Whenever somebody has to connect professionally, they provide their LinkedIn details. I, on the contrary, tend to recommend people to avoid LinkedIn to get in touch with me because I tend to avoid LinkedIn as much as possible. I often get asked the reason for this. Why do I avoid LinkedIn as much as possible? As a LinkedIn user, these are some of the reasons I avoid using LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Messaging
Disorganised inbox and no discouragement of spamming behaviour together curtails the possibility of genuine conversations. Whenever I open my LinkedIn messages, I see messages from variety of people seeking job opportunities, messages from variety of people with job opportunities for me, messages from variety of people looking forward to connect with me and messages which are somewhat random, vague, weird and sometimes just inappropriate.
LinkedIn isn’t designed in a way to inherently tackle a couple of problems
- Spamming : Doesn’t discourage users from sending the same message to multiple people
- Spamming: Doesn’t discourage users from sending the same message multiple times to the same person
- Disorganisation: Doesn’t have an auto-labelling or filtering system. Doesn’t even have a user-defined labelling or filtering system (except archiving which revives on another message)
- Disorganisation: Makes the user go through the reporting flow for filtering out unwarranted messages
- Disorganisation: Doesn’t have a way to highlight an important message or conversation
- Disorganisation: Doesn’t have a way to establish credibility of the message sender. CEO of LinkedIn sends me a message vs a random stranger sends me a message - it treats both of them equally which is not a real life mimicry of a professional network
The above problems together ends up in making a recipient’s life difficult and people generally end up having difficulty in identifying genuine connections and conversations in LinkedIn inbox. I’d be very interested to look at the data of % of messages replied by normal user as well as users who are on top positions in their career. I doubt if people reply to any message on LinkedIn if they are getting a lot of messages. It’s difficult to skim through messages and find genuine ones to reply to.
I think the above mentioned problems with LinkedIn messaging are fairly common problems. I’m sure LinkedIn must already be aware of these. I hope LinkedIn product is already doing some things to solve this problem and I hope we get a better LinkedIn soon. In my opinion, LinkedIn product folks need to sit down, have devoted thought process, and make a strategy to improve UX of inbox. I’m sure they are analysing data around repeated spamming behaviour, % of messages replied by different kinds of users et al. LinkedIn also needs to chart out a plan to better educate users on messaging etiquettes. Personally, in the long term roadmap after filtering, labelling, auto-labelling for spam (I vote for Hi
Network and Connections
I never understood the deal with LinkedIn connections. Why doesn’t LinkedIn move towards a follow only model like Twitter or Instagram (Only use case of Instagram private account with follow request is of one protecting one’s pictures from unknown users - I don’t think people on LinkedIn share something which would require protection or connection exclusivity)?
I don’t know about others but I get a lot of connection requests from people I know and people I don’t know (majorly the latter) and the only way I can do any filtering is on basis of my own school / organisation. This essentially means that I have to sit down with hours on my hand, go through each and every connection request and accept or reject. This is very time-consuming process and nobody in their sane mind would prefer doing, specially if the number of requests are too high. Besides, on a personal note, I feel bad about rejecting a request solely because rejection has a negative connotation and I feel who am I to judge somebody from their headline and decide what value they can provide in my career or vice-versa.
Again, the connection conundrum is something that LinkedIn product needs to sit down, brainstorm and take a call on. Of course, the answer may not be just “Follow”. Mutual follow does say a bidirectional connection. But, the answer is definitely not what is present currently on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Content
‘LinkedIn Influencers’ by Lumko Solwandle from Nikhil Narayanan.
Admit it, you all knew what I was going to say just by looking at “LinkedIn Content”. The problem is that prevalent. This is a larger problem of content that most of the companies face in today’s time. Honestly, I am not certain how LinkedIn should or would tackle this problem because of lot of such content is liked by people. Most of my feed is full of motivational gibberish which sometimes makes me want to never open LinkedIn again. Maybe it’s partly because I have added a lot of random people I did not know in my connections and now it’s too painful to clean my feed. This is a definite problem. There is no single solution. My wild idea would be to introduce anonymous downvoting feature on LinkedIn to feed into ML model while personalising for users as well as promote better content and not promote certain people/influencer (generally higher up the ranks).
Alright, if I have so many problems, then why do I even use LinkedIn?
- I have occasionally found genuine connections, conversations, content on LinkedIn
- LinkedIn is THE professional network. I don’t think there are any other giant professional networks like LinkedIn. Recently discovered Lunchclub, thanks to Abhishek Sethi and found it intriguing. Also, Twitter has also become a professional network to some extent, at least for certain cohorts of users.
- LinkedIn, being the giant professional network it is, also helps in checking everyone’s profile and career trajectory. It’s one stop shop in case you’re wondering where your new colleague used to work or what kind of education does somebody require for Google APM role or which classmate of yours is doing what in life. Just looking at career trajectories can be inspiring. Technically, you can connect with relevant people you admire and get mentorship. Though I don’t think I have taken up on that offer till now on LinkedIn, majorly due to reasons listed above.
- LinkedIn is extremely useful as a job board. One can check out most recent job openings when one is searching for a job and find a way to apply. Also helps in looking up people in the same domain and/or company. Most of the recruiters also check out the candidate’s LinkedIn profile.
With this, I want to conclude this rant about LinkedIn. I guess with this blog post originally being published on LinkedIn, #5 in the “LinkedIn good” list would be Blogs.
Disclaimer : Views present above are personal.
Originally published by Shilpi Agrawal on LinkedIn, ironic? :).