecessarily strict constraints that online social services place upon members' profiles; LinkedIn isn't the worst offender here. It steers you through the process of entering information, putting forth categories and instructions that encourage you to present yourself in a professional and businesslike manner, which is appropriate to an extent. But when it comes to professional experience, it makes the same mistake that so many job sites make: it tries to force you to toss aside that resume that you spent so many hours perfecting and instead waste a lot of time entering the same bits of information into a bunch of text boxes and dropdowns in a way that makes it very easy to lose a page worth of information and have to start the page over again. I understand the benefit of placing information into discrete categories so that it can be more easily searched, so that the computer can find and present results in more contextually appropriate ways. Nonetheless, the service should allow people to attach a plain-text or PDF resume and allow that to be searched, because many people are like me and are not willing to enter all this information over and over again across multiple sites in such an inefficient manner. The site should at least accept resume documents and then attempt to fill in its form fields automatically; many items such as names, addresses, well-known company names, position start and end dates, and the like can be fairly reliably parsed in this way. LinkedIn should ask live users to edit pre-filled fields if anything - they shouldn't saddle us with the painful task of filling out every single box and pulldown.
So I didn't follow this advice from LinkedIn: "As a job-seeker, you should add your past positions. It will provide an online resume through which users can find you!" I already have a perfectly good resume and I don't have time for this nonsense. Because I didn't fill in "positions" I don't even have the chance to seek an endorsement, and I don't think I'd feel comfortable asking any former clients to log in and post an endorsement for me here.
But I did fill in my "professional overview" with a suitably professional-sounding summary, which I lifted directly from the top of my resume. I also filled out a few of my core "specialties" because that section seemed like one that would be important in searches. I also adjusted my "receive requests" settings, configuring them at a fairly loose and liberal level because I don't expect to be flooded with requests from LinkedIn users.
I think it's too soon for me to tell whether this service is an effective way to find job connections, because so much of the answer to this question depends upon how many people who need my skills log in to the service, upon how much they trust LinkedIn connections, and so on. It seems like a much better way to find job connections than the other social networking services I've tried because it brands itself as a professional-networking service and it encourages members to present themselves in that way. I will certainly try to find jobs through LinkedIn and I wish I would have devoted time to it earlier in the year so that by now the pump would be primed.
A particular pet peeve: attempting to form a connection with another LinkedIn member is unnecessarily difficult, because you can't simply click a link to send them a connection request - you must enter the person's e-mail address. This is a very bad idea for several reasons:
1. It's a hassle; you have to go track down the person's address.
2. Many folks use multiple e-mail addresses, so when trying to connect to a few of my friends I wasn't sure which e-mail address to enter.
3. Because people trying to connect to me face issues 1 and 2, they will tend to enter my primary e-mail addresses, which they know me by, into LinkedIn. That destroys an important mechanism that I use to protect myself against spam and other invasions of privacy. Here's how that mechanism works: I sign up for a couple of free "spam-catcher" addresses at Hotmail that I use exclusively for Web site registrations. That way if any of the sites that I sign up for sells my e-mail address to spammers, or if they attempt to send me their own spam, I don't have to deal with it because it goes to my spam-catcher accounts which I studiously ignore. But I don't have this option on LinkedIn because even if I sign up using a spam-catcher account, my friends are likely to reveal my real e-mail addresses. What does LinkedIn do with these addresses? It's not clear, and even if they permanently trash them they should clearly notify users of that fact. But the really important issue here is -not- what LinkedIn does with those addresses, it's what LinkedIn members worry that LinkedIn might do with those addresses. LinkedIn is not paying enough attention to its brand and its customers' perceptions here.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this, but it seems that when you find someone who's more than two degrees away from you, the system only tells you which of your contacts that connection goes through. In other words, to arrange an introduction to that person and take advantage of the weak tie you'll have to ask your contact who's closest to her to pass on your contact request to the next person along the line. This preserves the important gatekeeper function carried out by people who link different groups of people. On the other hand though, it certainly can create new tensions because when a friend asks you to provide some social capital and put yourself slightly at risk by introducing you to one of your contacts, that's usually acceptable because you can judge both people in the situation and feel relatively sure that both people can be trusted and that neither person will feel inappropriately put upon if you provide the introduction. But if your friend asks for an introduction to a friend of a friend of one of your friends, you can't vouch for two people in that chain and you can't be sure that the person at the end is an appropriate fit for your friend at the beginning who's making the request.
Posted by sean at Květen 04, 2004 08:41 PM | TrackBack (0)